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Rabbi Michael Strassfield, Reconstructionist
Co-Editor of the Jewish Catalogue Editor of the first edition of the "Feast of Freedom" Haggadah 

The Art of the Four Children

1.Tanya Zion (Israel, 1996)
 
 

"The Ideal Jewish Daughter" reflects not only the inclusion of daughters into the art of the four "sons" but also the confusion of role models they face.
Traditionally, guns and trucks "belonged" to boys and Barbie dolls to girls, but the artist presents them tongue-in-cheek as the "bad" and "good" girl. 
Around the frame we see the variety of real life options available. 
Tanya, age 18, has studied in a modern women's Yeshiva and now serves in the Israeli Army Intelligence Corps.
 
 

2.Dan Reisinger (Israel, 1982)

While the Middle Ages offered a world view with clear types - wise and wicked - the contemporary view is dubious about stereotypes and judgmental categories applied to human beings.
Each person is a somewhat chaotic mixture of all the categories. The artist has used a collage of tom colored papers whose outlines are not sharp, which overlap haphazardly and whose colors and nongeometric shapes interact in complex ways.
It is probably impossible to label these four collages according to the four categories of the Haggadah.
 
 

3.Arthur Syzk (Poland and USA, 1939)

The four figures epitomize the Jewish cultural and class struggles in interwar Poland. The wise figure is a delicate intelligent yeshiva "bochur" (unmarried student) dressed traditionally yet meticulously. 
His body language expresses the grace and modesty of the Torah student ideally understood as an intellectual and religious aristocrat. 
In contrast, the wicked figure is a middle-aged bourgeois Jew dressed to show off his aspirations to Western European modernity. While the wise student has no props, not even a book, the wicked figure sports a riding crop, a cigarette with cigarette holder, and a stylish monocle. He is dressed in a hunting outfit with a jaunty Tyrollian hat with a feather, an ascot around his neck, silk gloves and sharp spurs on his leather boots. 
His stance is self-confident, self-contained and arrogant in contrast to the simpleton who is fat and smiling, opening himself to the world trustingly with arms and legs spread out.
While the simpleton is still traditionally dressed with a small tallis, the one who does not even know how to ask is a worker dressed poorly, wearing proletarian boots, without any visible link to Jewish tradition. His contemplative expression suggests that his direction in life is not yet determined.
 
 

4.David Wander (USA, 1984)

The four children in The Haggadah in Memory of the Holocaust reflect different attitudes towards Jewish tradition as symbolized by a book for we are "the people of the book," in the phrase coined by the Muslims. 
For the wise child, Judaism is an open book with letters to be read and studied. For the wicked child, the tradition burns up as it is destroyed. The association with Nazi book burning is chilling. 
For the simple child the book is open since he asks questions, but the child himself is still blank, still unlearned. 
Finally, for the fourth child, Judaism is a closed book. This child awaits someone to "open" the book and the pupil to one another as the Haggadah advises "You will open up" the Exodus story for the child who does not even know how to ask. 
The book is a symbol in many illustrations. For more about art, go to our Art page.
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