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The radical Jewish photographers who fought injustice with their cameras
(New York Jewish Week) — A multi-generational group of people congregate on a building stoop on Hester Street; an African-American man leans on a lamppost; a gaggle of teenagers pile on top of each other at the beach in Coney Island; a hoard of children — in various states of undress — play with a broken mirror in the street.
These are only a few examples of the 150 black-and-white snapshots of New York City street life in the 1930s and ’40s that appear in the new book “Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Midcentury New York” by historian and scholar Deborah Dash Moore. The photos are the work of the New York Photo League, a group of socially conscious street photographers whose aim was to showcase the living conditions of the city’s working class, as well as spotlight their everyday lives and relationships.
New York, ca. 1940. (Helen Levitt)
The Photo League operated in New York from 1936 until 1951; the cooperative of like-minded photographers ceased to exist after it was placed on a Department of Justice blacklist in 1947 on the suspicions that it had anti-American, communist associations. Most of the photographers in the league were left-wing and working class. Many of them were also Jewish — immigrants or the children of immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe.
Members of the Photo League included well-known Jewish photographers like Sol Libsohn, Sid Grossman, Morris Engel, Harold Feinstein, Helen Levitt, Weegee (born Usher Felig) and a young Marvin E. Newman (who died this month at age 95). “Touched by left-wing radicalism that flourished among second-generation Jews in the 1930s, these photographers considered photography a social and political tool,” Dash Moore writes in the book’s prologue. “It could influence how people interpreted their conditions.”
In “Walkers in the City,” Dash Moore explores how these photographers’ Jewish sensibilities allowed them to capture both intimate and hectic moments of New Yorkers’ everyday lives. “A focus on their fellow New Yorkers affirmed the capability of photography to help them grasp their world,” Dash Moore writes. “And with understanding came the potential power to change society.”
The New York Jewish Week caught up with Dash Moore via Zoom from Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the New York City native is a professor of history and Judaic studies at the University of Michigan. We spoke about the genesis of the book, her favorite images from the collection and how the photographers’ Judaism had impacted their work.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Historian Deborah Dash Moore is the author and editor of several books, including “GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation” and “City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York.” Her most recent book is “Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Midcentury New York.” (Courtesy)
What drew you to this subject of documentary photography and the New York Photo League?
I co-authored a book — that was not a Jewish book — on New York that came out in 2001. It was called “Cityscapes: A History of New York in Images.” I could have used prints — my co-author, who had the earlier half of the book, used a lot of print sources and stuff like that — but I was intrigued with the photographs. However, we had no money — we had like $25 for permission to publish a photo. So we wrote this very nice letter to all these different photographers, and a bunch of them said, “You must be kidding,” and “no.”
But then there were others who said, “OK, where do you see my stuff?” I said, “Well, the New York Public Library, Museum of the City of New York.” They said, “Oh, that’s only a small piece of what I produce. You have to come to my studio.” So I started to go to these photographers’ studios. This would have been in the late 1990s, because the book came out in 2001. So we’ve got these studios and I’m seeing lots of great photos and after a while it’s dawning on me: “Oh, this one’s Jewish, that one’s Jewish, the other one is Jewish. These people, these photographers, they’re all so Jewish. That was sort of lodged in the back of my head.
Twelve years or so ago, I had a fellowship at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. The theme that year was “Jews and the City” and it was at that point I thought, OK, let’s look at urban photography and Jews.
Hester Street, 1938. (Sol Libsohn)
The New York Photo League wasn’t specifically a Jewish group. Is this a new thesis that you’re offering, that their photos presented a very Jewish way of looking at the city? Or do you think they saw themselves that way?
No, they didn’t see themselves that way. They had far more conventional understandings of what it means to be Jewish: You had to be religious, you had to keep kosher. They didn’t fit any of those categories, so they did not see themselves that way. So yes, I am suggesting that this was basically a Jewish group. Now, does that mean that everybody there was Jewish? No, of course not. But it did mean that the non-Jews who joined the Photo League were comfortable in what was essentially a Jewish milieu. They were comfortable being around Jews. The Photo League was a Jewish organization in that way, in my terms.
