Agnieszka Traczewska

Jul 15, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Agnieszka Traczewska |Shai Secunda |Joshua Barton |Dara Horn

There are hardly any women in A Vanished World, Roman Vishniac’s classic postwar album of the ill-fated European Jews he photographed in the 1930s. With their nostalgic and elegiac quality, those pictures—more black than white, more religious than secular, and more masculine than feminine—established a way of seeing and photographing Orthodox Jews, especially Hasidim, as a pious, almost premodern, cadre of men and boys.

Jan 22, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Shai Secunda |Agnieszka Traczewska

Nearly every morning since October 7, I open my phone and look at the faces of the war’s most recent victims. I gaze at these portraits fearfully, searching for a familiar face. This mourning ritual must be a feature of life in war zones around the world, in Ukraine, Sudan, and Gaza too.

Jul 9, 2023 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | David Engel |Elisha Russ-Fishbane |Agnieszka Traczewska |Shai Secunda

Visitors to Warsaw’s splendid POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews pass through a section of the core exhibition titled On the Jewish Street. Devoted to the years between 1918 and 1939, a brief interval of Polish independence between two eras of foreign rule, it depicts, according to an accompanying catalog essay, “a modern Jewish world . . .