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So many lives were cut short by the Holocaust, many with no trace to leave behind for future generations to remember. Vendulka tells the story of a single scrap of remembrance—a candid photograph taken in the midst of this unspeakable tragedy—and that artifact’s amazing aftermath.

Famed Czech photographer Jan Lukas snapped an offhand portrait of twelve-year-old Vendulka Vogl in March 1943. A friend of the Vogls, Lukas was saying goodbye to the family, who were soon to leave Prague for a concentration camp. The photograph almost didn’t see the light of day—Lukas knew that if the Nazis found it on him, he could wind up in the camps as well—but the image was eventually developed and came to symbolize the Holocaust and humanize its victims. Seventy years after this famous picture was taken, investigative journalist Ondřej Kundra discovered that, despite all odds, Vendulka Vogl had survived the camps of Terezín, Auschwitz, and Christianstadt, and was in fact still alive and living in the United States. Kundra persuaded her to tell the remarkable story surrounding the photograph: her survival, her later decision to flee the Communist regime for America, and how she later reconnected with Jan Lukas, maintaining a lifelong friendship.
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Vogl’s thrillingly moving story, Kundra’s sharp and engaging writing, and Lukas’s striking photography all combine to make Vendulka an inspiring investigation into the horrors of totalitarianism and the redemptive beauty of friendship.

Establishes the centrality of visual culture within Judaism and Jewish history.

Visual Imaginations and Modern Jewish History traces how visual experience reflected and shaped Jewish life from the late seventeenth century onward. Richard I. Cohen shows how images, spaces, and objects were central to the making of modern Jewish identities and how the act of seeing itself became a site of cultural negotiation. Cohen claims that the prominence of visual art in modern Jewish life cannot be overlooked. Visual expression has become such a significant factor in Jewish life that it serves as both a mirror and an agent of Jewish modernity.

Cohen engages with a range of artists, figures like Moses Mendelssohn, Uriel Da Costa, and Baruch Spinoza, and such topics as the visual imaginings of the Mishnah, Jews in the military, and the motif of the Wandering Jew. Taken as a whole, the studies in this book argue that approaching modern Jewish history through images is not to replace the written word, but to restore to it the world of sight that Jews inhabited, created, and transformed.