The styles of talking about photographs, the way in which they decided what made for a good photograph, what was important to photograph — all these things were essentially inflected by Jewish concerns at the time in the 1930s and ’40s. Many of them were political concerns. This is the middle of the Great Depression — so they were about how you create a more just society in New York City. How do you deal with the incredible exploitation and inroads of capitalism that leave so many people impoverished?
“Soul of New York,” 1951-1952. (Louis Stettner)
Many of them, of course, came out of poor homes. They knew a lot of economic insecurity themselves. These were among their specific concerns. They also were very much aware that the standard pictures of New York City, which were produced by companies to make a lot of money, were pictures of the Empire State Building and of the Statue of Liberty and of the famous things like the skyline, et cetera. To them, that was not New York. New York, to them, was its people. So you had to figure out, how do you take pictures of the people of New York? One could be even more specific: It was the working-class people. These were the people who made New York.
Do you have a favorite photo in the book?
I love most of the pictures in the book, which is why they’re in the book. I really liked the cover picture. I think that [Morris] Engel’s photograph “East Side Sweet Evelyn” really captures New York in the late ’30s. But also it’s a real Photo League photo. I mean, how do you know it’s New York? Well, the guy is going down into the subway. The advertising has this great picture of “eyes examined” and this man looking at a woman. It speaks to the power that men have to look at women, which happens all the time on the streets of New York. It speaks to what I call “the circulation of gazes.” That also happens in New York. The woman, we can be pretty sure, knows she’s being looked at, although she looks straight ahead. This very much epitomizes New York. It says “the city” in so many different ways.
A woman passing by with a box labeled “Sweet Evelyn” catches the eye of a man making his way down subway stairs, New York, 1938. (Morris Engel)
The photographers themselves were really aware of what their presence meant, and aware of how they were capturing people’s experiences. When they took photographs, they wanted people to get a chance to see those photographs. So they often came back regularly to the neighborhood and they handed out prints to people. They felt that there was a reciprocity that was important. I think that piece, and the emotions connected with that, are really important. That was very much in the Jewish, New York, Photo League spirit. It’s not a candid that you’re snapping and that you’re never going to relate to that person again.
What are you hoping that non-Jews or non-New Yorkers will take away from your curation of these photos?
I hope that they take away a sense of the vibrancy of the time — of the ways in which people made connections and developed an appreciation of each other, and a sense of how this was fostered by the city. There’s so much anti-city stuff that exists. But the City of New York was a place that fostered this kind of interconnection, where you could learn about people who were different from you. Most of the photographs that these photographers took were not of Jews, but they were of New Yorkers. It was a way, in a sense, to come to understand your neighbors and how to be a neighbor.
So many people find cities frightening. They don’t know how to deal with the diversity of cities. They don’t know how to deal with differences. There’s fear and paranoia. Photographers said: “No, don’t be afraid.”
“Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Midcentury New York” was published Sept. 15 by Cornell University Press. Dash Moore will be in conversation with Manhattan Borough Historian Robert W. Snyder at the Center for Jewish History on Thursday, Sept. 28.
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The post The radical Jewish photographers who fought injustice with their cameras appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Vast Majority of US Jews Reject Jewish Voice for Peace, Other Anti-Zionist Groups, Polling Data Shows
Pro-Hamas protesters led by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) demonstrate outside the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 14, 2024. Photo: Derek French via Reuters Connect
A new poll released on Wednesday underscores how far removed Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and other anti-Zionist organizations that claim to represent Jews are from mainstream Jewish views on Israel, Zionism, and the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians.
Commissioned by The Jewish Majority, a nonprofit founded by a researcher whose aim is to monitor and accurately report Jewish opinion on the most consequential issues affecting the community, the poll found that the vast majority of American Jews believe that anti-Zionist movements and anti-Israel university protests are antisemitic.
