Visual Moment | Tales of Rifles and Resistance
These are the words of Faye Schulman, who, at age 16 during World War II, fled to the forests outside her hometown of Lenin, Poland, after witnessing her entire family being executed by the Nazis.
Visual Moment | Lost & Found: Solving a Holocaust Mystery
Lost and Found exhibit at Yeshiva University’s museum traces the story of a photo album smuggled out of Lithuania’s Kovno Ghetto, from its original disappearance through the investigation that found the owner’s descendants teaching Yiddish in the United States.
Visual Moment | A (Torah) Scribe Goes to Washington
It’s one of the more unsavory parts of the Bible. Lot, after the destruction of Sodom, is seduced by his two daughters, who think they are the world’s sole survivors.
Visual Moment | The Beguiling Language of Dress
Ribbed moiré silk from Greece, tulle and silver-tinsel embroidery from Egypt, silk satin from Ottoman Palestine, indigo-dyed goat hair from Iraqi Kurdistan, brocaded silk ikat...
Visual Moment | The Ringelblum Archive
Even before the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto (1940-1943) knew of the “Final Solution,” they understood that their story needed to be preserved. Under the...
An Artist’s Secret, Now Fully Revealed
When Charlotte (called Lotte by her family) was eight years old, her mother died. At the time she was told the cause was influenza—the truth was kept a carefully guarded secret.
Visual Moment | A Forgotten Ottoman Way Station
The Ottomans ruled what is now Israel for 400 years, and during that time they made some iconic contributions to the man-made landscape. Sultan Suleiman I (a.k.a. Suleiman the Magnificent) completed the current walls of Jerusalem’s Old City in 1541. The Jaffa Clocktower, finished in 1903, was built to celebrate the silver jubilee of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. Over time, innumerable Ottoman buildings have been lost, replaced by those of British or Israeli design, just as they in turn had replaced those of the Crusaders, Mamluks, Byzantines, Romans, Hasmoneans, Greeks, ancient Israelites, Babylonians, Assyrians and Philistines.
A Rare Peek Into a Renowned Library’s Vault
The extraordinary works in this exhibition are rarely seen, and this is their first time in America.
Visual Moment // Odessa
“To this day I remember, feel, and love this town…I love this town because I grew up in it, was happy, melancholy, and dreamy in it. Passionately and singularly dreamy.”
Reframing Roman Vishniac’s Legacy
Maya Benton was a high school senior living in Los Angeles when the Russian-American photographer Roman Vishniac’s first posthumous book, To Give Them Light, came out in 1993. Renowned for his iconic images of Eastern European Jews taken between the two World Wars, Vishniac had died three years earlier at age 92.
Visual Moment // Moshe Safdie
In 1967 a 29-year-old Israeli-born Canadian architect by the name of Moshe Safdie gained international recognition for his groundbreaking, visionary design for high-quality, affordable urban housing.
Visual Moment // Pink Phones, Midcentury Modernism & More
Did you ever wonder about the origin of the distinctive round thermostat that regulates the temperature in your home? Or how about the pink Princess phone every teenage girl once coveted or those eye-catching images that promoted such films as The Man with the Golden Arm, Anatomy of a Murder or Exodus? All these items, it turns out, are evidence of the vital role that Jewish architects, designers and patrons played in the development and dissemination of modernism in America.