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This Jewish artist hadn’t painted in more than 5 decades. Then came Oct. 7.
Sid Klein has finally found his subject. More than half a century after he scrambled to pick a topic for his senior art project at Brooklyn College—and settled on exploring the porcelain curves of a toilet bowl in a 20-painting series—he’s discovered a purpose.
Klein, 78, took a five-decade hiatus from art between college graduation and retirement. He picked his brushes back up just a few months before the events of Oct. 7.
Upon hearing of the Hamas attacks, Klein processed the news with acrylics. Soon, he began looking back to the Holocaust. He felt compelled to render contemporary and historical victims of hatred on paper and ultimately take on the mantle of combatting antisemitism, not with words or weapons but with images.
“For the first time in my life, I’m so motivated in my art,” Klein told me over Zoom from his home in South Florida. “All of a sudden I went from, ‘I don’t know what I want to paint,’ to, ‘I’ve got to make a record of this so people can look at these paintings and see what does antisemitism naturally lead to.’”
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Klein noticed at a young age that he could depict objects in three dimensions. “I started drawing with Crayola crayons with paper that my mom would pick up [at] the local five and dime,” he said.
But his mother died when he was seven, leaving his father to raise three children on his own. Though they weren’t particularly religious, Klein said, he attended yeshiva. The extra-long school day helped his working single father make sure he was safe. Klein continued dabbling in art through elementary and high school.
The Holocaust was not part of his education, as far as he remembers, not at the yeshiva and not later in college, where he flitted from pre-law to economics to philosophy before settling on fine art. “I’d never been exposed to it,” he said. “I’d never seen the photographs. I consciously avoided the photographs.”
“I was living in this bubble so I could pretend that antisemitism did not exist,” he said.
He remained in that bubble through business school and a long career in marketing. During that time, “painting didn’t even cross my mind,” Klein said. “For 55 years, I focused on the business and totally ignored the art.”
It wasn’t until his career drew to a close that he thought he might try again. “I wanted to give it a try and see what was left,” he said. But he wanted to keep painting only if he had a worthy subject, which he found in the wake of the Hamas attacks.
“That murder affected me in a profound way,” said Klein, who has two sons and five grandchildren living in Israel. “I started painting in my mind what these 1,200 people would have looked like. And that was my return to art.”
The segue from the horrors of Oct. 7 to those of the Holocaust felt natural to Klein. “For me, all of those are one of the same. They’re all Jew hatred at different times in history,” he said. “The amount of evil in our world is just—I don’t know how to measure it.” There are endless tragedies, he said, “but I’m focusing on our people.”
Klein paints in a corner of the family room he’s designated as his studio. He regularly pores over hundreds of black-and-white photos taken in ghettos and camps, looking for his next subjects to call out to him.
In one photograph, he recalled, he saw lines upon lines of women and children, standing near cattle cars, waiting, exhausted. He distilled the scene to one row of imminent victims in “Innocents.” They’re “going to be taken to a gas chamber and they’re going to be dead in 20 minutes or a half hour, and they don’t know that,” he said. On the right, a boy tugs at his mother’s coat. The woman on the far left balances the small child in her arms alongside her pregnant belly. In the middle, another grasps a toddler’s hand. Their eyes implore the viewer to grapple with their fate.
Several of Klein’s Holocaust works were displayed earlier this year at the Gross-Rosen Museum in Rogoźnica in Poland, on the grounds of the concentration camp system of the same name, where an estimated 120,000 people were imprisoned and 40,000 died.
“As employees of a Memorial Site, we have constant access to disturbing historical photos and documents; these are undeniably important, but viewing the victims through the eyes of an artist is an entirely different, more intimate experience,” Bartosz Surman, who works for the museum’s education department, told me. Surman estimated that approximately 4,000 people saw Klein’s work there between January 27 and March 31. “For a Memorial Site located in a village of fewer than a thousand people, we consider it a significant success and a testament to the power of Mr. Klein’s work,” he said.
