The Jew­ish artists who worked in France, includ­ing Chaim Sou­tine, Amedeo Modigliani, and Camille Pis­sar­ro receive exten­sive dis­cus­sion along with the Ger­man Jew­ish artist of the late 19th cen­tu­ry Max Lieber­mann, the Dutch artist Josef Israels, and the Pol­ish Eugene Zak. Russ­ian Jew­ish artists of the inter-war Sovi­et peri­od as well as dur­ing the dis­si­dent post-war peri­od are ana­lyzed in rela­tion to their place in both the art world and their per­son­al sta­tus as Jews. Amer­i­can Jew­ish artists are ana­lyzed in terms of their ​“oth­er­ness”; their par­tic­i­pa­tion in the var­i­ous art move­ments viewed as influ­enced by their Jew­ish sen­si­bil­i­ty — notably with regard to the Holo­caust. Painters such as Avig­dor Arikha, Jack Levine, Ben Shahn, the Soy­er broth­ers, Philip Gus­ton, and Philip Pearl­stein are rec­og­nized either for their mon­u­men­tal human fig­ures or for the social real­ism of their paint­ings. In all, the author includes men­tion of 68 artists. 

This study is a tes­ta­ment to the author’s broad knowl­edge of his­to­ry, polit­i­cal sci­ence, and art. Fre­quent­ly, the text seems to be a patch­work of quotes from books on Jew­ish his­to­ry, psy­chol­o­gy (Sig­mund Freud), anti-Semi­tism (Han­nah Arendt), artists’ biogra­phies and cat­a­logues of exhi­bi­tions (Avram Kampf). Stros­berg is deter­mined to locate her sub­jects in the zeit­geist of their time. Nev­er­the­less, despite the 643 foot­notes, which reflect the num­ber of sec­ondary sources uti­lized by Stros­berg, her the­sis that Jew­ish artists’ works com­prise a genre that she des­ig­nates ​“Human Expres­sion­ism” is expound­ed thor­ough­ly. The text is high­ly read­able — it was, after all, an exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logue in its ori­gins— and is accom­pa­nied by more than 100 col­or illus­tra­tions. The book’s val­ue is enhanced by its bib­li­og­ra­phy, glos­sary, artists’ biogra­phies, name and sub­ject index­es and, espe­cial­ly, the col­or illustrations.