More in ‘photography’

In an online slideshow accompanying his portraits of world leaders for The New Yorker, famed photographer Platon discloses Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s subtle negotiating tactics, no doubt honed over years of talks with the Palestinians. “As I was doing this portrait,” Platon relates, [Netanyahu] leaned forward and said, ‘Platon, make me look good.’ And ...

London-based photographer Frederic Aranda began taking pictures of Hasidim more or less by accident. While studying at Oxford and looking for a place to live, he stumbled across a house owned by a Lubavitcher rabbi. Aranda set up a studio in the house’s attic and started taking portraits of the rabbi’s family. Word spread and ...

Fashion photographer Irving Penn has died. A 2007 New York Times article on “the Jewish eye” in photography said that Penn did “not fit the profile of the nervous outsider,” and was therefore not firmly associated with his Jewishness. Rather, says the Times obit today, he was known for his “compositional clarity and economy” and ...

• Amnesty International reports that by its standards, both Israel and Hamas are guilty of committing war crimes during the recent conflict in Gaza. [London Times]
• The city of Rome has made kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit an honorary citizen and taken up the cause of his release. [Ynet]
• The photographer who runs the HaChayim ...

On November 7, 1955, the Swiss photographer Robert Frank was arrested in McGehee, Ark. The police, hoping to ferret out a real live Communist, questioned him for four hours because, as they subsequently explained, he was foreign; he was Jewish; his car was “heavily loaded with suitcases, trunks and a number of cameras;” he had ...

Congregation Beth El of Borough Park
Brooklyn, New York, is a central location on the map of Jewish American migration. At its height, in the 1950s, the borough’s Jewish population numbered more than a million. Today, many thousands still make their home there, as evidenced by the vast number of synagogues thriving in neighborhoods ...

Writer and artist Rachel Lichtenstein’s entree into historical preservation was accidental. In the mid-1990s, she attended an art event in a former synagogue in London’s now heavily Bangladeshi East End, and was horrified to see performance artists tearing up old records of the long-lost congregation. She intervened, and the artists stopped. Still, ...

GALLERY: View photographs by Stern

Cynthia, Montclair, New Jersey, 2002 (© 2007 by Andrea Stern)
As a teenager, Andrea Stern hated being the subject of her shutterbug father’s photographs. As an adult, she turned the tables, picking up a camera of her own and taking pictures of her large, affluent family not just in moments of celebration—horas ...