The photographer Liselotte Grschebina was born in Karlsruhe, Germany. She and her husband settled in Tel Aviv in 1934. From the 1930s to the 1950s, she took photographs for WIZO, the Palestine Railways, the dairy cooperative Tnuva, kibbutzim, and various businesses. Her work was innovative and startling, portraying subjects through surprising vantage points, strong diagonals, and the play of light and shadow, techniques she had learned in Weimar Germany during the early-twentieth-century revolution in photographic art.
This photograph of a discus thrower refers to the Zionist idea of “muscular Judaism,” in which the “new” Jew would celebrate and cultivate the body, sports, and physical fitness. When Grschebina…
In the 1730s, the German Jewish Franks-Levy family commissioned an artist to create portraits of three generations of the family. These paintings are all attributed to Gerardus Duykinck, a member of a…
At the center of the backplate of this Hanukkah lamp from Frankfurt am Main is a scene depicting the biblical heroine Judith, who has cut off Holofernes’s head and is about to place it in a sack held…