Over 170 amazing photographs of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement, from S. An-sky's ethnographic expeditions

Most view the relationship of Jews to the Soviet Union through the lens of repression and silence. Focusing on an elite group of two dozen Soviet-Jewish photographers, including Arkady Shaykhet, Alexander Grinberg, Mark Markov-Grinberg, Evgenii Khaldei, Dmitrii Baltermants, and Max Alpert, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes presents a different picture. These artists participated in a social project they believed in and with which they were emotionally and intellectually invested-they were charged by the Stalinist state to tell the visual story of the unprecedented horror we now call the Holocaust. These wartime photographers were the first liberators to bear witness with cameras to Nazi atrocities, three years before Americans arrived at Buchenwald and Dachau. In this passionate work, David Shneer tells their stories and highlights their work through their very own images-he has amassed never-before-published photographs from families, collectors, and private archives. Through Soviet Jewish Eyes helps us understand why so many Jews flocked to Soviet photography; what their lives and work looked like during the rise of Stalinism, during and then after the war; and why Jews were the ones charged with documenting the Soviet experiment and then its near destruction at the hands of the Nazis.

In January 1942, Soviet press photographers came upon a scene like none they had ever documented. That day, they took pictures of the first liberation of a German mass atrocity, where an estimated 7,000 Jews and others were executed at an anti-tank trench near Kerch on the Crimean peninsula. Dmitri Baltermants, a photojournalist working for the Soviet newspaper Izvestiia, took photos that day that would have a long life in shaping the image of Nazi genocide in and against the Soviet Union. Presenting never before seen photographs, Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph shows how Baltermants used the image of a grieving woman to render this gruesome mass atrocity into a transcendentally human tragedy. David Shneer tells the story of how that one photograph from the series Baltermants took that day in 1942 near Kerch became much more widely known than the others, eventually being titled "Grief." Baltermants turned this shocking wartime atrocity photograph into a Cold War era artistic meditation on the profundity and horror of war that today can be found in Holocaust photo archives as well as in art museums and at art auctions. Although the journalist documented murdered Jews in other pictures he took at Kerch, in "Grief" there are likely no Jews among the dead or the living, save for the possible NKVD soldier securing the site. Nonetheless, Shneer shows that this photograph must be seen as an iconic Holocaust photograph. Unlike images of emaciated camp survivors or barbed wire fences, Shneer argues, the Holocaust by bullets in the Soviet Union make "Grief" a quintessential Soviet image of Nazi genocide.

It is a sign of the accepted evidentiary status of photographs that historians regularly append them to their accounts, Amos Morris-Reich observes. Very often, however, these photographs are treated as mere illustrations, simple documentations of the events that transpired. Scholars of photography, on the other hand, tend to prioritize the photographs themselves, relegating the historical contexts to the background. For Morris-Reich, however, photography exists within reality; it partakes in and is very much a component of the history it records. Morris-Reich examines how photography affects categories of history and experience, how it is influenced by them, and the ways in which our understanding of the relationship between history and photography can be theorized and reoriented. Morris-Reich here turns to five twentieth-century cases in which photography and Jewish history intersect: Albert Kahn’s utopian attempt to establish a photographic archive in Paris in order to advance world peace; the spectacular failed project of Helmar Lerski, the most prominent photographer in British Mandate Jewish Palestine; photography in the long career of Eugen Fischer, a Nazi professor of genetics; the street photography of Robert Frank; and the first attempt to introduce photography into the study of Russian Jewry prior to World War I, as seen from the post-Holocaust perspective of the early twenty-first century. Illustrated with nearly 100 images, Photography and Jewish History moves beyond a focus on Jewish photographers or the photographic representation of Jews or Jewish visibility to plumb the deeper and more significant registers of twentieth-century Jewish political history.

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award In 1921, photographer Alter Kacyzne was comissioned by the New York Yiddish daily, Forverts, to document images of Jewish life in the "old country." Kacyzne's assignment was to become a ten-year journey across "Poyln," as Poland's three million Yiddish-speaking Jews called their home, from the crowded ghettos of Warsaw and Krakow to the remote villages of Otwock and Kazimierz. Candid and intimate, tender and humorous, Kacyzne's portraits-- of teeming village squares and primitive workshops, cattle markets and spinning wheels, prayer groups and summer camps-- tell the story of a way of life that is no more. For the last sixty years, Kacyzne's Forverts photographs-- the sole fragment of his vast archive to survive World War II-- lay unseen. Now the work of this lost master is restored to the world in a volume of extraordinary force and beauty.

A single photograph--an exceptionally rare "action shot" documenting the horrific murder of a Jewish family--drives a riveting forensic investigation by a gifted Holocaust scholar.

THE JEWS OF AFRICA: LOST TRIBES, FOUND COMMUNITIES, EMERGING FAITHS is a veritable journey into the Jewish communities across the length and breadth of the continent. The eBook features 230 visually stunning and thematically intriguing images by photographer Jono David. THE JEWS OF AFRICA explores, examines, and delineates the Jewish history of Africa in 14 essays contributed by some of the biggest Jewish Africa scholars, rabbis, and esteemed members of African society. The contributors are: historian Dr. Tudor Parfitt / researcher Dr. Shalva Weil / director of the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre Tali Nates / Head Emissary of the Lubavitch Rebbe for Central Africa Rabbi Shlomo Bentolila / anthropologist Dr. Edith Bruder / the last Jewish resident of Asmara, Eritrea Dr. Samuel Cohen / researcher Dr. Vanessa Paloma Elbaz / Honorary Life President and religious leader of the Windhoek Hebrew Congregation Zvi Gorelick / professor Dr. Magdel Le Roux / chief curator of the Museum of Moroccan Judaism Zhor Rehihil / CEO & Spiritual Leader of the African Jewish Congress Rabbi Moshe Silberhaft / researcher and historian Dr. Remy Ilona / Chief Rabbi of Uganda and member of parliament Rabbi Gershom Sizomu / assistant to the chief rabbi of Tunisia Moché Uzan / with art by expert printmaker Pauline Jakobsberg.=In August 2012, independent photographer, Jono David, set out on an audacious Jewish African journey. His aim was to document the life, culture, and history of the Jewish people from one end of the continent to the other. Over the next 4 years, he would take 8 unique trips totaling some 60 weeks of travel to 30 countries and territories. His adventures led him from the continent's largest communities strewn across Southern Africa to ancient yet vibrant communities in Morocco and Tunisia to emerging Jewish groups in unexpected places like Uganda, Gabon, Cameroon, Ghana, and Madagascar. It is the largest Jewish Africa photographic survey of its kind.=In words and images, THE JEWS OF AFRICA brings the entire journey to life and aims to answer one central question: Who are the Jews of Africa? The answer is as complex and rich as the communities themselves particularly as the phenomenon of the emergence of Jewish communities is gaining rapid and wide traction, notably in West and Central Africa.=*** Purchasers of THE JEWS OF AFRICA will have exclusive access to 4 online bonus galleries featuring some 300+ photographs and numerous anecdotes not featured in the eBook. The photographs are also available to purchasers at a special reduced rate. ***