V-J Day in Times Square. August 14, 1945
Alfred Eisenstaedt shot one of the most iconic photographs of the twentieth century in Times Square, where crowds were gathering to watch the electric news ticker for an anticipated announcement by U.S. President Harry S. Truman about the end of the war with Japan (marking the end of World War II). The sailor in the photo has been identified as George Mendonsa. The woman in the nursing uniform is believed to be Greta Zimmer Friedman, a Jewish dental hygienist on her lunch break. She escaped from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, but her parents were killed in Auschwitz.
Credits
Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images.
Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 9.
You may also like
La Ghriba Djerba, Tunisia
Jules Lellouche painted the interior of this synagogue in Djerba during World War II, when Tunisia was ruled by Vichy France. Though Tunisia’s Jewish community escaped mass deportations and murder in…
Untitled, Execution: Babi Yar series. Nizhny Tagil or Leningrad
Felix Lembersky’s three Babi Yar paintings were among the first artistic representations of the Nazi massacre in Kyiv, when, over the course of two days in September 1941, over 33,000 Jews were…
Home! Home?
After surviving the war, Miklós Adler returned to his hometown of Debrecen and created sixteen woodcuts, signing them Ben Binyamin (“son of Benjamin”) in honor of his father. In this woodcut…
And G-d Remembered Rachel . . . And She Conceived, and Bore a Son
Abel Pann devoted much of his artistic career to painting and drawing scenes from the Hebrew Bible. Like other Jewish artists who worked in this genre, such as Ephraim Moses Lilien and Ze’ev Raban, he…
Dismantling Bent Props
Moses Reinblatt served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II, first as a mechanic and then as an aircraftman. In August 1944, he was appointed an official war artist and was posted in…
Leaflets (Double V)
Morris Topchevsky painted Leaflets when he was an art instructor at the Abraham Lincoln Centre in Chicago, where the majority of students were Black. Here we see African Americans holding posters with…
You may also like
La Ghriba Djerba, Tunisia
Jules Lellouche painted the interior of this synagogue in Djerba during World War II, when Tunisia was ruled by Vichy France. Though Tunisia’s Jewish community escaped mass deportations and murder in…
Untitled, Execution: Babi Yar series. Nizhny Tagil or Leningrad
Felix Lembersky’s three Babi Yar paintings were among the first artistic representations of the Nazi massacre in Kyiv, when, over the course of two days in September 1941, over 33,000 Jews were…
Home! Home?
After surviving the war, Miklós Adler returned to his hometown of Debrecen and created sixteen woodcuts, signing them Ben Binyamin (“son of Benjamin”) in honor of his father. In this woodcut…
And G-d Remembered Rachel . . . And She Conceived, and Bore a Son
Abel Pann devoted much of his artistic career to painting and drawing scenes from the Hebrew Bible. Like other Jewish artists who worked in this genre, such as Ephraim Moses Lilien and Ze’ev Raban, he…
Dismantling Bent Props
Moses Reinblatt served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II, first as a mechanic and then as an aircraftman. In August 1944, he was appointed an official war artist and was posted in…
Leaflets (Double V)
Morris Topchevsky painted Leaflets when he was an art instructor at the Abraham Lincoln Centre in Chicago, where the majority of students were Black. Here we see African Americans holding posters with…