Artist Stories

Allison Zuckerman is a painter and curator whose work fuses the visual languages of art history and contemporary digital culture. For years, her practice centered on feminism and the Western canon, remixing imagery borrowed from artists including Rubens, Picasso, and Van Gogh into dense, glitch-flecked compositions. After October 7, 2023, her focus shifted toward Jewish identity, history, and memory. She began drawing more deliberately from Jewish artists, including Chagall, Modigliani, Soutine, Guston, and Lichtenstein, using her longstanding practice of sampling and remixing not to critique the canon, but to reclaim it.

That reclamation is most direct in “From Door to Door”, her series addressing Holocaust-era art theft and restitution. Zuckerman reconstructs works exhibited in the Nazis’ “Great German Art Exhibition” using only the visual vocabularies of Jewish artists, including Jewish artists who were persecuted by the Nazis and denounced as “degenerate.” In doing so, she stages a deliberate reversal of Nazi theft: appropriating the regime’s own sanctioned imagery and “stealing it back” through the Jewish visual languages it sought to eradicate. The title echoes l’dor v’dor—“from generation to generation”—while also invoking the door-to-door roundups and dispossession of Europe’s Jews. The series becomes her own form of symbolic restitution: not the return of a specific object, but a reclamation of cultural power and authorship.

Jewish joy and visibility are central to her practice, from her TikTok-commissioned SHALOMmural for Jewish American Heritage Month in Bushwick to a two-story banner outside the Jewish Museum of Australia. Through related fundraising projects, she has raised tens of thousands of dollars for Jewish causes.

Zuckerman was named the first-place recipient of the Mark Podwal Prize in Visual Art from the Elie Wiesel Foundation for her painting “Even a Flood Could Not Wash Away the Flame”, previously exhibited at the Jewish Museum of Australia. She carried that honor forward throughHINENI, a fifteen-artist traveling exhibition she curated to amplify the strength, diversity, and continuity of Jewish artistic voices—including that of Mark Podwal himself. First presented at Ezra Gallery in Sag Harbor, the exhibition now travels to the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C.  Bringing together perspectives shaped by places as varied as the clubs of Tel Aviv and the shuls of Crown Heights, HINENI refuses any single idea of what Jewish art looks like. “We are not a monolith,” she says. “Here we are.”

Her advocacy and visibility have carried a cost. As Jewish identity, history, and memory moved to the center of her work and public voice after October 7, Zuckerman endured antisemitic hostility online, including an attack on social media in which another artist from her extended professional network, someone she had never met or interacted with, directed antisemitic slurs at her. In a separate incident, a different artist declined an invitation to participate in an exhibition Zuckerman was curating, one unrelated to Jewish themes, citing a statement Zuckerman had made marking the anniversary of October 7. Undeterred, she has continued creating and putting Jewish stories in full view.

This December, Zuckerman opens In Every Generation, a solo exhibition at DIMIN Gallery exploring Jewish identity and the foundational role of Jewish creators in the comic book industry.

Alyssa Rosenheck is an author and photographer known for creativity, design, and beauty. Her debut book, The New Southern Style (2020), was one of the first inclusive design coffee-table books in her industry, and for years she was among the most sought-after in the country for photographing beautiful homes and helping women cultivate creativity. Her work was welcomed in the creative spaces she had spent years building, as long as she spoke about design, community, and inspiration.

After October 7, 2023, that changed. Rosenheck began speaking openly about the rise of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, exposing Hamas, pushing back against the BDS movement, helping withdraw two BDS resolutions at a city level, and publicly identifying as a proud Zionist. As she puts it, her content shifted “from homes to Hamas.” The opportunities that had come easily began to fall away.

In 2023, Rosenheck spent nearly nine months developing a second book with an editor at a major publishing house. After the final revision, she was told she had “knocked it out of the park,” and the proposal was submitted at the end of September. Weeks later, Hamas attacked Israel, her public voice changed, and lists of Zionists to boycott began circulating through publishing and the design world. Soon after, the publisher passed, citing a lack of “coaching experience,” a business she had already built and earned from, and one never raised during the nine months of work. During Nashville Design Week, she was excluded from a panel on “Defining Southern Style,” a subject on which she had written and titled her first book, as the organizer of the event had described Alyssa’s advocacy against antisemitism as “polarizing.” Speaking invitations disappeared, and opportunities dried up.

In the summer of 2026, Bell Bird Books cancelled the Nashville launch weeks before the launch of her new book, White. Blonde. Jew. (BenBella and Simon & Schuster). On July 26, the store told her it no longer felt able to promote her online or the August 20 event; two days later, it informed her literary agent that the launch was cancelled. Within a day of cancelling, it gave The Tennessean statements expressing support for an event it had already called off. Days later, it deleted the announcement from Instagram, removing any public mention of the launch without telling readers or ticket holders it was gone.

Rosenheck did not step back. Alyssa says that literary antisemitism is both overt and covert, taking the form of professional excuses, shifting standards, institutional silence, pressure campaigns, public humiliation, and community exclusion. She refuses to shrink in the face of this and continues to use her voice.

She refused to be complicit in her own erasure.

Jean Meltzer writes love stories and insists on the kind with happy endings. She trained in rabbinical school before turning to fiction and has built a career around the idea that Jewish characters deserve to be the heroes of their own stories — funny, desired and fully alive, rather than victims, sidekicks or black-and-white photographs of the dead. When her father told her to write a book, “not a Jewish book, because no one reads them,” she did the opposite and made a career of it.