Four thousand miles away, “My Zaidy” hangs on the wall at the Dr. Bernard Heller Museum in downtown Manhattan as part of the exhibition “Proverbs, Adages, and Maxims.”
The man in the painting wears a star under his heart. The bright yellow patch and pearlescent and gold shimmer of his face contrast with the matte blue of his coat and hat. But turning the corner of the exhibition, it’s the eyes that catch you. “I left them blank, so you can put in his eyes, any eyes you want,” Klein said—his zaidy’s or yours or a stranger’s.
The eyes may be missing but the gaze is powerful, as though this old man, as he approaches his cruel end, is staring and saying, “Look at me. Do you see what’s happening? Why are you just standing there?”
“A lot of bubbes and zaides were exterminated,” Klein said, including his paternal grandfather. But the zaidy in the painting isn’t Klein’s, exactly, he said. He can’t recall ever seeing a photo of him. Instead, he painted another elderly man in a photo that struck him: This is what a zaidy selected for the gas chamber looks like. This is what Klein’s zaidy could have looked like.
“I decided I was going to do a painting, and fill that hole in my heart,” Klein said.
“There’s something very haunting about the hollowed, empty eyes,” museum director Jeanie Rosensaft told me over the phone. “We were very touched, because although [Klein] has not had a long resume of art production, we felt that the image that he provided was very compelling.”.
Klein is one of 58 artists in the exhibition, and his work will be included in a tour the museum is organizing following its New York run, which ends June 24. “We hope that he continues on this path,” Rosensaft said. “It’s really essential that art bear witness to the past and provide a bridge to the future.”
Seeing the pain
Klein’s next painting, he told me, was inspired by a photo of two small children, empty bowls in hand, begging for food.
“If I had more working space, I would make my paintings bigger,” said Klein, who says he hopes to one day create life-size portraits. “Right now you’ve got to get pretty close to see what the hell is going on,” he said. “I want size to be part of your experience seeing the pain.”
Spending his days sifting through Holocaust photos and painting its victims takes a toll. “When I paint, I become emotionally involved. But when it’s done, I listen to my music for a couple of hours, and that gives me the emotional strength to continue,” says Klein, who puts on Vivaldi, Mozart, or Brahms, for example. “After I do a painting, I need this music to settle my nerves.”
“Sometimes I say, ‘Klein, try something else!’” he said. But he can’t imagine abandoning his subject or newfound mission for any others. Which means he’ll need more of that music in the years to come, as might those viewing his paintings.
“A lot of my work is grotesque,” Klein said, and that’s intentional. “I want to shake you up.”
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Synagogue attacks were part of massive ISIS-inspired plot last week, FBI says
(JTA) — A 21-year-old man from Valencia, Pennsylvania, suggested poisoning food in synagogues as part of a mass attack in support of the Islamic State group last week, according to the FBI.
The suspect, Jonathan Kramer, said in an online forum using the pseudonym “Hamza Al Rashid” that “i wish to inject ricin or cyanide into places such as grocery stores inside water/food with a syringe, or going to food events, preferably synagogues and putting the chemicals in their food and drink…,” according to a sworn FBI affidavit.
The prospective poisoning was part of a broader plot of mass violence that included “repeated attempts to encourage and coordinate violence through encrypted platforms, such as advising others on attack methods, discussing chemical poisons, arson, vehicle attacks, drone delivery explosives and firearm based assaults,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Richard Evanchec said at a press conference last week.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh said in a security update on Friday that no synagogue had been specified by the FBI. , “We are in close contact with our law enforcement partners and federal prosecutors, and if we learn of anything concerning, we will share that immediately,” the organization noted.
Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg announced last Tuesday that Kramer was “preparing for a mass shooting that could have taken many lives, having already secured a rifle and approximately 190 rounds of ammunition for what he called his ‘mission.”
Efforts to reach Kramer’s public defender Jake Morrison were unsuccessful.
FBI agents arrested Kramer in a hotel parking lot in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, the Justice Department said. They seized a semiautomatic rifle, five rifle magazines, a rifle bipod and scope, a total of 190 rounds of rifle ammunition and about 30 knives following a search of him, his house and his hotel room.