The findings also showed that Jews across the US overwhelmingly oppose the views and tactics of JVP, a prominent anti-Israel group which has helped organize widespread demonstrations against the Jewish state during the war in Gaza.
Founded in 1996 at the University of California, Berkeley, JVP describes itself as “the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world.” It was infamously one of the first organizations to blame Israel following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust.
“Israeli apartheid and occupation — and the United States complicity in that oppression — are the source of all this violence,” JVP said as Israelis were still counting their dead and missing.
American Jews who responded to The Jewish Majority’s poll overwhelmingly reject this line of thinking. Seventy percent said they believe that anti-Zionism of any stripe is antisemitic; 85 percent believe that Hamas, whom JVP described as “the oppressed,” is a genocidal group; and 79 percent support vocally pro-Israel groups such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization JVP has defamed as “not a credible source on antisemitism and racism.”
Additionally, JVP’s methods of protest are unpopular among American Jews, The Jewish Majority added, noting that 75 percent disapprove of “blocking traffic” and only 18 percent approve of protesters’ wearing masks to conceal their identities. Sixty percent also disagree with staging protests outside the homes of public officials, a common JVP tactic.
“Plain and simple, Jewish Voice for Peace is an extremist group that does not represent the views of the overwhelming majority of American Jews,” Jonathan Schulman, The Jewish Majority’s executive director, said in a statement accompanying the poll results. “American Jews share a strong and consistent stance against anti-Zionists as well as a deep concern over rising antisemitism and the tactics used by organizations like JVP.”
He continued, “It is high time people see through the charade: JVP is not representative of anyone but a marginal fringe, even if a few radical Jews are involved in their movement.”
The Jewish Majority’s poll was conducted by Public Opinion Strategies.
Jewish Voice for Peace’s inner workings, messaging, and political activities were recently documented in a groundbreaking report on the group published last month by StandWithUs, a Jewish civil rights group based in Los Angeles, California.
Titled, “A Shield for Hate, Not a Voice for Peace,” the report noted that JVP has promoted a distorted history of Zionism and Israel, accusing the movement for Jewish self-determination of everything from training US police officers to violate the rights of African Americans to abusing “Jewish history.” In doing so, it has allied with extremist groups such as WithinOurLifetime — whose founder has threatened to set Jews on fire and led a movement to harass Jews on New York City’s public transportation — and Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), which celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and has proclaimed that “the Zionist entity has no right to exist.”
The report also stated that JVP has collaborated with anti-Israel entities such as Samidoun, which identifies itself as a “Palestinian prisoner solidarity network,” to hold rallies. Samidoun described Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities in Israel as “a brave and heroic operation.” The United States and Canada each imposed sanctions on Samidoun in October, labeling the organization a “sham charity” and accusing it of fundraising for designated terrorist groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
JVP has also compared Zionism to Nazism.
“This is Holocaust inversion — an antisemitic tactic in which the genocide Jews faced in the past is used to promote baseless hatred against Jews today,” the StandWithUs report said. “The only group benefiting from JVP’s Holocaust inversion is Hamas — a truly genocidal terrorist group. JVP has helped shield them from accountability for launching the war, ruthlessly militarizing civilian areas across Gaza, stealing humanitarian aid, and rejecting nearly every proposed ceasefire and hostage release deal.”
In June 2024, the Anti-Defamation League filed a complaint with the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) accusing the political fundraising arm of JVP of transgressing federal election law by misrepresenting its spending and receiving unlawful donations from corporate entities, citing “discrepancies” in the organization’s income and expense reports.
The complaint lodged a slew of charges against Jewish Voice for Peace’s political action committee (JVP PAC), including spending almost no money on candidates running for office — a political action committee’s main purpose. From 2020-2023, JVP PAC reported spending $82,956, but just a small fraction of that sum — $1,775, just over 2 percent — was spent on candidates, according to the complaint. The money went elsewhere, being paid out in one case for “legal services” provided by a company which “doesn’t appear to practice law” and other expenses.
