The greatest photographers of the 20th century, and the leaders in that relatively new visual art form, were Jews renowned for their contributions spanning all photographic fields, including portraiture, fashion, news reporting and photojournalism, photo-essays, and “street photography,” which many art and photography critics consider “a Jewish invention.”
Leading Jewish photographers include Alfred Stieglitz, “Weegee” (aka Usher Fellig), Paul Strand, Richard Avedon, and Annie Leibovitz. (Margaret Bourke-White had a Jewish father.)
But the greatest of them all was, arguably, Alfred Eisenstaedt (1898 – 1995).
An escapee from Hitler’s Germany (1935), Eisenstaedt is universally recognized as the defining photojournalist of the twentieth century. Over a career that lasted more than fifty years, he became famous as the quintessential Life Magazine photographer, producing more than 2,500 picture stories and 90 covers for the beloved weekly as he recorded some of the enduring images of modern history.
Though renowned for his ability to capture memorable images of important people in the news, including statesmen, movie stars and artists, his most iconic photograph is “The Kiss,” in which he preserved for eternity the joyful celebrations in Times Square on V-J Day; the classic shot depicts an exuberant American sailor kissing a nurse in a dancelike dip and summed up the euphoria felt by Americans as World War II ended. Though at least 80 men have claimed to be the sailor in the photograph, it is generally accepted that the nurse in the photo, who went on to become a kindergarten teacher in a Jewish school, was the late Edith Shain.
Another of Eisenstaedt’s best-known images is a famous shot of a sneering Joseph Goebbels at the League of Nations in Geneva (1933), which one commentator cogently characterized as capturing “the sheer malevolence animating the Reich’s ideology and actions” and which, to Eisenstaedt, was an unnerving premonition of the Jewish genocide to come.
Eisenstaedt often chose Jewish themes as subjects including, for example, “Jewish Man Reading from the Torah”; “Girl Visiting Her Father’s Grave in the Jewish Cemetery Weissensee”; “Yemini Jewish Children Studying the Torah”; “Rabbi Teaching the Talmud, the Basis for Much Jewish Law”; “Indian Rabbi Blowing the Shofer Horn on the Jewish Sabbath”; “Portrait of Rabbi Eleazar and Students”; and “Tunisian Woman Wearing Elaborate Wedding Dress During the Celebration of Purim.”
He took several color pictures of Israeli children wearing costumes on Purim for a Time Magazine feature on Judaism (1955) but, sadly, they were left on the cutting room floor.
Born into a Jewish family in West Prussia, Eisenstaedt studied at Berlin University before being drafted into the German army and going off to fight in the Flanders trenches, where he was severely wounded and almost lost his legs (1918). While recuperating, he visited art museums to study painting composition and went on to become one of Europe’s best-known press photographers whose assignments included the flight of the Graf Zeppelin to Brazil and the Ethiopian War with Italy.
In June 1934 he photographed the famous handshake between Hitler and Mussolini and, a few months later, shot photos of the Fuhrer at Hindenburg’s funeral. With the handwriting clearly on the wall for Jews, he avoided becoming a Holocaust victim by emigrating to America where, after arriving in New York, he became staff photographer for the newly launched life Magazine.
Eisenstaedt received many awards and honors, including the Presidential Medal of Arts and the Infinity Master of Photography Award given by the International Center of Photography. He is buried at Mt. Hebron, a Jewish cemetery in Queens. (On a personal note, my parents and my ancestral family are buried there.)
In the February 10, 1981 correspondence on his Life Magazine letterhead exhibited here, Eisenstaedt writes to Dr. Ben B. Braude:
When I read your lines, I realized again how lucky and fortunate I am to have chosen the profession as a photographer at the right time when photojournalism as a new phenomenon was born in Germany in the late twentieth. In photography, there is no language barrier so I could begin work in this country when LIFE Magazine was born in 1936. Of course, one had to devote a great deal of effort and show enthusiasm for this kind of work….
