Artists On Antisemitism at the 81 Leonard Gallery, Manhattan, NY
Artists on Antisemitism, currently running at 81 Leonard Gallery in Manhattan, is a courageous artistic proclamation attacking an insidious cancer growing in the midst of New York’s cultural capital. Each artwork defiantly says, “Never Again!”
The myriad aspects of this disease should have been eradicated decades ago, but have remained hidden, dormant, and only now are sprouting their vicious tentacles into the public discourse. The October 7 massacre is clearly a stimulus fueling the shocking rise of global antisemitism which is addressed by this exhibition in the heart of the Tribeca art gallery district.
Curators Hannah Rothbard, Yona Verwer, Ronit Levin Delgado, Judith Joseph, and gallery owner Nancy Pantirer have chosen 21 artists for this exhibition. Almost all are members of the Jewish Art Salon, a global network for contemporary Jewish visual art, and have responded in their artworks to the tidal wave of antisemitism across the world.
Increasingly, in the contemporary art world, Jews and Israelis are considered the new axis of evil and thus legitimate targets. Considering that the art world, along with academia, has grown especially dangerous for Jews, this exhibition is especially courageous.
For example, as prominently reported on February 13 on Hyperallergic.com, a leading online magazine in contemporary art and culture, a group of mostly Jewish anti-Zionist activists aggressively disrupted a talk at the Jewish Museum and called Israeli artist Zoya Cherkassky’s paintings chronicling the Hamas attack “imperial propaganda” that serves to “manufacture consent for genocide.”
On March 7, Hyperallergic reported “Activists disrupt Israeli artist Michal Rovner’s opening at Pace Gallery [a leading international art gallery representing influential contemporary artists and estates], accusing the artist of ignoring the reality of Palestinians and decrying her use of poppies, a flower that carries special significance in Palestine…” After being evicted from the gallery, the activists displayed a banner that read “Poppies are indigenous to Palestine/Pace Artwashes Occupation While Israel Conducts Genocide.” Significantly Hyperallergic failed to actually review the artwork, question the absurd nationalist identification of the poppy, or even challenge the accusation of genocide. In January, individuals spraypainted Pace’s exterior with pro-Palestine messages and imitation blood splatter, resulting in the Pace’s temporary closure.
In the Artists on Antisemitism exhibit, world-famous photographer Joan Roth’s “The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same” (2004) documents a street scene in Lviv, Ukraine with a man glancing at swastika graffiti and the word “JUDE” on a sheet-metal wall. This was taken just after Jewish life in the city began to cautiously rebound.
“Thingstatte Eichstatt” (2021) by Ali Shrago-Spechler shows a performance that attempts to Jewishly reclaim the Bavarian open-air stage that was the infamous site of Nazi propaganda performances in the mid 1930s, encouraging the viewer to examine the locations and effects of antisemitic memory.
History and memory play a central role in Yona Verwer’s “Star Amulet” (2007) which fuses the Star of David as protective amulet with allusions to a darker past where the star was the antisemitic sign used to identify Jews for vilification, abuse, and deportation to death camps. Verwer has taken the ultimate Jewish symbol that antisemites used to condemn us and made it a wearable badge of courage for Jews to proudly display.
Another sign of intense Jewishness, tzitzit, are utilized in “My Friend in Crown Heights” (2024). Dan Harris’ papercut features a highly cropped view of tzitzit hanging out from under ghd shirt of a man who is carrying his infant son, as we see a baby-blue pajama foot dangling alongside. Hanging from his belt is a canister of Sabre Red Defense pepper spray. It is a shocking juxtaposition necessitated by the terrible growing urban antisemitism in New York. This is an expression of resistance and protection at its most elemental.
“Emergency Golem” (2024) by Maxwell Bauman takes self-defense to a more complex and ironic level. In a well labeled box with a glass front sits a diminutive Lego brick figurine. Much like the golem legend centering on Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague 400 years ago, the little automaton figure stands ready to be symbolically summoned to defend the Jewish people against the current surges of antisemitism. Bauman’s “Golem” draws upon contemporary powers for his artwork, specifically the very real need to protect the Jewish people, here marshaling an allusion to the mighty powers of the Lego corporate toy empire, in much the same way that Barbie The Movie capitalized and transformed the Mattel Corporation’s Barbie doll into a feminist tale.
One of the most disquieting effects of the surge of antisemitism is a mounting predicament over public Jewish identity. Goldie Gross’s “Neck Piece” (2024) brilliantly examines her personal crisis surrounding wearing a delicate gold necklace with her name in Hebrew. After October 7, she was uneasy wearing something that would overtly identify her as Jewish, especially after she noticed how many non-Jewish coworkers stayed home on the Hamas-proclaimed October 13 “Day of Rage.” Her two paintings show just her chin and neck, the necklace tucked under a black top in one, the necklace proudly hanging in the other. We should feel safe in New York City, with the world’s largest Jewish community, yet the Wall Street Journal’s April 28 headline proclaimed: “New York City’s Jewish Population under ‘Dark Cloud’ as Tensions Rise.” We know who we are, but what about our public face?
The terrible human costs of antisemitism over the years are explored by many of the exhibition artists, including Israeli artist Ruth Schreiber in her deceptively simple black and white photograph, “Pieta” (2024). A woman clothed in black wearing the modest headscarf of Orthodox women is seated on a rock on the ground. A young man in army fatigues is laid across her lap with his right arm hanging down to the ground. His eyes are open, and both of them are looking at us, skeptical and slightly surprised. The man is the artist’s son. This work evokes the ever-present reality of Israeli army service because of the antisemitic enemies that have surrounded the Jewish State from the day of its birth. Every Israeli Jewish man and woman must confront the antisemitism that drives the need for universal military service.
