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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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Mamdani concedes he can’t arrest Netanyahu but urges U.S. to enforce International Criminal Court warrant
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced Tuesday night that a legal review he ordered found he does not have the authority to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he visits the city, putting to rest a question that has repeatedly surfaced since he first vowed to take custody in light of an International Criminal Court order for Netanyahu’s arrest.
In the two-minute address posted on his official social media accounts, Mamdani opened by declaring “Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people” but acknowledged the legal limits that prevent him from following through on his pledge, which had become a rallying cry for his pro-Palestinian supporters. (The use of the term “genocide” to describe the Gazan death toll in the Israel-Hamas war remains contested.)
“My administration has reviewed every avenue available under applicable law to determine whether New York City could execute the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant if Benjamin Netanyahu came here,” Mamdani said. “It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this one.”
Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal. pic.twitter.com/YRezmW6YVx
— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) July 22, 2026
The United States does not recognize the court’s authority over American citizens or foreign nationals on U.S. soil, and local authorities have no power to execute such a warrant. U.S. law gives the federal government control over foreign policy, and heads of state traveling to the United Nations are protected by diplomatic immunity.
The announcement ended days of speculation and fierce backlash over one of his most controversial campaign promises after comments he made when asked about his arrest vow in an interview with The New York Times reignited the issue. “If someone is charged with a warrant from the International Criminal Court for these types of crimes, that’s something I believe should be honored,” Mamdani told reporters on Monday.
Mamdani, who rose to power aligned with pro-Palestinian activism, has been unapologetic about his anti-Zionist views. He came under fire during the mayoral race last year for defending the slogan “globalize the intifada,” used by some at the pro-Palestinian protests and perceived by many as a call for violence against Jews, and repeatedly said he’d arrest the Israeli leader over the conduct of the war in Gaza.
Netanyahu’s representatives in the U.S. responded angrily to Mamdani’s move, calling him “an antisemite” and accusing him of attacking Israel to cover up for political failure.
On Tuesday night, Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, responded on social media: “Zohran Mamdani, ENOUGH. Enough with the blood libels. Enough with the attacks on Jewish organizations. Enough with the outreach to the Iranian regime. You were elected to serve New Yorkers, not Hamas’ propaganda. Do your job!”
Tuesday’s video mirrored the Nakba Day video produced by his City Hall media team commemorating the displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s founding in 1948, which drew sharp criticism from Jewish and Zionist organizations. But it also highlighted the tension that has defined Mamdani’s first six months in office: balancing the activist politics that propelled him to City Hall with the legal limits and governing responsibilities of leading the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel.
In his address, Mamdani said that while the city had exhausted its legal options, the federal government had not. He urged the Trump administration to join the International Criminal Court and enforce its arrest warrant for Netanyahu. President Donald Trump, writing on Truth Social on Monday, reassured Netanyahu that he “will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America.”
Mamdani concluded that Netanyahu “is not welcome in New York City” and said New York leaders can choose not to remain silent to defend Palestinian human rights. “That is my commitment to you,” he said.
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Democratic socialist rails against AIPAC in uphill primary bid against pro-Israel incumbent in Arizona
(JTA) — Kai Newkirk, an activist and democratic socialist, has made Israel and AIPAC a focal point in his effort to unseat pro-Israel Rep. Greg Stanton in Tuesday’s Arizona Democratic primary.
“I’ve been arrested over 25 times in civil disobedience — and I’ll go to jail for justice again before I ever take a dime from AIPAC,” Newkirk wrote on X last week, referring to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Newkirk, 45, whose organizing has largely focused on campaign finance reform, has repeatedly blasted Stanton’s support from the pro-Israel lobbying group. He has also accused the Israeli government itself of “trying to interfere in our elections,” including in Arizona’s 4th Congressional District where he is running and which covers parts of Phoenix and Maricopa County.
He pointed to a $45 million text message campaign to improve Israel’s image in the U.S. as a sign of such interference, and posited that “they may be targeting areas where AIPAC is more invested or where these issues are more at stake.”
The primary comes as a number of left-wing congressional candidates with sharply critical Israel stances have won the Democratic nomination around the country, and as Israel and AIPAC grow increasingly unpopular among Democratic voters.
The most recent poll on the Arizona race, commissioned by a group that favors Newkirk, had Stanton up by 8 percentage points, while another poll, conducted two weeks earlier by a group favoring Stanton, showed the incumbent ahead by 33 points.
Newkirk’s platform includes ending all military aid to Israel and imposing an arms embargo on the country, which he accuses of genocide.
Stanton, 56, a four-term incumbent, voted against Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie’s amendment to cut military aid to Israel last week. Newkirk criticized Stanton, saying that he would have voted for the amendment, and suggested that Stanton’s vote was the result of his support from AIPAC.
“Greg Stanton has taken over $300K from AIPAC,” Newkirk wrote. “And today — as so many Americans in our district and across the country struggle to get by — he just voted to send billions more of our tax dollars to Israel to fund their war crimes and genocide. Disgraceful.”
Among AIPAC’s endorsees in Congress, more than a dozen voted to cut aid to Israel last week; AIPAC has since removed the option on its website to donate to those candidates.
