Cathryn J. Prince is the author of several nonfiction books, including the forthcoming For the Love of Labor: The Life of Pauline Newman.
Cathryn J. Prince
By Cathryn J. Prince
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Art Haunted by ‘monsters,’ a Jewish artist sees the Dark Ages in modern times
Even as Karen Kassap cocooned with her family while the world shut down last March, the world insisted on intruding — the pandemic, racial strife, politics. And so, with no particular project in mind, the multimedia collage artist began snipping, gluing, and painting her way through her feelings. Slowly, a canvas depicting two ruby-red monsters…
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Culture How Judah Benjamin — a Jewish Confederate slave-owner who decried slavery — came to embody so many contradictions
In 1842, Judah P. Benjamin stood inside a New Orleans courtroom and declared that “slavery is against the law of nature.” It was part of his winning argument as to why an insurance company didn’t have to pay the slave ship Creole’s owners after its cargo of enslaved people revolted and escaped. Meanwhile, less than…
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Culture How a Jewish photographer found his true calling in Chinatown
The life’s-work of the bespectacled, bow-tie wearing photojournalist Emile Bocian might have been lost forever if not for the foresight of actress Mae Wong. After Bocian died in 1990, Wong, his close friend, discovered over 120,000 photographs, negatives and contact sheets stuffed into cigarette and shoeboxes in his apartment. Knowing he had no children, and…
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Culture In Lakewood, New Jersey, a garden blooms — and so does a community
Wearing a broadbrimmed straw garden hat, Tova Herskovitz looked over the raised beds and smiled. The first carrot tops were poking through the chocolate-colored soil, the purple kale was already looking hearty, and so was the mint. “Everybody should take some mint home with them,” she said. As a longtime organizer, Herskovitz loves it when…
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Culture Between a shtetl-born painter and a Dutch expressionist, remarkable parallels
With his canvases depicting remote villages, blood-soaked carcasses and portraits of ordinary people, Chaïm Soutine was Willem de Kooning’s favorite–hands down. “I’ve always been crazy about Soutine — all of his paintings,” the Dutch-born artist once said. Now visitors to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia can see how the shtetl-born Jewish artist inspired de Kooning…
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