Amid the horrors of fascism and genocide, Jewish artists forged a powerful form of resistance through visual art. Their works did not mythologize or glorify Nazi perpetrators; rather, they delivered biting critiques, employed satire, and offered deeply personal testimonies. From the 1930s through the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jewish artists used visual imagery to condemn fascism, document atrocities, and combat historical erasure. Revisiting these strategies today reveals a legacy of resistance that continues to shape debates around Holocaust representation.
My recent research, supported by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, examines how Jewish artists depicted Nazi perpetrators in real time, as fascism surged, and the Holocaust unfolded. This project builds on earlier work analysing how contemporary artists have grappled with Holocaust imagery, such as in the controversial 2002 exhibition Mirroring Evil at the Jewish Museum in New York. Although accused of glamorizing Nazism, exhibitions like this interrogated the enduring presence of fascist aesthetics in contemporary culture.
What’s often missing from these debates, however, is historical contextualisation. The depiction of perpetrators as a form of resistance did not emerge in the postmodern era; it has deep roots in wartime and postwar Jewish art. Artists have long engaged with these figures, not to sensationalize, but to expose, condemn, and remember.
One of the most prominent early examples is Polish-Jewish illustrator Arthur Szyk, who fled to the United States in the 1930s. Known for his grotesque caricatures of Hitler and other Nazi officials, Szyk published in major outlets like PM, Collier’s, and The New York Times. After learning that his mother and brother were murdered at Chelmno, he created searing cartoons that laid bare the brutality of the Nazi regime. In one 1943 drawing, first published in PM, Szyk juxtaposed images of two innocent Jewish children marked for extermination with a depiction of unfazed Himmler and his associates. The work took on the activism its author had intended, and later appeared in prints and fundraising stamps for Peter H. Bergson’s Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe.
Szyk was not alone. Emigré artists such as William Sharp (born Leon Schleifer), Otto Flatter, and John Heartfield, along with non-Jewish artists like George Grosz, used their artistic talents to expose and denounce fascist violence and increase opposition towards it. Many were active in anti-Nazi cultural circles in Britain like the Artists’ International Association (AIA), founded in 1933, which fostered collaboration among artists across ideological lines. Its 1935 exhibition Artists Against Fascism and War and the 1938 Twentieth Century German Art show in London were key moments of visual protest. Spaces such as London’s Whitechapel Gallery and the Ben Uri Gallery also became hubs of anti-fascist expression by exiled Jewish artists. Some concealed their political views, wary of antisemitic backlash, but their work spoke clearly, nonetheless.
William Sharp’s work epitomizes this ethos. Sharp, a WWI veteran and vocal anti-Nazi, fled to the US after Hitler’s rise and continued publishing in outlets like Life and The New York Times. His 1940 cartoon in PM was accompanied by a testimony:
Once, when Adolf Hitler was standing by the tomb of Richard Wagner, whose music he adores, he referred to himself as ‘the young drummer of the German people.’ He has been a drummer all right, thumping the tom-toms of hate and ‘race’ to a chorus of hysterical ‘Heils’ while the German people march blindly to their destruction. This drawing I completed in Germany. Imagine what would have happened if the Gestapo had seen it.
Otto Flatter’s 1944 Mein Kampf Illustrated caricatures, shown at exhibitions in London were a powerful response to a book treated as the “German bible”, and which was increasingly gaining in popularity in Britain too. Flatter refrained from demonising the regime, instead portrayed Hitler as pitiable and delusional, haunted by the spectres of his crimes. One cartoon shows Hitler tormented by guilt, in sleeplessness by ghosts of women and children, victims of his regime. Flatter’s work didn’t merely satirize, portraying Hitler as both dictatorial and deeply guilty.
As the war ended and concentration camps were liberated, a new wave of Jewish visual testimony emerged, this time from within the camps themselves. Artists such as Leo Haas, Bedřich Fritta, David Olère and many more, documented their experiences with stark realism.
Unlike earlier uses of grotesque or satirical depictions, these works often avoided individualized portrayals of perpetrators, rendering them as anonymous agents of terror – armed with whips, dogs, and guns, dressed in boots and uniform, and often expressionless or even faceless. They illustrated both the oppression inflicted and the dehumanization of the perpetrators themselves. These were efforts to tell one’s story, to provide personal testimony, and to document terror with the intention of inscribing it into history and creating a body of evidence for justice when that became possible.
Prewar works used irony and exaggeration to destabilize Nazi propaganda and challenge the illusion of Nazi invincibility. Postwar visual images emerging from the destruction bore witness to trauma, resistance and survival, but also an urgent need to tell one’s story for posterity and for seeking justice and retribution.
Despite their significance, these early visual responses remain the domain of scholarly research, although increasingly recognised in temporary exhibitions. Major museums and public history projects still rely visually on perpetrator-produced material to represent the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, giving minimal importance to contemporaneous responses emerging from persecuted groups. Yet, Jewish artists offered crucial counternarratives – reclaiming representation, giving voice to the persecuted, and framing events through a lens of resistance and memory.
My forthcoming book, Facing Perpetrators in Jewish Visual Art since the 1930s, traces these visual strategies across generations and contributes to a growing digital database of such works. This research underscores a critical point: Jewish artists have not merely remembered the Holocaust; they have shaped how we see its perpetrators. In the face of fascism, Jewish visual art as well as visual accounts produced by victims or survivors offered an arsenal of resistance, bold, complex, and profoundly human. These images remain urgent, both as timely warnings and enduring acts of creative defiance. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, as we uncover more of these accounts – many published in limited editions in the immediate post-war period and now buried in major Holocaust Museum archives – they will emerge as prominent visual anchors for constructing historical narratives about Jewish victims and survivors within museum exhibitions. As far as I have studied them, these narratives are sharp and clear, with an intense immediacy and universality. Although regarded as post-Holocaust sources, the historical narratives they generate in the immediate aftermath can meaningfully amplify Jewish voices in exhibitions that have traditionally relied heavily on perpetrator-produced sources.
To cite this article:
Diana I. Popescu, ‘Visual Resistance: How Jewish Artists Confronted Fascism Through Art in Britain and the United States,’ The Helsinki Notebooks, Vol. 1, No. 15 (2 June 2025).
Visual Resistance: How Jewish Artists Confronted Fascism Through Art in Britain and the United States © 2025 by Diana I. Popescu is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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