Stanton explained his vote on X, saying that the amendment “would undermine America’s ability to counter real threats from Iran” and weaken the ability to promote long-term stability across the region. He also criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and wrote that “clear change is necessary” as the U.S.-Israel security agreement, which includes $3.8 billion in annual military subsidies for Israel, nears its expiration in 2028.
Newkirk is endorsed by progressive groups such as Our Revolution, Track AIPAC and the Progressive Democrats of America.
Also among Newkirk’s endorsers is Cenk Uygur, the host of the Young Turks who has spread conspiracy theories about Israel. “Kai is Israel Free and has fought to get money out of politics his whole life,” wrote Uygur last month.
Newkirk has faced turbulence in establishing broader support.
The Young Democrats of Arizona pulled its endorsement of Newkirk earlier in July, writing that it had been “made aware of some concerning patterns of behavior” displayed by Newkirk, without specifying what it meant.
Newkirk did not respond to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s request for comment. After the Young Democrats of Arizona retracted its endorsement, Newkirk wrote that the withdrawal of the endorsement was based on a false report amid “a wave of wins by democratic socialists” and called it a “weaponization of … disavowed misinformation.”
Newkirk did speak out against last year’s killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. “I stand always with my beloved Jewish siblings against the scourge of antisemitism just as I will never stop in the nonviolent struggle to end the genocide in Gaza, release all hostages, and open the way to just, lasting peace,” he said.
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Ed Miliband, Britain’s new Jewish foreign secretary has a long history of support for — and disagreement with — British Jews
(JTA) — Tapped to become Britain’s new foreign secretary, Ed Miliband said he would strive to honor the memories of his Holocaust refugee parents.
“My parents came to Britain as Jewish refugees from the Nazis,” Miliband tweeted just hours after Prime Minister Andy Burnham named him to the post. “To them, Britain was both a sanctuary and a beacon of hope in the global fight against fascism. I will carry my parents’ faith in that spirit of Britain to my role representing our country.”
The appointment by the new prime minister positions Miliband as the highest-ranking Jewish official in the British government, assuming a role once held by his older brother David and at a time when questions of the country’s relationship to Israel are a pressing priority. Miliband has long decried antisemitism, including within his own party, and is also known as a critic of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Among the priorities facing the office is whether Britain should move forward with an effort to ban imports from West Bank settlements, which has support across the political spectrum, and how to handle surging anti-Israel and anti-Jewish violence that authorities say has been orchestrated by actors abroad.
Ed Miliband led the Labour Party when it was in opposition from 2010-2015; his brother was among the candidates he bested in the party’s 2010 leadership race.
He has said he has no Jewish practice or formal education and that his parents favored politics over religion. His mother, Marion Kozak, who died last month, was an early supporter of Jews for Justice for Palestinians, a British group, but ceased speaking out publicly as her sons ascended in British politics.
David Miliband, now the president of the International Rescue Committee, has also said his career choices stem from the suffering their parents endured as Jewish refugees.
Ed Milliband’s stances on Israel have caused consternation among British Jewish groups in the past. In 2014, he led his party in a symbolic vote to recognize a Palestinian state and also criticized the toll of Israel’s operations during that year’s Gaza war.
“I defend Israel’s right to defend itself against rocket attacks,” he said then. “But I cannot explain, justify or defend the horrifying deaths of hundreds of Palestinians, including children and innocent civilians.”
He also told the Jewish News at the time that he did not eschew the “Zionist” label.
“I am proud to be Jewish,” he said. “I’ve no issue with people calling me a Zionist.” He described Israel as “the homeland for the Jewish people.”
The Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council said they recognized Miliband’s overall support of Israel, but also chided him for his comments about the Palestinian civilian death toll. “These comments regrettably ignore the ideology of Hamas, the psychology of Hamas, the actions of Hamas and thus the reality faced by Israel,” they said then in a joint statement at the time.
Miliband was succeeded as Labour Party leader by Jeremy Corbyn, whose strident pro-Palestinianism and perceived insensitivity to Jewish sensibilities marked the worst relations between the party and the Jewish community in decades.
Miliband was cautious about criticizing his successor but made clear his unhappiness with how Corbyn was handling the antisemitism charges in 2018 when he took the organized Jewish community’s side in lambasting the party leadership for rejecting a definition of antisemitism that includes some forms of anti-Israel rhetoric and activity.
“Labour should adopt the full IHRA definition,” he said then, referring to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. “The argument that it is somehow incompatible with criticizing the actions of the Israeli government is wrong. The views of the vast majority of the Jewish community are very clear.
Miliband condemned Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, but also persisted as one of Labour’s most forceful critics of Israel’s government.
During the 2024 general election campaign, he called Oct. 7 “an appalling terrorist atrocity,” saying, “We in the Labour leadership are completely committed to the security for the people and security for the state of Israel.”
However, he added that “the continuing Israeli action in Gaza is not either beneficial now for Israel, or for the people of Gaza.”
One of the first questions Miliband will face is how he will handle relations with U.S. President Donald Trump, who is famously averse to people who have criticized him in the past. “These are dark days for America and the world,” Miliband wrote in 2017, as Trump assumed his first term of office. The same year, Miliband also said Trump had “lowered the bar for idiocy.”
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