Sikhes-khulin (Small Talk, or, The Legend of Prague)

The Traveler was painted soon after the Russian Revolution, around the time that Marc Chagall was appointed commissar of the arts for Vitebsk, the site of Yehudah Pen’s academy, where Chagall had…

Rabbi Abraham Bloch was a French army chaplain, killed in 1914 while holding a crucifix for a dying Catholic soldier. In 1934 the French government erected a monument in his memory at the spot where…

Hugo Scheiber painted this rueful self-portrait during World War I. He wears a military cap but otherwise does not appear to be in uniform. Though in 1915 he became a futurist, this painting is more…

Ḥad Gadya (One Little Goat) is a song customarily sung at the end of the Passover seder. It recounts a sequence of events beginning with a young goat purchased by the protagonist’s father that is then…

Issachar Ber Ryback painted Pogrom during the Russian Civil War, when waves of pogroms were occurring in Ukraine and other areas in the former Pale of Settlement. In the foreground a slain man…

In Alexander Tyshler’s illustration for a Yiddish version of the Sleeping Beauty story, characters seated around a table are packed together like puzzle pieces, enclosed in a rectangular shape from…