Leo Baeck Institute - New York

10/22/2026

Emil Lehmann (1829–1898) was a Dresden lawyer and the first Jew to be elected (in 1865) to Dresden’s municipal council. With brief interruptions, he held that seat until 1883, serving much of this time as first or second vice-president of that chamber. From 1875 to 1881, he also held a seat in the lower house of the Saxon state parliament as a member of the Progressive Party. The son of a Dresden merchant, Lehmann could count among his ancestors court Jews and actors brought to Dresden by August the Strong in the eighteenth century. Lehmann attended the Jewish Community School and then, from 1842–48, the Kreuzschule in Dresden. In 1848, he moved to Leipzig, where he studied jurisprudence until 1851. Returning to Dresden, he initially concentrated on writing for the left-liberal Sächsische Dorfzeitung and other journals, but from 1863 on he practiced law in the Saxon capital. With his colleagues Bernhard B**r, Zacharias Frankel, and Wolf Landau, Lehmann turned his attention to the struggle for Jewish rights from the mid-1860s onward. He was elected head of Dresden’s Jewish community [Gemeinde] on February 9, 1869. His pamphlet “Hear, Israel!” led to the founding of the League of German-Jewish Communities in 1872. A proponent of Jewish assimilation, his efforts had already contributed substantially to the (formal) emancipation of the Jews in Saxony on December 3, 1868—that is, before passage of the Law of Religious Freedom by the North German Reichstag (July 3, 1869). He also supported the founding of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith in 1893.

Even though Lehmann was a life-long advocate of German-Jewish symbiosis—taking Gabriel Riesser as his model—his lot was not an easy one. The Kingdom of Saxony was home to some of Imperial Germany’s most rabid antisemites. Lehmann was heavily engaged in the pamphlet literature that flourished in the years 1878-1882 as the result of Heinrich von Treitschke’s polemics against the Jews, the subsequent “Berlin Antisemitism Conflict,” and the agitation in Saxony that stemmed not only from members of Adolf Stoecker’s Christian Social Party but also from the more radical antisemites organized in local “Reform Associations.” Initially, Lehmann’s writings displayed argumentative brilliance, but in later years they were marked by increasing bitterness—and with good reason. In 1883, Lehmann lost his seat in Dresden’s city council at the hands of a coalition of antisemitic “Reformers” and Conservatives. Dresden’s antisemites rejoiced that they had purged the municipal parliament of its last Jew.

Courtesy of GDHI.

10/21/2026

A letter from Hermann Levi, orchestral conductor of Richard Wagner's work at the Bayreuth Opera House, November 12th, 1894, to Gerhard Patitz of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

He writes:

Honored Sir!

Frau Wagner has asked me to inform you that she is unfortunately unable to fulfill your wishes. Frau Wagner is so occupied by the preparation of the performances of the Ring in Bayreuth that she has to keep away from everything that is not directly related to this, her great task. You are also mistaken if you assume that Frau W is "in the middle of an artist's circle"- on the contrary, Frau W leads a completely isolated life, far away from the events of the day, and lives solely to fulfill the mission that she follows after the death of the Master: to perform his works in Bayreuth in an exemplary fashion.

Hermann Leopoldi
General Music Director

10/21/2026

Leo Blech (1871 – 1958) was a German opera composer and conductor who is perhaps most famous for his work at the Königliches Opernhaus (later the Berlin State Opera / Staatsoper Unter den Linden) from 1906 to 1937, and later as the conductor of Berlin's Städtische Oper from 1949 to 1953. Blech was known for his reliable, clear, and elegant performances, especially of works by Wagner, Verdi, and Bizet's Carmen (which he conducted over 600 times), and for his sensitivity as an accompanist.

Blech was born in Aachen. After working briefly in sales, he landed a position conducting at the Stadttheater Aachen in 1893. From 1899 to 1906, he conducted at the Neues Deutsches Theater in Prague before moving to the Königliches Opernhaus in Berlin. In 1913, he was promoted to general music director. Between 1923 and 1926, he took various positions at opera houses in Berlin and Vienna, including the Deutsches Opernhaus, the Volksoper Berlin and the Vienna Volksoper. In 1926, he returned to the Staatsoper unter den Linden, where he remained until Adolf Hi**er's antisemitic policies forced him in 1937 into exile in Riga, the capital of Latvia, where he conducted the Latvian National Opera and Ballet Theatre.

