Explore how antisemitism shaped the portrayal of Jews in art, how Jewish communities reclaimed their history and identity on their own terms, and how lessons from the past can inform strategies for confronting antisemitism today.
Session 1: Orientalism against the Jews
This session will focus on the depictions of Jews, Jewish history and Jewish time into the 19 th century. In particular, we will
examine the visual strategies across Christian Europe that sought to make Jews a relic of the past. We will also look at the broader place of Jews in the Christian images, paying particular attention to how a colonial imaginary developed within Europe that subjugated Jewish agency. Finally, we will reflect on how these visual strategies were contested as well as how they later gained greater expression and momentum in the Middle East.
Session 2: New Media and the Jewish Eye
This session looks at the social and visual development of modern Jewish art. Barred from participating in national artistic academies, Jews across Europe flocked to a new set of arts that had no barriers to entry and required a transnational mobility. In the realm of the camera, Jews revolutionized news media and entertainment on both sides of the Atlantic. They used these same devices to highlight the plight of At the same time, Jews were instrumental to creating new national art forms and demonstrating both mastery and loyalty to states.
Session 3: Exile, Genocide, and Ethnic Renewal
This class will focus on the visuality of Jewish victimhood. Beginning in the 1920s and 30s, we will explore how Jewish artists and photographers tried to capture a picture of rising antisemitism and precarity across Europe. We will discuss too how the Holocaust as a series of images was publicized by survivors and how their efforts became the basis for the record we now have across museums and films.
Session 4: Making Israel in Images
This final class treats how Israel was produced in art and media. Looking at the mandate period, the war of independence, and the State’s first two decades. We will examine how the previous sessions came to inform the broader image of Israel. We will emphasize how much of the West fell in love with Israel and its glamour in the time of Jet Age.
Spring 2027
Online
4
May 5, May 12, May 19, May 26, 2027
Wednesdays, 12:00 - 1:00PM
Dr. Steven Weiss Samols is the ISGAP-Woolf Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge. His expertise lies in both German Jewish history, modern antisemitism and Visual Studies. In addition to his publications, he is currently revising a book manuscript for Cambridge University Press on how coffee table photobooks popularized Jewish history for non-Jews throughout the twentieth century.
