Rachel Stern2026-10-25T09:51:35-04:00October 25th, 2026|Events, Lectures|
Join us for a special early tour of the exhibition with curator Maria Castro, before the museum opens to the public. After the tour, we’ll gather for coffee and tea and continue the conversation. REGISTRATION CLOSES SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2026. The Parade is an epic cycle of 63 charcoal, pencil, and ink drawings conceived by Si Lewen (1918–2016) in the aftermath of World War II. The work unfolds a visual narrative on war, memory, and the human condition that is informed by the artist's extraordinary life. Born in Poland to Jewish parents and raised in Germany, Lewen fled Nazi persecution with his family in 1933 before immigrating to the United States. While serving in the U.S. Army [...]
Rachel Stern2026-10-30T05:36:41-04:00October 22nd, 2026|Events, Lectures|
We cordially invite you to a cocktail reception at the home of Gary Zimmerman on Central Park South in NYC benefiting the Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art. Join us for art, conversation and connection. *All food is certified Kosher Image above: Marc Chagall, Mockup for the backdrop of Stravinsky's Firebird, 1945. Gouache, india ink, pastel, colored pencil, and gold paper collage on paper mounted on japanese paper, 14 13/16 x 24 7/16 in. (37.7 x 62 cm). Collection du Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris © 2026 Marc Chagall / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris TICKETS We look forward to seeing and discussing art, to honoring [...]
Rachel Stern2026-10-22T00:23:24-04:00October 21st, 2026|Events, Lectures|
Locked away for decades following also a history of persecution, the drawings of the iconic 20th-century writer Franz Kafka remained one of the final unknowns of his work. In 2021, the literary scholar Andreas Kilcher brought them to light. Image above: Franz Kafka, Drawing of a whip-wielding jockey on a horse vaulting over an obstacle. Photograph: Ardon Bar-Hama. Max Brod Archive. The National Library of Israel REGISTER HERE Franz Kafka, Drawing of a male figure, entitled “The Dancer” by Kafka’s executor Max Brod. Photograph: Ardon Bar-Hama. Max Brod Archive. The National Library of Israel Franz Kafka, A Beggar and a Generous Elegant Man, 1906. Photograph: Ardon Bar-Hama. Max Brod [...]
Rachel Stern2026-10-29T06:20:03-04:00October 5th, 2026|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
The artist Armin Stern (1883–1944), born near Pressburg (now Bratislava), moved to Frankfurt in 1900 to study painting. Despite numerous travels and periods of study in Paris, Brittany, the Netherlands, and Ticino, Frankfurt remained the center of his life. After being excluded from an exhibition at the Frankfurt Kunstverein in 1933 because he was a "non-Aryan artist," he relocated with his family to Bratislava, which had by then become part of Czechoslovakia. Image above: Armin Stern, Ascona, 1928. Watercolor. Donated by the descendants of Armin Stern. Jewish Museum Frankfurt As the situation there also grew increasingly perilous, Stern initially sought to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine. By his own account, the painter had [...]
Rachel Stern2026-10-29T04:26:03-04:00August 31st, 2026|Events, Lectures|
To mark the November Pogrom of 1938 (euphemistically called "Kristallnacht"), a discussion, "Understanding Past Realities of the Holocaust: Photography versus Art" will take place on 4 November 2026. Historians Dr Christoph Kreutzmüller and Dr Rachel Perry examine how photography and art depicted the Nazi state-orchestrated campaign of terror perpetrated against Jewish men, women and children across Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland from 9 to 10 November 1938 (the November Pogrom). The historians ask what photography and art reveal about the lived realities of the victims of the Pogrom, the interactions surrounding the violence and the broader society in which the violence was perpetrated. The event will be live-streamed and recorded. Questions can be submitted through this form. The discussion [...]
Rachel Stern2026-08-13T06:16:59-04:00July 21st, 2026|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
Born in Germany, Suzanne Loebl and her family left for Belgium in 1938, and lucky enough to be hidden there after the Nazis overran the country. She survived to carve out a diverse career as a writer, including books that focus on the visual arts and museums. Her most recent volume, Plunder and Survival, draws from her passion for art and her fascination with the story of both the Nazi obsession and theft of cultural property and the winding trajectory of attempts to restore plundered artworks to the families or institutions from which they were stolen. Image above: Yussuf Abbo, sketch of Gretel Bamberger, Suzanne's mother, n.d. Courtesy Suzanne Loebl . In this zoom program Loebl [...]
