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.”

The post This Jewish artist hadn’t painted in more than 5 decades. Then came Oct. 7. appeared first on The Forward.

My mom — 93 years old, still sharp, a lifelong Democrat, a woman who has read The New York Times nearly every day for the last five decades — called me this week, in something approaching shock, to tell me she had read Nicholas Kristof’s latest op-ed.

“I can’t believe what they’re saying,” she said of the piece, whose claims — particularly one, questionably sourced, involving the alleged rape of a prisoner by a dog — drew accusations of serious journalistic malpractice. To me, this felt like more than flawed reporting. It bore the unmistakable contours of a modern blood libel.

“How can they print this?” my mom asked. “What’s happening in the world?”

Sometimes we encounter an unexpected threshold, and suddenly the familiar world appears altered. The Kristof column was such a threshold for my mother. Her parents were immigrants; her mother left a Romanian shtetl as a child, crossing the Atlantic with her younger brother when they were 12 and 9 years old. They came because Jews were fleeing rapes and murder. If you are an American Jew of Eastern European descent, there is a decent chance your family history contains some version of this story — that of people fleeing pogroms.

You may remember the most recent example of such an attack. It happened on Oct. 7, 2023 — the first pogrom carried out in the age of smartphones.

To say that things have felt strange and frightening for many Jews worldwide since that horror is like saying clouds produce rain or honey is sweet. Strangest of all is the speed with which, in many quarters, people sought to not just explain the atrocity, but actually justify it.

What has tormented me almost as much as the violence itself is the astonishing pace at which animus toward Jews, or toward “Zionists,” has become normalized in spaces where one might once have expected understanding. And yes, I know, people are weary of hearing Jews explain why hostility directed at the overwhelming majority of Jews who believe in Jewish self-determination often bleeds into hostility toward Jews themselves. I know all the caveats. I know all the disclaimers. I have read them too. Still, it increasingly appears that anti-Zionism in many quarters has become not merely tolerated, but a litmus test.

The range of what can be said aloud has changed. So have the categories of people toward whom contempt may be openly directed. Prejudice against Jews that can once again — as in an era many thought was gone forever — pass as a kind of moral sophistication.

Each week there is a new reason to think about all this. A Democratic congressional candidate in Texas named Maureen Galindo has crossed yet another Rubicon of human foible and weakness. Galindo reportedly proposed transforming a detention center into a prison for “American Zionists” and described it as a place where many Zionists would undergo “castration processing.”

I cannot say categorically that Galindo represents a new political era. She may not. Fringe figures have always existed. But that a candidate seeking office within one of America’s two major political parties — a candidate who advanced to a Democratic runoff after finishing first in a crowded primary field, with roughly 29% of the vote — used this grotesque language is notable.

Maybe she’ll lose badly. Maybe she’ll vanish from the political stage. That wouldn’t change the fact that her statements did not produce immediate and universal condemnation.

Every era contains extremists. But sometimes institutions cease to treat extremism as radioactive, and begin treating it first as eccentricity, then as another perspective deserving “consideration,” then activism, then orthodoxy.

Is that happening here? I’m wondering. So is my mother.

I have spent much of my life among artists, intellectuals, musicians, progressives — a cohort that once seemed animated by an instinctive suspicion toward ethnic hatred in all forms. Increasingly, Jews appear exempt from that instinct. “Galindo is just another crazy person,” I’ve heard people say. I see. Just another crazy person competing seriously in a Democratic primary after proposing internment camps for “American Zionists.”

This is not about Galindo alone. It is also about institutions. About The New York Times, whose reporting and opinion pages remain, for millions, a moral compass. My mother did not call me outraged after reading Kristof. She called bewildered. She called sad. This was the newspaper she’d followed through wars, assassinations, civil rights struggles, and presidents of every variety. Her confusion and grief now pains me more than I can say. When exactly, she seemed to be asking me, did this happen? When did support for Israel become, in some circles, evidence of moral defect? When did “Zionist” become a slur, not a description of a legitimate ideology?

When did suspicion toward Jews become newly accessible, provided it arrived draped in the language of liberation?

All of this feels both cosmic and deeply personal. I have yet to meet a Jew who does not feel some shift beneath their feet.

And to them I say: do not cower. Do not hide your Jewishness. Do not keep your love for Israel or for Jews a secret. Go and do something singularly Jewish. Reorient yourself toward whatever you understand God to be. And if God feels impossible, then orient yourself toward the continuity of the Jewish people.

May we go from strength to strength. Mom, if you are reading this, that goes especially for you.

The post How can I explain to my 93-year-old mother why it suddenly seems ok to hate Jews? appeared first on The Forward.

The pub bookshelf in Painswick, England, was stocked with books bound in handsome jewel tones. It seemed charming and innocuous, until I spotted a 1934 hardback with the alarmingly simple title of Twelve Jews.

