Photo by Zach Golden

Wagensberg’s studio is located on the second floor of a back house, where on a sunny day, the light pours in. The peace and quiet here is rare for urban Los Angeles, and part of the charm is the calmness that blankets the room, punctuated by the sound of chirping birds outside. You notice the variety of artistic styles immediately: three small, blue, and realistic depictions of Venice are displayed below an abstract painting. Wagensberg changes her color palette based on “the mood of what’s going on around me or in the country, in the whole world.”

Photo by Zach Golden

Wagensberg started sketching Yiddishists in 2016 from photos, but during the pandemic, she captured many from the flat angle of a Zoom screen, which significantly changed the depth of their appearance. The sketch Wagensberg is holding here is of Tomas Woodski, the Yiddish-language TV host from Sweden, who was a guest at an online Workers’ Circle class she attended. Her pen has traced the faces of well-known Yiddishists like YUNG YiDiSH founder Mendy Cahan, scholar Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, linguist Yitskhok Niborski and many others. She also sketches fellow students. Many of her subjects are often not aware they are being sketched — which is why she displays them publicly only with their first names.

On this table, Wagensberg has stacks of what she describes as Yiddish calligraphy. The words are largely indecipherable. She paints these as she sits through class (an imaginative version of note-taking); they invoke the frustration of language learning and the beauty of the language at the same time.

Wagensberg describes language learning as a worthwhile struggle. “I’ve been learning different languages. And this is a process of painful frustration. I don’t think I’m especially good at it. But I’m persistent with it, and I end up learning and then it’s a good feeling of ‘oh my God, I can read the Forverts.’”

A painting of Wagensberg’s grandmother Beyle, whom she would visit as a child. “She spoke no Spanish,” the artist said.

Wagensberg’s paintings of Yiddishists Yehuda Blum, Pearl Gluck and Miriam Isaacs are now on display as part of a multi-artist exhibition by the Jewish Artists Initiative hosted by UCLA Hillel, “Jewish Artists Capturing Sense of Self & Community,” that is running at UCLA’s Hillel until March 24.

She describes these paintings as belonging to a large collection of portraits of groups she belongs to; this group here is from her online Yiddish class, which started during the COVID pandemic.

At the opening reception to the exhibit, Perla Kearney, the UCLA Hillel Artistic Director  (who co-starred together with actor Mike Burstyn in this Forverts deli video), and USC professor and artist Ruth Weisberg, were among the speakers. Weisberg, pictured here, spoke about the need for Jewish art.

“I think that there are many forces in our culture, some of them kind of disturbing, that would have us be less Jewish. And I’m here to say, let’s be more Jewish. And one way we explore that and share is through our art.”

Wagensberg has publicly displayed her portraits of Yiddishists before as solo shows, once before at UCLA Hillel in 2017, and once at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles in 2019 — but this showing is different. Her Yiddishist portraits are not on their own this time, isolated from the Jewish artistic mainstream. Instead, they are part of an exhibition of many different Jewish artists, weaving the faces of the contemporary Yiddish world into the tapestry of collective Jewish expression.