Kramer was charged with receiving a firearm and ammunition believing they would be used to commit terrorism. He appeared in court last Wednesday to waive a preliminary hearing, according to CBS News. A court date has not been set for Kramer’s next proceedings, the network reported.
Kramer had been on the FBI’s radar since 2023, when he was charged by Pennsylvania state authorities “for his role in a plot to commit a mass casualty incident” and sent to a juvenile detention facility, FBI special agent Gregory Battaglia said in a sworn affidavit.
Nearly eight years ago, 11 worshippers were killed at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Proposed U.S. $24.3 billion sale of F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia advances
(JTA) — The State Department has approved a possible $24.3 billion sale of 48 F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia — a move that would make the kingdom the second Middle Eastern country after Israel to have the world’s most powerful combat aircraft.
“This proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security objectives of the United States by improving the security of a major non-NATO ally,” the department said in a statement.
Israel wants the sale attached to a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia, but that doesn’t appear to be on the horizon. However, there is a small chance that Congress could keep the sale from happening.
When President Donald Trump first confirmed that he was considering the sale last November, Israeli officials told Axios that while they don’t oppose the sale itself, they wanted it “to be subject to Saudi normalization with Israel.”
Although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly brushed off the deal’s significance last fall, a security source at the time warned on CNN that the possibility of Saudi Arabia acquiring “the same capabilities” as Israel was “very concerning.”
The prime minister was more vocal in his opposition to a July announcement from Trump that he was weighing selling the advanced jets to Turkey as well, telling CNN that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is “not exactly a model ally of the United States.”
Israel has already purchased 50 F-35 jets, in two procurement rounds that occurred in 2016 and in 2017, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry. However, local media reports indicate that two of the 50 have yet to arrive, meaning that just 48 are on the ground – the same number of planes that the State Department has approved for Saudi Arabia’s potential purchase.
Israel would have many more F-35s than Saudi Arabia for the time being, because its Defense Ministry announced in 2024 that it would be procuring 25 more of the planes, slated to begin arriving in 2028. Earlier this year, the Defense Ministry revealed that it would be procuring yet another squadron of the jets, although the quantity remained unclear.
Congressional approval is not assured; wariness of the Saudi regime, stemming in part from the state-sanctioned 2018 murder of a U.S.-based journalist in Turkey, crosses party lines.
The U.S. Arms Export Control Act requires the executive branch of the government to notify Congress regarding major defense equipment sales to most countries. Congress can then deem a country ineligible to participate in a sale through a joint resolution. The president can then veto the resolution, which Congress would need a two-thirds supermajority to override.
Additionally, U.S. law requires the president to ensure that Israel maintains “a qualitative military edge over military threats” when considering arms sales to other Middle Eastern countries. Israel, per the law, must be able “to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat” from both other nations and “non-state actors.”
“The proposed sale of this equipment and support will not alter the military balance in the region,” the State Department said on Thursday. It called Saudi Arabia “a force for political stability and economic progress in the Gulf region,” adding that the sale would help “deter current and future threats by strengthening its homeland defense.”
The department maintained that not only would the sale improve Saudi Arabia’s defense capabilities, but it would also boost “interoperability” with both U.S. forces and other players from NATO and the region.
As for the potential deal’s logistics, Saudi Arabia has requested 48 of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter Jets, as well as 49 Pratt & Whitney engines, according to the State Department.
The kingdom is also seeking to acquire other non-major defense equipment, such as cryptographic devices, precision navigation, secure communications, simple key loaders and support for electronic warfare databases, maintenance and personnel training.
Producing and delivering these planes can take many years.
Meanwhile, just a day before Trump’s announcement, The New York Times surfaced intelligence concerns that China could acquire F-35 technology by spying on Saudi Arabia or through its partnerships with the kingdom.
U.S. House Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat from Illinois, warned in a statement on X that “Beijing has spent decades stealing American intellectual property” and that this deal could “help them do it.”
“Our own intelligence community is warning that it could put the crown jewels of American military technology within reach of the Chinese Communist Party,” Krishnamoorthi added.
