In this seminar, Diana Popescu uncovers an overlooked chapter in British and Jewish cultural histories: the role of Jewish refugee artists in shaping visual opposition to Nazism during the 1930s and 1940s.
Persecuted and displaced, these artists took up pen, ink, and brush to create searing images: satirical cartoons, sketches, and prints that exposed Hitlerism and gave voice to Jewish resistance. Published in newspapers, shown in exhibitions, and circulated in activist networks, their works formed a striking body of anti-fascist imagery that confronted perpetrators directly while contributing to Britain’s wider cultural and political discourse.
Artists such as John Heartfield, Joseph Otto Flatter, Hermann Fechenbach, Victor Weisz, and Walter Trier, Stephen Roth, Fred Uhlman, and others are brought together here to trace their contributions and connections with antifascist British groups like the Artists International Association. This talk reveals how their art combined urgency, honesty, and defiance, offering a powerful and still resonant visual resistance to fascism.
Diana I. Popescu is a Gerda Henkel Fellow and Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. She specialises in Holocaust representation and memory, visual arts, and visitor experience at Holocaust museums and memory sites. Her edited books include Public Engagement with Holocaust Memory sites in Poland (Palgrave 2024); Visitor Experience at Holocaust Memorials and Museums (Routledge 2022); and co-edited volumes Performative Holocaust Commemoration in the 21st Century (Routledge 2021) and Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era (Palgrave 2015). She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.