Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series Featuring Kerry Wallach, author of Traces of a Jewish Artist: The Lost Life and Work of Rahel Szalit

January 22, 2025

7 pm EST | Online

HBI is honored to have supported Kerry Wallach’s research on this with a 2019 HBI Research Award.

Graphic artist, illustrator, painter, and cartoonist Rahel Szalit (1888–1942) was among the best-known Jewish women artists in Weimar Berlin. Highly regarded by art historians and critics of her day, she made a name for herself with soulful, sometimes humorous illustrations of Jewish and world literature by Sholem Aleichem, Heinrich Heine, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, and others. After she was arrested by the French police and then murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz, she was all but lost to history, and most of her paintings have been destroyed or gone missing.

Wallach used primary and secondary sources including the “Szalit recovery team,” her colleagues and institutions in seven countries around the world, to give us a powerfully moving account of a feminist Jewish artist, illustrator, painter, and writer who had fallen through the cracks of historic memory. This biography recovers Szalit’s life and presents a stunning collection of her art.

Kerry Wallach is Professor and Chair of German Studies and an affiliate of the Jewish Studies Program at Gettysburg College.

Traces of a Jewish Artist: The Lost Life and Work of Rahel Szalit is available at Amazon, Bookshop, Penn State University Press (30% off with code NR24, and your local bookseller).

This event will be recorded and shared with registrants. It will also be available to view on HBI’s website.