JVP continues to have the support of powerful friends in the world of progressive philanthropy, a formidable subset of the American elite, amid these scandals and controversies.
Since 2017 it has — according to a 2023 report by the National Association of Scholars — received $480,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a philanthropic foundation whose endowment is valued at $1.27 billion. Between 2014 and 2015 alone, JVP brought in over half a million dollars in grants from various foundations, including the Open Society Policy Center — founded by billionaire George Soros — the Kaphan Foundation, and others.
According to the recent StandWithUs report, JVP has received substantial financial assistance from organizations tied to Lebanon and Iran.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Vast Majority of US Jews Reject Jewish Voice for Peace, Other Anti-Zionist Groups, Polling Data Shows first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Turkey’s Erdogan Demands Israel Pay Reparations for Gaza, Says Palestinian State ‘Must Not Be Delayed’
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a joint statement to the media in Baghdad, Iraq, April 22, 2024. Photo: AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/Pool via REUTERS
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday demanded Israel pay reparations “for the harm it inflicted through its aggressive actions in Gaza” and urged the immediate establishment of a Palestinian state.
During a press conference with Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto in West Java, as part of his Asian tour to Malaysia and Pakistan, Erdogan rejected US President Donald Trump’s plan to “take over” the Gaza Strip to rebuild the war-torn enclave while relocating Palestinians elsewhere during reconstruction efforts.
Like many other Middle Eastern leaders who rejected Trump’s proposal, Erdogan also advocated for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“The creation of a sovereign, territorially united State of Palestine within the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital cannot be delayed any further,” he said during the press conference, as aired by the Turkish TRT Haber TV channel.
“Any step, proposal, or project that undermines this matter is illegitimate in our view, and it means more conflicts, bloodshed, and instability,” he continued.
During Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House last week, Trump called on Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab states to take in Palestinians from Gaza after nearly 16 months of war between Israel and Hamas.
“Until there is peace in Gaza, until the Palestinians achieve peace, peace in the region is impossible,” the Turkish president said.
With talks underway to extend the fragile Israel-Hamas ceasefire, Erdogan also demanded that Israel must pay reparations “for the harm it inflicted through its aggressive actions in Gaza.”
“The cost of Israel’s 15-month attacks in Gaza is about $100 billion,” he said. “The law dictates that the perpetrator must compensate for the damage.”
Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists started the war in Gaza when they murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages during their invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel responded with a military campaign aimed at freeing the hostages and dismantling Hamas’s military and governing capabilities in neighboring Gaza.
Last month, both sides reached a ceasefire and hostage-release deal brokered by the US, Egypt, and Qatar.
Under phase one, Hamas agreed to release 33 Israeli hostages, eight of whom are deceased, in exchange for Israel freeing over 1,900 Palestinian prisoners, many of whom are serving multiple life sentences for terrorism-related offenses.
So far, 16 of the 33 hostages have been released during the first phase, which is set to last six weeks.
During the press conference, Erdogan also announced that Turkey and Indonesia will join forces in the reconstruction of Gaza.
Last month, Erdogan met with Hamas leader Muhammad Ismail Darwish in Ankara.
Turkey has been one of the most outspoken critics of Israel during the Gaza war, even threatening to invade the Jewish state and calling on the United Nations to use force if it cannot stop Israel’s military campaign against Hamas.
Last year, Ankara also ceased all exports and imports to and from Israel, citing the “humanitarian tragedy” in the Palestinian territories as the reason.
Erdogan has frequently defended Hamas terrorists as “resistance fighters” against what he described as an Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. He and other Turkish leaders have repeatedly compared Israel with Nazi Germany and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Adolf Hitler.
