Born to a Romanian Jewish family, Edwin Salomon (1935–2014) pursued a career as a painter, gaining renown in his country as a young man. Yet in 1961 he, with his parents, seized an opportunity to leave for Israel, seeking better lives as Jews. Salomon had to struggle to resume his career in a new land, but he was able to break away from the strict realism mandated by the Communist regime under which he came of age. Jackie Frankel Yaakov considers his work on the tenth anniversary of his death.

Salomon . . . was not afraid to embrace his own expressionistic, surrealism-evoking style on the margins of the Israeli art world at the heights of Israeli conceptual and abstract art movements. His fringe immigrant voice sheds light on why Jewish Israeli art can never embrace the full measure of true surrealism.

There was no true surrealism in Israeli art in the 20th century. Surrealism was emancipation from stress and persecution, while in the young Israeli state allegories were gleaned from anxiety and the intense mental energy of the individual and the national psyche. Salomon could not fully break from his abnormal reality in the wake of the Holocaust and while facing frequent wars and existential crises. His art’s sharp comments using animal imagery give textured and colored expression to both the evil and the hope for good in humanity.

While he painted in many styles throughout his lifetime, from realistic portraits to quasi-surrealist scenes, he had a passion for using animals to give expression to fundamental human traits. He often drew predators hunting their prey, evoking their hunting instincts and depicting the gore of their feasting—expressing his contemplations on man. Salomon stated, “I am not looking for human traits in animals. I regret that man has lost his animal dignity.” Salomon’s surrealistic animals, in a moment of abstraction in Israeli art, were countercultural.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.