Hongying Wu

  

Volume 7 | Issue II | June 2023

La Jolla Country Day School ’24 | California, USA

Columbia University ’28

  

This paper examines 20th-century American artist Ben Shahn’s Jersey Homesteads Mural and the importance of his Jewish identity as reflected in this mural by comparing the finalized work with the preliminary documents and drafts, which focused on the distressing experiences of the Jews in Europe instead of their lives after emigration in the United States, thus reflecting Shahn’s Jewishness to a striking extent that was not as accessible to the audience in the final mural. The paper also introduces the final mural’s Jewish-related elements, such as the use of Haggadah, the religious text read at the beginning of the Jewish Passover seder dinner, as a narrative and his choices of subjects – the uncommon lack of heroic figures which presents the momentum in Jewish Americans’ history and the design of character’s bodies, gestures, and poses which emphasizes the sordid process, the trials, and tribulations of the hard-working populace, instead of glorifying their success story of rapidly integrating into the American society, thus giving more context and a better sense of the complexity of Jewish American history that Shahn’s murals rendered, along with the reasons and impacts on his art and, thus, his strong connection with his Jewish heritage.