Rachel Stern2026-07-15T13:51:50-04:00June 28th, 2026|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
In her talk, Daria Santini presents her new biography of the Austrian-British photographer and Soviet agent Edith Tudor Hart (1908–1973). At the centre of a wide and vibrant circle of predominantly Central European artists, architects, designers, scientists, intellectuals and political activists in 1930s and 1940s London, Tudor Hart combined a successful career as a photographer with a clandestine role as a communist agent. This remarkable dual identity forms the basis of a compelling and dramatic life story. Image above: Edith Tudor Hart, London ca 1935. Born in Vienna into a secular, social-democratic Jewish family deeply rooted in the progressive culture of the city that became known as 'Red Vienna', Edith Tudor [...]
Rachel Stern2026-07-22T15:12:44-04:00May 24th, 2026|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
In this presentation, Carla Maria Huttenloher brings women’s photographic agency to the forefront of the Bauhaus story, uncovering the rich and long-underexplored links between their lives and their powerful bodies of work. Image above: Grit Kallin-Fischer, Self-portrait with cigarette, around 1928. Courtesy Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin . Women have worked behind the camera since photography’s beginnings, but their contributions have been sidelined in art‑historical narratives. The Bauhaus offers a clear case: during the Weimar Republic women engaged with and shaped photographic modernism in multiple ways, yet their work is insufficiently acknowledged to date. In the 1920s and early 1930s, the social figure of the New Woman — ideologically linked to greater independence, professional [...]
Rachel Stern2026-05-21T07:16:30-04:00April 27th, 2026|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
In this online lecture Anne Uhrlandt will present the forgotten story of once prominent German Jewish artist and collector Eugen Spiro (April 18, 1874, Wrocław - September 26, 1972, New York City). During her two-year research project, Uhrlandt reconstructed the artist’s biography and the fate of his looted collection by bringing together evidence and sources from numerous international archives. Two case studies about specific stolen objects highlight the dramatic events following both s the Nazi government ‘s expulsion of Spiro from his profession, robbing him of his sources of income, and the theft of his art collection, which included both his own works of art and works of art by other artists. The case studies demonstrate the potential of [...]
Rachel Stern2026-05-06T14:12:25-04:00April 22nd, 2026|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
In this talk, Rutgers University professor emeritus Matthew Baigell discusses early Jewish immigrant artists and cartoonists. As millions of Jews immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe starting in the 1870s, they brought with them not only their religious heritage but also a definitive idea of the place and value of art and aesthetics in society. Around 1900 they established a Jewish art stream separate from mainstream American art that continues to the present day. To a greater or lesser degree over the decades, artists have continually emphasized community values, politics, and religious heritage. Image above: Shelter Us Under the Shadow of Thy Wings, Hebrew Publishing 1909 Matthew Baigell is professor emeritus in art history at Rutgers University. [...]
Rachel Stern2026-03-05T07:21:05-05:00February 13th, 2026|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
In this talk, art historian and curator Rachel Perry discusses ten graphic narratives of their experiences of Nazi persecution created by women immediately after liberation. Lacking photographs of what they witnessed and endured, these "first responders" used visual storytelling to counter perpetrator and liberator sources and represent maternal loss, sexual violence, forced labor, and bodily trauma—experiences rarely recorded in canonical Holocaust testimony. Drawing on archives across Europe, Israel, and the United States, this talk recovers marginalized stories that predate Art Spiegelman's Maus by decades. Featured Artists: Lea Grundig (1906-1977), Luba Krugman Gurdus (1914-2011), Mária Turán Hacker (1886-1967), Edit Bán Kiss (1905-1966), Regina Lichter-Liron (1920-1995), Ella Liebermann-Shiber (1927-1998), Ágnes Lukács (1920-2016), Zsuza Merényi (1925-1990), [...]
Rachel Stern2024-04-16T05:35:20-04:00March 26th, 2024|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
Told by survivors, their children, and expert witnesses from the U.S. Israel, and Europe, Resistance: They Fought Back, is a revelation based on extensive research of how the Jews of Europe fought back. It uncovers evidence of non-violent methods which served as crucial tools of resistance and evolved into Jewish armed revolts in ghettos, forests and death camps, even as the odds of success were vanishingly small. On Monday, April 15, the 7:00pm film screening will be followed by Q&A with director Paula S. Apsell and Avinoa J. Patt, Ph.D., Professor of Holocaust Studies, New York University. Watch the TRAILER here: We’ve all heard of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but most people have no idea [...]