Her debut novel, The Matzah Ball, helped establish a genre that had rarely existed in commercial fiction: Jewish romance. Before it, Jewish women were often relegated to familiar stereotypes — the nagging mother or the comic-relief best friend. Meltzer wanted to write something different, giving readers a Jewish heroine who gets the happy ending that romance novels promise. Known across the community as the “queen of Jewish romance,” she sees the book’s success as extending beyond her own career and helping open doors for the Jewish authors coming up behind her.

October 7, 2023 changed the landscape. As antisemitism increasingly reached Jewish creative life, authors landed on “do not buy” lists, events were cancelled, blurbs were withheld and colleagues became afraid of association. Meltzer chose to be visible, publicly expressing her support for Israel despite knowing there could be professional consequences. She felt that an author who publicly identifies as Jewish had a responsibility to stand up as one.

That conviction also led her to create new spaces for Jewish readers and writers. Her Jewish Joy Book Club has one rule: they only read books in which no Jewish person dies at the end. Through this community and The Jewish Joy Box, she has directed support to more than 2,500 Jewish books and over thirty Jewish small businesses and brands. Her latest project, the Jewish Joy Network, is a social collaboration platform for Jewish creatives and a database for organizations looking to hire them. For Meltzer, Jewish joy is an act of resilience. Every Jewish person, she insists, deserves a happy ending.

Judy Gold has spent more than forty years making people laugh. A two-time Daytime Emmy winner, she has performed stand-up on HBO, Comedy Central and Netflix, starred in three acclaimed Off-Broadway solo shows, including 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother, and written the critically acclaimed book Yes I Can Say That!, about free speech. But what has defined Gold’s career as much as her comedy is her willingness to be fearless, honest and unmistakably Jewish. She has long believed that comedy is more than entertainment: a well-crafted joke can carry a serious idea past a listener’s defenses, and laughter itself is worth defending, even when it makes people uncomfortable.

After October 7, 2023, that fearlessness came at a price. Gold began speaking openly and unapologetically about the rise of antisemitism, anti-Zionism and her support for Israel. The backlash was immediate. Even a photograph of Gold eating a bagel became an invitation for antisemitic abuse, with commenters calling her “Genocide Judy” and an “Ogre Jew bitch.” At shows in New York, audience members interrupted her sets with shouts of “Free Palestine” and “Israel is an apartheid state.” Fundraising performances for FIDF in New York, Toronto, and Phoenix were met with protesters shouting “Baby killers!” and, at times, threats to her safety.

At Jewish venues, security became part of the performance itself: police and private security surrounded the buildings, entrances were heavily guarded, and security personnel were stationed inside the audience throughout the show.

Gold noticed another change that was harder to explain but impossible to ignore: jokes that had reliably landed on October 6 suddenly drew silence two days later. To her, that silence was not a coincidence. It was antisemitism, plainly stated, and she refused to let it pass unnamed.

The professional consequences were real: Gigs were canceled, tours were dropped. Radio, podcast, and television bookers who had once regularly welcomed her went quiet, and many never returned. Even people she had worked with for years failed to reach out when she was stranded in Israel last June during the Iran war. Perhaps most painful, Gold says, was watching some of the very communities she had spent her adult life marching for turn away when she needed them.

And yet, she is still here, still performing, still making people laugh, still speaking her mind, and still proudly Jewish.
The backlash may have changed the room. It did not change Judy Gold.
She refuses to be silenced.

Peter Decherney is a documentary filmmaker, photographer and scholar whose work follows global Jewish life and traditions. A professor of Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Penn Global Documentary Institute, he builds long-term collaborations with communities whose stories are rarely given the space to be told on their own terms.

Since 2019, Decherney has photographed Jewish communities across Africa, working closely with each community to build the sustained relationships that thoughtful representation requires. His images of the Jewish community of Gondar, Ethiopia, made over many years, are collected in his book Endless Exodus: The Jewish Experience in Ethiopia. His photographs of Jewish Africa have been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Sag Harbor, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia.

Alongside photography, Decherney has partnered with African Jewish communities on a series of documentary films. Dreaming of Jerusalem, a Discovery+ original, follows everyday life in the Jewish community of Gondar, Ethiopia, from the synagogue to the soccer field. Days Between Rest and The Cave Synagogue explore pivotal moments of persecution and resilience in the history of Uganda’s Abayudaya Jewish community. Lembaland is a feature-length documentary road trip film that follows a leader of South Africa’s Lemba community on a journey of Jewish exploration. Yiddle Yiddle On profiles Johannesburg’s only Yiddish singer. And Stella tells the epic story of Zimbabwean Sephardic cookbook author Stella Hanan Cohen from her family’s expulsion from Spain, to generations spent on the island of Rhodes, to years in Congo and Zimbabwe, to New York.

Decherney’s new photography book project widens this scope, turning to the global diversity of Jewish diaspora communities in Europe, Latin America, India, and beyond, continuing the same commitment to long-term relationships and careful, collaborative representation.

Taken together, the work insists on a simple idea: that there is no single vantage point from which Jewish life comes into focus. The photographs and films help each of these communities tell its own story, in its own way.

Sustaining this work takes resources. Each project depends on renewed funding to build long-term relationships within a community, to bring university students along as collaborators and assistants, and to document each community’s life and religious traditions. For Decherney, the goal is straightforward: that these communities have a voice in shaping how the world understands the Jewish people.