Facing the Holocaust: Portraits in Peril | Echoes & Reflections

Portraiture was central to Jewish artistic practice across Europe before the war, a genre that affirmed individual identity, family continuity, and communal belonging. The Nazi persecution transformed these images into something more urgent: acts of witness, mourning, and at times defiance, made under conditions ranging from relative freedom to incarceration and imminent death. Rachel Perry, PhD, art historian and curator specializing in the representation of Holocaust memory and WWII, will examine how Jewish artists navigated questions of visibility, dignity, and memory in their portraits of individuals whose lives, and whose world, were under existential threat.