The pioneer Jerusalem photographer Tsadok Bassan was born in the Old City into a religious Zionist family. He received a yeshiva education and acquired informally a hands-on knowledge of photography. At age eighteen, with the aid of his family, he purchased a photography studio in the Old City. He became, in effect, the “court photographer” of the Old Yishuv, photographing their institutions and daily life. He worked for many of the city’s Jewish charities, photographing their work, often for fund-raising purposes in the diaspora.
In The Writing on the Wall, Attie brought the ghosts of pre-World War II Jewish life in Berlin temporarily to life by projecting black-and-white slides of Jewish schools, bookstores, kosher butchers…
Al Hirschfeld was most famous for his caricatures of actors, musicians, and other figures from the arts and public life. He himself preferred to be known as a “characterist.” After the birth of his…
Der pinkes (The Book of Records, or The Annals) appropriated the term for the old-fashioned record book of a Jewish community or institution to name a very new phenomenon: the first “annual for the…