Winter Gift 2024 Print

Artist Statement by Liora Ostroff For the first month of the genocide, I carried Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s 1973 essay “The Reasons for My Involvement in the Peace Movement” in my pocket to sit-ins and protests, and thought of it as my amulet. Though Jews of various political persuasions claim Heschel as a spiritual and political ancestor, it was clear to me that his writings on the Vietnam War—as well as those on the Holocaust—place him firmly in the lineage of today’s Jewish anti-war activists. While the Jewish establishment was insistently defending Israel’s razing of Gaza, one of the most venerated rabbis of the 20th century was calling through time, clearly and unequivocally: Some are guilty, but all are responsible. Soon, inspired by the art of Jewish scribal amulets, which have been used since ancient times for protection or spiritual meditation, I began making prints that arranged text from Heschel’s anti-war essays as meditative amulets. For some, like the one you’ll find