The post Turkey’s Erdogan Demands Israel Pay Reparations for Gaza, Says Palestinian State ‘Must Not Be Delayed’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Boston University Rejects Proposal to Divest From Israel
College students in the Boston, Massachusetts area hold dueling demonstrations amid Israel’s war with Hamas in April 2024. Photo: Vincent Ricci via Reuters Connect
Boston University has rejected the group Students for Justice in Palestine’s (SJP) call for its endowment to be divested of holdings in companies which sell armaments to the Israeli military, becoming the latest higher education institution to refuse this key tenet of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
“The endowment is no longer the vehicle for political debate; nevertheless, I will continue to seek ways that members of our community can engage with each other on political issues of our day including the conflict in the Middle East,” university president Melissa Gilliam said on Tuesday in a statement which reported the will of the board of trustees. “Our traditions of free speech and academic freedom are critical to who we are as an institution, and so is our tradition of finding common ground to engage difficult topics while respecting the dignity of every individual.”
Gilliam’s announcement comes amid SJP’s push to hold a student government administered referendum on divestment, a policy goal the group has pursued since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Its hopes were dashed on Tuesday when what SJP described as “technical difficulties” caused the referendum to be postponed indefinitely. However, SJP hinted that the delay may have been caused by its failing to draw a “representative sample of BU’s undergraduate population” to the polls.
SJP’s relationship with the university is poor, according to The Daily Free Press, Boston University’s official campus newspaper. In November, the Student and Activities Office issued the group a “formal warning” following multiple violations of policies on peaceful assembly. SJP, the Free Press said, occupied an area of the Center for Computing and Data Sciences for two days and tacked anti-Zionist propaganda — which included accusations that Boston University profits from “death” — on school property inside the building despite being forewarned that doing so is verboten. Following the disciplinary action, SJP accused the university of being “discriminatory towards SJP and our events.”
American universities have largely rejected demands to divest from Israel and entities at all linked to the Jewish state, delivering a succession of blows to the pro-Hamas protest movement that students and faculty have pushed with dozens of illegal demonstrations aimed at coercing officials into enacting the policy.
Trinity College turned away BDS advocates in November, citing its “fiduciary responsibilities” and “primary objective of maintaining the endowment’s intergeneration equity.” It also noted that acceding to demands for divestment for the sake of “utilizing the endowment to exert political influence” would injure the college financially, stressing that doing so would “compromise our access to fund managers, in turn undermining the board’s ability to perform its fiduciary obligation.”
The University of Minnesota in August pointed to the same reason for spurning divestment while stressing the extent to which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict polarizes its campus community. It coupled its pronouncement with a new investment policy, a so-called “position of neutrality” which, it says, will be a guardrail protecting university business from the caprices of political opinion.
Colleges and universities will lose tens of billions of dollars collectively from their endowments if they capitulate to demands to divest from Israel, according to a report published in September by JLens, a Jewish investor network that is part of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Titled “The Impact of Israel Divestment on Equity Portfolios: Forecasting BDS’s Financial Toll on University Endowments,” the report presented the potential financial impact of universities adopting the BDS movement, which is widely condemned for being antisemitic.
The losses estimated by JLens are catastrophic. Adopting BDS, it said, would incinerate $33.21 billion of future returns for the 100 largest university endowments over the next 10 years, with Harvard University losing $2.5 billion and the University of Texas losing $2.2 billion. Other schools would forfeit over $1 billion, including the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, and Princeton University. For others, such as the University of Michigan and Dartmouth College, the damages would total in the hundreds of millions.
“This groundbreaking report approached the morally problematic BDS movement from an entirely new direction — its negative impact on portfolio returns,” New York University adjunct professor Michael Lustig said in a statement extolling the report. “JLens has done a great job in quantifying the financial effects of implementing the suggestions of this pernicious movement, and importantly, they ‘show their work’ by providing full transparency into their methodology, and properly caveat the points where assumptions must necessarily be made. This report will prove to be an important tool in helping to fight noxious BDS advocacy.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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