In 2013, Pope Francis, to the surprise of many, singled out Marc Chagall’s 1938 painting the White Crucifixion as one of his favorites. However, despite being a depiction of a Jewish Jesus surrounded by antisemitic violence, the White Crucifixion has inspired a fair amount of serious Christian theological engagement, even before the Pope’s announcement. The painting allows viewers to imagine a crucifixion without a concomitant resurrection, without redemption and hope, which has proven inspiring for post-Holocaust Christian thinkers. Reading the White Crucifixion alongside Donald MacKinnon’s tragic theology of Christ’s human contingency allows us to visualize the violent consequences of the crucifixion and ask questions about Jesus’s responsibility for the Jewish people and antisemitism. The White Crucifixion is thus an important and meaningful site for Christian and Jewish visual engagement with tragic theology.
In 1951, Hersh Fenster published Undzere farpainikte kinstler (Our Martyred Artists), a 300-page yizkor book in Yiddish that commemorated 84 Jewish artists who had worked in France in the interwar period and perished in the Holocaust. Unlike most memorial books, which are collaborative group endeavors sponsored by landsmannschaften groups or communal organizations, this volume was researched, written, and published entirely by one individual. This article situates Fenster’s initiative within the genre of the yizkor book and commemorative practices in the immediate postwar period more broadly. I argue that Fenster’s volume is not only a memorial tombstone (matseyve) for the murdered artists, it also offers a “window” (fenster) into an entire generation of Jewish artists lost to art history, illuminating their lives through not only portraits, critical reviews, and reproductions of works of art, but also through anecdotal information based on the recollections of friends and family who survived. Whereas Holocaust scholars have generally resisted using yizkor books as historical documents, this article suggests important ways in which Our Martyred Artists opens up new frames for art historical inquiry.
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