FROM THE ARCHIVES: CAN'T HELP BUT BE POLITICAL:

The Passover Story, Illuminated (GABRIELLE BIRKNER, April 18, 2008, NY Sun)

At the ritual Passover meal, or seder, many Jewish families will be reading an abbreviated story of the Jews' exodus from Egypt from wine-stained, center-stapled Haggadahs. A more select group will be reading the same slavery-to-freedom story from a leather-bound volume that features 48 brilliant-hued reproductions from an illuminated manuscript by Arthur Szyk — the Lodz-born art ist who became one of America's most influential political cartoonists during World War II.

Irvin Ungar, a rabbi turned antiquarian, is publishing 300 numbered reproductions of the Szyk Haggadah, available in two editions, priced at $8,500 and $15,000, respectively. This rerelease comes more than seven decades after the Haggadah was rejected by Eastern European publishers, apparently for its incorporation of Nazi caricatures: In Szyk's original, snakes had swastikas painted on their backs, and the "wicked son" of the Passover story wore Hitler's iconic mustache. "For Szyk, the story of Passover was taking place in his own day; it was something unfolding before his eyes," Mr. Ungar said. "He saw Hitler as Pharaoh, and the Nazis as the new Egyptians who had come to enslave, and ultimately annihilate, the Jewish people."

The London press that agreed to publish his book in 1940 did so on the condition that Szyk paint over much of the Nazi imagery. [...]

A lecturer at University of California, Los Angeles who is writing a book about political art in America, Paul Von Blum, said the Szyk Haggadah provides a more activistic message than do other seder-table texts — and that is a good thing. "You can make tremendously contemporary applications of the story of escaping from tyranny and slavery, and that should apply to all oppressed people," he said, noting that Szyk was also an advocate for the civil rights of black Americans. "The Haggadah service should be political."

A few years ago, as we read, the Mother-In-Law commented: "This sounds like a speech by George Bush!?"

MORE:
Anti-Nazi Haggadah is the legacy of an activist artist (rafael medoff, 4/07/06, Jewish Weekly News))
The classic Szyk haggadah becomes a modern masterpiece of the digital age: The Art of the Seder (Tom Tugend, 4/18/08, Jewish Journal)

[originally posted: 4/20/08]

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 29, 2010 3:26 PM