My ninth book, EISENSTAEDT – GERMANY just came out and an exhibition of all the pictures in the book are shown right now at the International Center of Photography at 94th and Fifth Avenue…
Braude was a dentist best known as an expert on magic who, as a close friend of renowned card magician John Scarne, ghostwrote most of Scarne’s books. In Eisenstadt – Germany (1981), Eisenstaedt captured the social background of pre-Hitler Germany and the early years of the Nazi regime in the 1920s and 1930s, but the anthology also includes contemporary photographs he took upon his first return to Germany since he fled in 1935.
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Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was, in a sense, a legend of his own making, as he worked hard to nurture his image as a composite of all the manly attributes he gave to his fictional heroes – a larger than life hard drinker, big game hunter, fearless soldier, and bullfight aficionado. A renowned adventurer who enjoyed his flashy lifestyle and celebrity status, “Papa” was also a systematic author who worked tirelessly to attain literary perfection. Considered one of America’s greatest writers, his reputation rests upon a relatively small body of brilliant writing characterized by its emotional authenticity, stylistic purity, and penetrating vision.
Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea in Cuba in 1951, the last major work of fiction published in his lifetime. One of his most celebrated works, significant in his selection for the Nobel Prize in Literature (1954), it centers on an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. The novel first appeared, in its 26,500-word entirety, as part of the September 1, 1952 edition of Life Magazine, and 5.3 million copies of that issue were sold within two days.
Eisenstaedt arrived in Cuba in June 1951 to photograph Hemingway for Life’s Old Man and the Sea issue. Hemingway proved to be his least favorite subject; Eisenstaedt characterized him as “the most difficult man I ever photographed,” quite a remarkable statement from the man with a career photographing egocentric athletes, prima donna movie stars, uncooperative heads of state, and snooty academics.
In fact, an inebriated Hemingway almost threw the photographer off the dock, camera and all, and he threatened to shoot the photographer if his boat came to close to Hemingway’s. As Eisenstaedt discussed in a 1992 interview:
We photographed a deep-sea fishing contest in Havana. I visited Hemingway the night before, and he told me, “Don’t come closer than 200 feet or else I will shoot at you.” This was a deep-sea fishing contest! We . . . kept at least 400 feet away. That afternoon the Royal Yacht Club gave a cocktail party, and he came over, blue in his face from drinking and said, “Alfred, you came too close to my boat. I shot at you.” With Hemingway, you had to think first before you answer, as he was an alcoholic. I’d forgotten that, and I said, “Papa, I don’t believe you.”
You know what he did? Dropped his glass. Foam came to his mouth. He grabbed me by the lapels and bent me backwards. My cameras flew all over. He almost killed me; he wanted to throw me into the water . . . He said to me, “Never say you don’t believe Papa.”
Hemingway’s antipathy to Eisenstaedt may well have been attributable to his general contempt for Jews. Hemingway was widely viewed as anti-Semitic and his private correspondence is replete with vile remarks about “kikes.” Finding Jewish names funny, he would sometimes sign letters as “Hemingstein.” For example, in an angry letter about “Block,” a Jewish publisher who planned to publish a Spanish translation of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway wrote about Block’s “rotten Jewish soul.”
The Sun Also Rises, in which Hemingway features Jewish boxer Robert Cohn, is considered the definitive evidence of Hemingway’s anti-Semitism. Characterizing Cohn as the eternal outsider, the quintessential obnoxious creature separated from others by his Judaism, he never lets readers forget that Cohn is not a repellant character who happens to be Jewish but rather a character who is repellant because he is Jewish.
All this makes a lovely dedication by Hemingway to Eisenstaedt, shown below, particularly remarkable – and ironic:
To Alfred Eisenstaedt wishing him all good luck always and for all of his life, Ernest Hemingway, June 17, 1952, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba
