This film documents the introduction of the artist, activist, and World War II political caricaturist Arthur Szyk (1894-1951) to a group of students and teachers at Mercer Island High School in Seattle, Washington. Irvin Ungar, curator of The Arthur Szyk Society, encourages the students to share their reaction to work that is as vivid, profound, and worthy of discussion today as it was when it was created.
Short interview with Hilde Taussing Friedman,, wife of artist and Holocaust survivor David Friedmann. Friedman was an accomplished artist before World War II and the Holocaust. In October 1941, he was deported from Prague to the Lodz Ghetto, then to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and to Gleiwitz I. He survived a death march to Blechhammer concentration camp., Oberschlesien, where he was liberated January 25, 1945 by Soviet troops. In 1949, he fled Communist Czechoslovakia to Israel and later immigrated to the United States. Also in this report interview with Muriel Nezhnie-Helfman, (1934-2002) is best known for her...
Interview with Hilde Taussing Friedman, wife of artist and holocaust survivor David Friedmann. Dav. Friedmann a.k.a. David Friedman was an accomplished artist before World War II and the Holocaust. In October 1941, he was deported from Prague to the Lodz Ghetto, then to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Gleiwitz I. He survived a Death March to Concentration Camp Blechhammer, Oberschlesien where he was liberated January 25, 1945 by Soviet troops. In 1949, he fled Communist Czechoslovakia to Israel and later immigrated to the United States.
Mayer was born in 1916 in a small shtetl: Opatow. He completed seven grades of Polish school and immigrated to Canada at age 17. After he retired over 20 years ago, his daughter Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, began urging him to tell and paint whatever he could remember of his childhood. The images yielded by his memory exceeded everyone’s expectations, probably including his own. Mayer’s photographic memory allowed him to meticulously recreate Jewish life in Opatow, as it was before the war.
The godfather of the American comic book, Will Eisner enjoyed a career spanning 1930s cartooning to contemporary graphic novels. Part of an unparalleled group of Jewish cartoonists, Eisner stretched the boundaries of storytelling, developing the comic into a mature combination of art and literature. In 1939, he created The Spirit (recently adapted as a major motion picture), a gritty crime fighter series. Much of his work incorporated the Jewish experience and struggle against anti-Semitism. This accomplished documentary features a wealth of artwork, as well as interviews with comic luminaries Art Spiegelman and...
An adaptation of Bruno Schulz's story from the collection Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937). Schulz, a Jewish-Polish writer, graphic artist and literary critic, was killed by the Gastapo in Drohobycz, Galicia, in 1942. The film tells of Joseph (Jan Nowicki) who is travelling through a dream-like world, taking a train to visit his dying father, Jacob, in a sanatorium. When he arrives at the hospital, he finds the entire facility is going to ruin and no one seems to be in charge, or even caring for the patients.