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…
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…
Yosl Bergner was only twenty-one years old and living in Australia when he painted this bleak picture. Many of his paintings were drawn from memories of his childhood in Warsaw but he also portrayed…