The Biden administration reportedly ended a past F-35 deal with the United Arab Emirates — secured by the first Trump administration — due to similar concerns about the country’s connections to China, as well as to Russia.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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After outcry, Texas lieutenant governor says schools should teach Holocaust books ‘Night,’ ‘Anne Frank’
(JTA) — The lieutenant governor of Texas says his recent call for the state’s public schools to remove “over 2,000 titles” of “dirty, filthy and vulgar books” was not meant to include books about the Holocaust.
Dan Patrick’s statement, provided exclusively to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday, comes after a month of confusion following a press conference in which he and a conservative Christian activist threatened schools with potential loss of state funding if they did not comply with his directive to purge their libraries.
“I believe Texas students must learn about the Holocaust, and that includes reading books such as ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank,’ and other books about the Holocaust,” Patrick told JTA, singling out two books on the removal list he had promoted – one of which, “Night,” that he previously explicitly called for removal from middle schools.
Patrick added that his initiative was “focused on age-inappropriate, sexually explicit books in public school libraries across Texas.” At his earlier press conference, he had directed viewers to an online list compiled by an activist group that features several books about the Holocaust and Jewish identity.
Patrick’s threats have teeth. In Texas, lieutenant governors are more powerful than in many other states, playing central roles in shaping the budget and determining the legislative agenda.
Patrick also appeared to walk back some of the harsher proclamations from his Aug. 19 press conference, at which the Republican had stated, “We’re coming for the books.”
“As the law states, local communities have the right to make their own decisions about their public school libraries,” he told JTA Friday.
The lieutenant governor, who is up for reelection this fall, appeared at the conference with Bonnie Wallace, the head of the activist group Recover America, and told viewers to “go to RecoverAmerica.com.” That group has circulated a list of more than 2,100 “Harmful Books in Libraries.” Its list, which it describes as “books with harmful, sexually explicit, and vulgar content,” includes more than a dozen titles of particular import to Jewish readers.
Recover America’s flagged books include both volumes of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” a comic-book adaptation of Frank’s diary and Bernard Malamud’s novel of a blood libel “The Fixer” — all books that have been removed from school districts in Texas and other states in the past amid broader conservative-led library culture wars. In some cases those books were restored to the districts following public outcry, but spurred deeper dialogue about the state of Holocaust education and antisemitism awareness in public schools.
Patrick’s latest push would go much further than a handful of districts, affecting the more than 5.5 million students in public schools across the state.
One book of particular contention on Recover America’s list was “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s bestselling memoir of surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald, which has been taught in schools for decades. After a Houston Chronicle story noted the book’s inclusion on the Recover America “harmful” list, Patrick initially doubled down on “Night,” saying that it was not appropriate for middle schools owing to its “violence.”
“If ‘Night,’ by Elie Wiesel, were made into a movie, it would likely be rated R,” Patrick wrote on the social network X on Aug. 26. “‘Night,’ which includes depictions of graphic violence and the machine-gunning of babies, should not be available to sixth graders in middle-school libraries. High school is more age-appropriate.”
His tweet appeared to contradict the state’s own K-12 required reading list, passed this summer, which mandates that “Night” be taught in the eighth grade beginning in 2030.
Now, in response to questions from JTA, the lieutenant governor said he would defer to the Texas State Board of Education on the appropriate grade to teach “Night.”
“The State Board of Education decides the appropriate grade level for books and will determine whether ‘Night,’ by Elie Wiesel, is at the appropriate grade level,” Patrick told JTA in his statement.
He continued to insist that books in schools should be held to “FCC standards,” referring to the Federal Communications Commission, an agency that governs broadcasting content and does not regulate publishing.
The head of the Texas Holocaust, Genocide and Antisemitism Advisory Commission, a governor-appointed panel which advised the state on the inclusion of “Night” and other Holocaust texts on its required reading list, did not return a JTA request for comment.
