Blind Woman

In 1903, the paintings of Abel Pann had helped draw attention and international outrage to the Kishinev pogrom. Pann again used his art to document the devastation of Jewish communities in Eastern…

Issachar Ber Ryback’s drawings of the painted ceiling of what was known as the Cold Synagogue in Mogilev (today in Belarus) are among the few visual records of the work of the painter Chaim ben…

Around the time that Paul Strand took this photograph, he wrote an essay on photography that called for developing an original American art “without the outside influence of Paris art schools.” This…

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…

Cover of Sikhes-khulin: Eyne fun di geshikhtn (Small Talk, or, The Legend of Prague) by Moyshe Broderzon, with illustrations by El Lissitzky. The book is an example of a new modernist style that…