The German-born, American-raised painter and printmaker Henry Mosler worked as an artist and correspondent for Harper’s Weekly during the Civil War. In his home city of Cincinnati, he painted the Plum Street Temple (ca. 1866), representing the synagogue of the leading Reform rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, as well as portraits of members of the local Jewish community. Mosler subsequently settled in Paris, where he showed his works in the Salon, the annual art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, from 1878 to 1897. His 1879 entry, Return of the Prodigal Son, was awarded an honorable mention and acquired for the Musée du Luxembourg, making it the first painting by an American artist that the French government purchased.
The Christian parable of the prodigal son, from Luke 15:11–12, was a favorite subject of artists from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century. A son squanders his inheritance and is reduced to…
Tomb of Cyrus, King of Persia (reigned 559–530 BCE). The tomb stands in Cyrus’ capital, Pasargadae (near today’s Shiraz, Iran). See the Cyrus Cylinder for Cyrus’ role in the return of Judeans from…
Dos naye lebn (New Life) was a Yiddish literary and political monthly founded and edited by Haim Zhitlovsky and published in New York. Among the topics debated in its pages was the question of whether…