In a statement, the Texas Educational Authority, which drafted the required-reading list, told JTA, “When Texas students learn about the Holocaust, they will be exposed to the horrors of the Holocaust. That is why the SBOE placed the book in 8th Grade to ensure age appropriateness for students.”
At the Emmys this week, when “The Librarians,” a documentary about librarians facing book removal threats, won an award, retired Texas librarian Carolyn Foote joined the producers on the stage and held up a copy of “Night” in protest.
“I felt like it was very symbolic to bring ‘Night,’” Foote, a subject of the film and a co-founder of the librarian activist group FReadom Fighters, told JTA. “Having read it, I just know the importance of not forgetting our past. And that’s part of Elie Wiesel’s whole legacy, is remembrance, and so it just felt very important for me to carry that book, coming from Texas.” Another librarian onstage for the win held up “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation.”
Elisha Wiesel, Elie’s son and chair of the Elie Wiesel Foundation, told JTA that “Texas deserves credit for recognizing that Holocaust education belongs in the eighth-grade curriculum.” Yet, the younger Wiesel suggested, Patrick’s concerns about the book’s violence were misplaced.
“‘Night’ contains violence because the Holocaust was violent; its purpose is not to shock young people, but to help them understand where hatred and indifference can lead,” he wrote in an email. “With context and guidance, students should not be shielded from this history. They should be equipped to confront it.”
Despite having directed viewers to Recover America’s book list during his press conference, Patrick’s new statement to JTA said, “I do not have a book list.” He pointed instead to a law passed in the state legislature in 2025 regulating school books that he said districts were required to follow.
Yet some districts in the state have removed every book on Recover America’s list from their own libraries out of fear of losing funding, Foote told JTA. While the list nominally contains a ratings system, many of the books do not have a rating.
Besides “Night,” “Maus,” “Anne Frank’s Diary” and “The Fixer,” other books about Judaism and the Holocaust on Recover America’s list of “Harmful Books” include:
- “Annexed,” a young-adult novel about Peter van Pels, who hid in the Amsterdam annex with Anne Frank
- “The Berlin Boxing Club,” a young-adult historical novel based on German boxer Max Schmeling, who helped young Jews during Hitler’s rise to power
- “Black, White and Jewish,” a memoir by Rebecca Walker, the mixed-race Jewish daughter of author Alice Walker
- “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents,” a nonfiction book analyzing the “caste systems” of Nazi Germany. “Caste” had been included on an earlier, Wallace-spearheaded list of books for removal from a Texas public library in a case that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear in 2025, allowing the removals to proceed.
- “Kasher in the Rye,” a memoir by Jewish comedian Moshe Kasher
- “Pride: the story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag,” a children’s picture-book biography of the pioneering Jewish LGBTQ legislator
- “Sophie’s Choice,” the bestselling Holocaust novel for adults
- “The Violin Maker’s Daughter,” a historical novel about a Jewish family of musicians during the Holocaust
- “White Bird,” a young-reader graphic novel about a Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied France
In response to JTA sharing a list of the above books, Patrick’s statement mentioned only “Night” and Anne Frank by name. The Recover America list is largely made up of romance and fantasy novels, many with an LGBTQ element, while also including classics such as “The Glass Menagerie” and “Cat’s Cradle” and some picture books for children.
Recover America did not immediately return a JTA request for comment Friday on Patrick’s new statement. Wallace, the group’s leader who has also appeared on Patrick’s podcast, previously told the Houston Chronicle that she had “thought long and hard” about including “Night” on her list.
She ultimately did so, she said, because “an eighth-grade student is 13 years old. Do they need to read about soldiers massacring, throwing up babies, and killing them with machine guns?”
She added, “It’s not to say this doesn’t happen in life. And the Holocaust was maybe the worst tragedy in the history of the world.”
For Cameron Samuels, a Jewish alum of Texas public schools and founder of the activist group Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, such efforts do not help Jewish students.
“Non-Jewish people are deciding for us what’s best, and making this public policy,” Samuels said. “We can’t readily access these books and stories. And that makes students feel alone. It also means that our classroom peers are not learning authentic Jewish narratives.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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