The deeply personal struggles of a New York Jew are reflected in Akiva Listman’s surprising urban metaphor, “They Don’t Want Us to Succeed” (2023). This small acrylic painting detailing a streetside curb overgrown with abundant weeds, specifically the indomitable yellow dandelion, was his contribution to the specific call for art on antisemitism. This is his defiant reaction: We Jews will flourish in the most unexpected places in spite of the scourge of hate. Anywhere there is a little room, like the dandelion, we will blossom!
Carol Oster’s “From the Ashes 2” (2021) evokes through photographs and letters “the Holocaust and its wreckage that inhabited the walls of our tiny railroad apartment…,” including the image of her father, who enlisted in the U.S. Army to liberate his people and instead became a POW narrowly escaping execution as a Jew.
Many of the artworks here naturally reference the Holocaust as the summation of antisemitism. The image of piles of carefully marked luggage at Auschwitz by Susan May Tell summons the ghosts, the aching absence of whole lives destroyed, the names and places marked in white chalk in a silent requiem.
“Memories,” (2024) a painting by Leah Raab, traverses a similar path, delineating a memorial similar to Yad Vashem of individual portraits of “people entirely wiped out because of antisemitism…each a real person.” Notably, Raab’s artwork is distorted, the rectangular portraits suffering changes in scale as they cascade up the canvas, creating a sickly reflection of the effects of murderous hate.
An obscene historical memory is conjured by the abstract series “An Anarchist Yehudia, A Liberal Yehudia….” (2023) by Israel Rabinovitz. It consists of eight framed abstracts, each featuring two large circles above a horizontal slash with eight designations in Hebrew of “types of women” – liberal, anarchist, opinionated, spiritual, etc. The work references both Paul Goldman’s horrifying 1945 photograph of coerced Jewish women prisoners and, more immediately, the recent documentary by Anat Stalinsky and featuring Sheryl Sandberg, Screams Before Silence, about the October 7th atrocities against women. This work is perhaps the most visceral indictment of antisemitism’s hidden misogynistic side.
Diane Britt’s “Pogrom Landscape 2” (2024) summons a nightmare of organic brokenness, a twisted place where nature provides no refuge. But there must be some refuge, some hope from the scourge of antisemitism, some Jewish positive reaction. A breath of salvation is found in Ronit Levi Delgado, “Chai – ALIVE!” Her performance piece is lipstick on paper, the Hebrew word literally kissed on paper, creating a living presence of Jewish optimism.
Mark Podwal’s “Providence” (2014) promises retribution with his image of a Sefer Torah, its crown knocked off and a skull in its place. The verse from Psalms 112:10, “The wicked will see it and be angry…the hope of the wicked will amount to nothing!” commands punishment from the Torah itself for those who would be our enemies. Another glimpse of justice is found is Irina Sheynfeld’s “Still Afloat” (2024), in which a single hopeful Tree of Life, considered the strength of the Jewish people, is set in a flickering flame of belief amid a chorus of hate.
Finally, the exhibition inexorably turns personal, even more personal than how it began. Mike Wirth reaches into the visual archives of the Holocaust with “Silent Remembrance” (2024). Here the artist stands holding a cell phone with the image of Felix Nussbaum, the German-Jewish surrealist painter, who famously depicted himself in 1943 cornered at a wall of desperation, at the edge of the abyss, holding his Jewish Identity Card. One year later he would be murdered at Auschwitz. Wirth, the contemporary artist, sees the threat of antisemitism, yet nonetheless holds the image of Nussbaum as resistance and as his Jewish and artistic “identity card.”
“The Child From The Train” (2016) by Mira Sasson confronts us across the decades. A disarmingly simple and very large 4’x2’ image of a boy, about 9 years old, bears a large yellow star. The image is made up of thousands of fine black and white threads, all attached to a wood panel with tiny nails. The panel is riddled with nails so that the only way you can see the boy is through the hundreds of nails that pierce him. This unnerving artwork is a demanding memorial to one life cruelly cut short.
Cruelty can be easily found in the hateful things one casually overhears from a coworker or a neighbor. Judith Joseph experienced this in real time recently. The head in her woodcut image, entitled “No Room For Me” (2024), is exploding as vitriol vibrates into her ears. Birds of prey hover above and on each side, waiting to devour the pomegranate seeds of hurt that fly from her brain. And the apple of knowledge from Eden renders her speechless. A harvest of Jew-hate.
The largest and angriest artwork is Marina Heintze’s “Yitler” (2023). Over 7’x7’, the work forms a composite image of Hitler and Kanye “Ye” West. The notion that history can easily repeat itself must not be ignored as we must put into our collective sights these antisemitic monsters for elimination from public influence.
In the face of the continued antisemitism we see daily, there is much we can do, and Isaac ben Aharon’s “Our Voice – Ambassador Lipstadt” (2022) is a solid place to start. This celebrated historian and diplomat has devoted much of her professional life to actively resisting and fighting Jew-hatred. The meticulous watercolor and colored pencil portrait actually echoes some of Isidor Kaufmann’s great rabbinic portraits and presents the steely determination of Lipstadt’s lifelong battle against antisemitism and its pernicious child, Holocaust denial.
This Tribeca gallery exhibition is especially courageous here and now. The profoundly different artistic reactions seen here courageously confront a full spectrum of antisemitism at a time that it is imperative to react and resist Jew hatred. We must not turn away.
“Artists on Antisemitism” runs through August 30 at the 81 Leonard Gallery, 81 Leonard St., New York, NY. Open Thursday-Sunday from 12-6 p.m. For more information, visit 81leonardgallery.com.
All photographs courtesy of 81 Leonard Gallery.