Curious, I opened it.

“The quarrel between the Jews and the rest of civilisation has been kept alive by two forces: one, the peculiar character of the Jews, and the other, the antipathy of Christian or non-Jewish society,” the introduction read. “The one has induced the other.”

Um, what?

As disturbing as that claim was — it’s such a pity that Jews are too weird for Christian society to tolerate! — I found it even more troubling that the author, Hector Bolitho, who conceived of and edited the essay collection, had obviously written with a profound wish to defend Jews against prejudice. He hoped the book would help ameliorate the long quarrel he identified, especially in light of the already unfolding “enforced exodus of the Jews from Germany.”

Less than a page in, I felt a profound need to take a shower. (“Centuries of estrangement from normal society and opportunity have undermined the qualities in Jewish character, so that Jews neither think nor act within the comprehension of other people” — ick.)

There was something in this strange, unconsciously bigoted book that felt painfully contemporary. I hated it, and needed to understand it. Since I first encountered Twelve Jews on vacation a year ago, I’ve been perturbed by its particular combination of animus and sympathy. How could anyone think that this book — a book in which one writer, a financial journalist named Hartley Withers, questions “whether Jews are unpopular because of their money, or money is unpopular because of its Jews” — was the right way to make a case against the impending genocide of the Jews?

Bolitho, a prolific New Zealand-born author who has faded into obscurity, had a simple idea: Have 12 writers profile 12 eminent Jews — including Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust and former Italian Prime Minister Luigi Luzzatti — with the hope that doing so might “calm people to realize the conquests as well as the sorrows of the race.” Bolitho wanted, in effect, to humanize Jews at a time when he saw them being dangerously dehumanized.

His tragedy, and ours, is that the best he could achieve was a more earnest form of dehumanization. Call it falling prey to the allure of explaining the Jew.

The fallacy that hatred against Jews is an equation that can be solved — in part by parsing the bigoted instincts of broader society, but mostly by seeking to explicate what Bolitho called “the peculiar character of the Jews” — is age-old. Abbé Grégoire, who during the French Revolution prominently argued for Jews to have legal equality, also “believed that Jews should convert, so that they might intermix with the rest of the population and thus lose their ‘degenerate’ moral and physical characteristics,” Lawrence Grossman wrote in the Forward in 2011. The word “antisemitic” was coined in reference to the 19th-century scholar Ernest Renand, who undertook serious research into ancient Israel and the Hebrew Bible, and also helped popularize the idea of fundamental divisions between “Aryans” and Jews that reflect poorly on the latter. We know how that aged.

This is a phenomenon that broadly falls under the definition of “philosemitism.” As Grossman wrote, “not all expressions of love for Jews are necessarily benign.”

Spending time with Bolitho’s particularly enraging entry in this canon — he refers to one German Jew whom he met in the course of his research as “a cruel, dishonest business man,” who “was nasty with Christian pretensions” — has helped me understand just why the urge to solve antisemitism through anthropology is so seemingly eternal. And it’s helped me to understand why it never, ever works.

It’s simple, really. To take on the task of explaining a people to whom you don’t belong is to ground your work in the belief that that group is not just different from the norm, but somehow unknowable. From that point, there can be no true understanding; only observation, as of animals in a zoo.

Take this sentence from an entry by J. Hampden Jackson — a writer of history who, like Bolitho, has largely been forgotten — on one former writer for the Forward: “Leon Trotsky remains a Jew all through, from the cast of his countenance to the cast of his mind.” Think what you will of Trotsky — and Jackson was clear that many Jews, of many different affiliations, despised him — the lack of recognition of a fellow human being inherent in that statement stings. Jackson is trying to explain, but the only way he can do so is by further stereotyping.

To experience this in real life is to feel profoundly lonely. At the start of the Israel-Hamas war, I was dating someone I had been close friends with for nearly a decade, who I thought I knew well. Then he began to treat me as an avatar for everything wrong with Israel; when the IDF did something particularly inhumane in Gaza, like kill aid workers with the World Central Kitchen, I was, in his eyes, personally responsible. I felt as if he no longer saw me as myself; he just saw me as a Jew.

Which might be part of why I reached for Twelve Jews, despite the obvious fact that it is poisonous. It made me feel clearly understood, but not by its authors.

Instead, I feel understood by the Jews they wrote about. We are a diverse people; we cannot be made sense of as a single body. But most of us have experienced some version of othering in our lives — someone thinking they can know us by analyzing us, rather than engaging with us.

To be reminded we’re not alone in that experience is to feel some relief from it. The rest of the world might be observing us, but at least, in this one way, we understand each other.

The post The bizarre antisemitic book that taught me to better understand Judaism appeared first on The Forward.