The painter and graphic artist Ben Shahn was born in Kovno (Kaunas, Lithuania) and, in 1909, came to New York City, where he received formal training in art. From the late 1920s until about 1950, he worked in a social realist tradition, attacking injustice, prejudice, and brutality. During the Great Depression, he was employed as a photographer by the Farm Security Administration to document the unemployed and the poor, government homestead projects, and rural, small-town life. After 1950, his work became more allegorical and symbolic, and he turned increasingly to producing illustrated Hebrew texts.
Shahn frequently based his paintings on his own photographs. East Side Soap Box is based on a photo of Jewish workers protesting in Madison Square Park in Manhattan. The Yiddish sign reads: “Nature…
Glid’s memorial for the Jews of Salonika, Greece who were murdered in the Holocaust is modeled on Menorah in Flames, his 1990 monument for the murdered Jews of Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Both depict a tree…
Wolin spent six years photographing a hundred Jewish residents of Wyoming, eventually publishing the photographs in a 2000 book, The Jews of Wyoming: Fringe of the Diaspora. Her black-and-white…