Born in Poland in 1894, and immigrating to the U.S. in 1940, Artur Szyk was a talented and versatile artist whose work appeared in the New York Post and on the covers of both Time and the Manhattan phonebook—among many other publications. He was a lifelong Zionist and a committed patriot of both his native and adopted countries. J. Hoberman reviews an exhibit of his work currently on display at the New-York Historical Society, which he calls “a jewel box overflowing with concentrated gem-like images of Jewish heroes and Nazi monsters.” (The exhibit runs until January 21, 2018.)

Most of Szyk’s images were made for reproduction in books, magazines, and newspapers. To see the originals, many of which are surprisingly small opaque watercolors (or gouaches), is to be dazzled by the painter’s technique and the fact that he evidently worked without a magnifying glass.

Szyk is a singular figure in 20th-century art—at once a remarkable craftsman, a political activist, a successful commercial artist, a ferocious cartoonist, and the inventor of a style closer to medieval illuminated manuscripts than any sort of contemporary expression. He was also an unabashed propagandist with a taste for patriotic pomp and sturdy Muskeljuden [“muscular Jews”]. . . .

Although he is best known now for his illuminated Haggadah, produced during the late 1930s, Szyk was even more celebrated during the period of World War II. Then, close to ubiquitous, with his work regularly featured in national magazines, he was America’s most dogged, and perhaps most prominent, anti-fascist artist. . . . A close friend of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, providing illustrations for his novel Samson the Nazirite, [Szyk] was a fervent supporter of Franklin Roosevelt as well as an advocate for Jabotinsky’s [acolyte], Peter Bergson. . . .

Where the irrepressible [Marc] Chagall created a wildly successful synthesis of expressionism, fauvism, cubism, and invented folk art, Szyk’s images, some taken from the book of Esther, were precise and self-contained—as decorative, symmetrical, and intricately patterned as Oriental rugs. Although, like Chagall, Szyk would paint Jesus as a symbol of Jewish suffering, he was more traditional and also more political: one of his major works was a triptych of Jewish martyrdom in tsarist Russia, medieval Spain, and Roman-occupied Palestine.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.