With an eye to Blech's substantial German and foreign reputation, Hermann Göring, then Hi**er's second in command, issued an order to Major Karl Heise, head of the Schutzpolizei in German-occupied Riga in September 1941, to issue an exit visa to Blech for neutral Sweden, making him the only Jewish survivor in Riga to escape as a result of such high-level intervention.

During and after World War II, Blech conducted at the Stockholm Royal Opera. In 1949, he returned to Berlin to conduct at the Städtische Oper (Civic Opera), where he worked until 1953. He died in 1958.

10/21/2026

The death mask of Richard Wagner, as drawn by Arno Nadel, ca, 1920. From the archives of the Leo Baeck Institute.

Arno Nadel was a composer, cantor, choir director, and visual artist. He was a fan of the work of Richard Wagner, despite Wagner's anti-Semitism. Nadel was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943.

10/21/2026

Photographs by August Sander, from Die Photographische Sammlung, Cologne.

August Sander was a German photographer who operated out of Cologne. His series People of the Twentieth Century - part of which was published in 1929 as the book Face of Our Time - was a lifelong project, engaging him from the mid-1920s until his death in 1964. In his semi-staged portraits, Sander aimed to document all the types that made up German society: farmers, artisans, musicians, aristocrats and so on. The taxonomy of People of the Twentieth Century (from where these images come from) expresses the analytical realism associated with the New Objectivity movement, which depicted contemporary industry by means of sober realism and a detached, analytical approach.

The philosopher Walter Benjamin acutely noted how such classification could be exploited by an oppressive regime. He stated about the work:

"Work like Sander's could overnight assume unlooked-for topicality....Whether one is of the left or right, one will have to get used to being looked at in terms of one's provenance. And one will have to look at other's the same way. Sander's work is more than a picture book. It is a training manual."

Despite the perceived use of such imagery by totalitarian rulers, the N***s banned Sander's opus because its sensitive, humane depiction of marginalized people contradicted the N**i idea of a racially and socially "pure" German society. (Note, for example, the photograph of the Romi ("Gypsy") man with darker features and longer, dark hair.)

10/21/2026

Sabbath candlestick, one of a pair, c. 1960
Ludwig Yehuda Wolpert
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Trained in Germany during the Bauhaus period, Wolpert is known for popularizing Modernism in Jewish ceremonial metalwork. He taught at the New Bezalel School for Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem and later at the Tobe Pascher Workshop at the Jewish Museum, New York. Wolpert's work is characterized by the use of stylized Hebrew letters as a primary design motif. This pair of candlesticks, a necessary element in the ceremony welcoming the Sabbath, is typical of Wolpert's design aesthetic, featuring stylized, geometric Hebrew letters integrated into architectonic forms.

Text: Minneapolis Institute of Art.

10/20/2026

Untitled, 1963-1964. Gift of Helen Hesse Charash / Jewish Museum New York.

Eva Hesse fled N**i Germany with her parents at just two years old and was raised in the German-Jewish enclave of Washington Heights in Manhattan. This work is one of the last paintings Hesse completed before switching to sculpture, the beginning of a path that took her far in her (sadly) short career. Here she paints fractured forms rather than a whole figure, evoking natural shapes and bodies without their ever being directly identifiable. Hesse intended this work, with its delicate brushwork, soft colors, and light, witty touch, as a rebuke of the masculinity of Minimalist art.

Around the time Hesse was creating this painting, she was reading The Second S*x by Simone de Beauvoir. Inspired by this female manifesto, she began to question conventional family values and her dual roles as an artist and a wife. Through Hesse never explicitly explored identity in her work or called herself a feminist, feminist critics and women artists alike have championed her work for decades.

Text: Jewish Museum New York.

10/20/2026

10/20/2026

What happened when members of a minority community cast its lot with a political leader who despised them

10/20/2026

Article from 2020.

She was ignored for decades, but now Suter has been rediscovered as a pioneering eco-artist. We meet her, and her 97-year-old collagist mum, in the wilds of Guatemala