Born in Hollywood to a toy manufacturer and a silent-film actress, Ruth Orkin was a photographer and filmmaker. Her first major project was her documentation of a bicycle trip from Los Angeles to New York to the 1939 World’s Fair, when she was seventeen. Later a professional photojournalist, Orkin achieved renown in 1951 for her photograph An American Girl in Italy, from a series chronicling the experiences of women traveling alone. The following year, she and her husband, Morris Engel, produced Little Fugitive, a feature film that was nominated for an Academy Award in 1953. In the 1970s and 1980s, she took a series of photographs of Central Park from the window of her apartment; it was published in two acclaimed books, A World through My Window, and More Pictures from My Window.
This rare example of a Roman ketubah (marriage contract) from the seventeenth century was written on the occasion of the marriage of Menahem ben Samuel Zadik to Zevia, daughter of the prominent banker…
A shady incident took place in Moscow a few days before Easter. At noon, in the center of town, they seized an old Jew, poor and wretched, who was carrying a burlap sack on his back and in it the…