The New Country

The Yiddish Book Center’s newest visiting exhibit captures the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Lower East Side of New York City, which hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants called home. It’s an urban landscape that tried, tested, and occasionally thrilled its denizens — a place the exhibit’s notes refer to as “a crowded neighborhood of pushcarts and open-air markets, tenement buildings and sweatshops, Yiddish theaters and street stickball games.” Works in the multi-artist exhibit are culled from the Balka Collection at New York’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum, featuring etchings, lithographs, wood engravings, and works on paper by artists including Joseph Hirsch, Larry Rivers, Raphael Soyer, Saul Raskin, and William Sharp.

Balka’s Lower East Side: Through March 13, 2017. Brechner Gallery, Yiddish Book Center, 1021 West St., Amherst. (413) 256-4900, yiddishbookcenter.org.

— Hunter Styles