The Groundbreaking Jewish Artist Who Taught Marc Chagall

Around the age of eighteen Marc Chagall apprenticed himself to a Jewish artist in the city of Vitebsk named Yehuda Pen. Born in 1854, Pen was not only a gifted teacher but was himself a great artist. Jennifer Stern writes:

Pen was a casualty of the fame of his students, who also included El Lissitzky and Solomon Yudovin. Yet, as an artist and teacher, Pen was instrumental in creating a distinctly Jewish form of art that would explode in a thousand directions during the 20th century. In most cases, including Chagall’s, Pen was his students’ first teacher. Often he was the first artist they had ever met. He introduced them to the potential of specifically Jewish art at the most formative moment in their young lives. The seeds he planted bore remarkable fruit.

Artistically, Pen had little in common with his future superstar pupils: he worked throughout his career in a conservative realistic style that his students came to reject. . . . Once he was free to pursue his own interests, he turned almost exclusively toward Jewish subject matter. And unlike some Russian Jewish artists such as Isaac Asknazi, Pen didn’t emphasize subjects drawn from the Hebrew Bible, which were equally palatable to Christians. Instead he showed Jews as he knew them: ordinary men and women engaged in their daily work and religious rituals.

These were humble folk, but Pen infused them with deep dignity as they went about their labors and performed Jewish rituals in their modest workshops and homes. Even when they were shown working rather than reading or praying, a sense of the sacred permeated these canvases: the antiquity and moral weight of Jewish tradition were always a palpable presence.

Pen taught his students how to look at, think about and make art: but ultimately his reverence for Jewishness was his most crucial legacy.

Read more at Forward

More about: Jewish art, Marc Chagall, Russian Jewry

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF