How to Respond to the Moment: After the Rupture, the Rebuild

I often teach with photographs. In my Politics and geography course, I not only present arguments, data, figures, and charts, I show pictures – of faces, streets, institutions, and the lived texture of how people organize themselves into communities and nations. I keep piles of images, catalogs, and books that I return to each semester, selecting and setting aside, trying to find the picture that will do the work a paragraph of writing cannot achieve.

Wrapping up the spring semester, sorting through those piles, I came back to Maya Benton’s Roman Vishniac Rediscovered. It had been months since I had opened it. I had not used it this term and was prepared to reshelf it, and then I stopped and looked through it.

I paused and I then gasped. I had completely forgotten how hard these photographs hit.

We tend to remember Vishniac for the images he made in Eastern Europe before the war with faces marked by poverty, communities suspended between endurance and fragility, a world that now feels both intimate and impossibly distant. Those photographs read, in retrospect, like a warning. The New York photographs, taken just a few years later after Vishniac arrived in the city on New Year’s Day 1941 having escaped internment in Nazi-occupied France, read like something else. They read like a response.

At first glance, the images are almost disarmingly ordinary. Children sit in classrooms. Boys cluster in hallways. Girls lean over desks. There are games, gatherings, moments of quiet instruction and supervised play. Nothing announces itself as extraordinary. But the longer you look, the more deliberate everything appears. These are not scenes of life unfolding. They are scenes of life being organized.

Benton’s scholarship makes the construction explicit. Many of these photographs were commissioned by the Joint Distribution Committee and other Jewish philanthropic organizations documenting and in some sense justifying the work they were doing in a new American context. Settlement houses, community centers, schools, youth programs: the infrastructure of a transplanted community. The camera was not wandering. It was directed. It was capturing not just people, but systems. As the historian Hasia Diner observes in her essay for the Benton volume, the Jewish child in New York is the emotional and strategic center of this archive; photographed again and again, by a people who understood that the next generation was the plan.

The contrast is unmistakable when you hold the two bodies of work together. In Europe, Vishniac’s subjects often appear precarious even when dignified: children thin, environments worn, futures uncertain. In New York, the children are sturdy, structured, embedded in institutions designed to carry them forward. They are not simply living Jewish lives. They are being prepared for them.

Preparation, here, is everything.

After the Shoah, Jewish life did not regenerate spontaneously. It was rebuilt — deliberately, systematically, and often quietly — through institutions. Schools transmitted identity. Community centers created belonging. Camps, classrooms, and after-school programs became the mechanisms through which a dispersed and traumatized people ensured that there would be a future at all. Continuity and formation was not treated as an inheritance. It was treated as a responsibility. L’dor v’dor – “from generation to generation” – was not taken or considered a sentimental phrase. It is a theory of formation and resilience, and these photographs are what it looks like in practice.

I closed the book thinking about my son. He is coming into his own now and he loves being Jewish. He asks questions; real ones, the ones that may you pause and think about how to answer, the kind that do not settle for a first answer. He is looking for community in a world that has made plain, in the months since October 7, that it is not always on his side. He wants to know where he fits, who his people are, what tradition is asking of him. He wants to belong to something older and larger than himself.

And I find myself asking a question that Vishniac’s New York children never had to ask on their own behalf, because the adults around them had already answered it. Will the institutions be there? Will there be places where my son can practice being Jewish with other Jews, learn the texts, observe the holidays, form the friendships that last, and develop the habits of mind and values that make a Jewish life possible? Being Jewish is not a solo activity. It is inherently social, communal, structured. It requires spaces, budgets, teachers, clergy, tables, calendars. It requires other people showing up, year after year, for reasons that are not reducible to individual preference.

The data are not encouraging. Pew’s 2020 study of Jewish Americans documented significant declines in synagogue membership and attendance, in denominational identification, in day school enrollment, in attachment to Israel. Jack Wertheimer, writing in Tablet, described non-Orthodox congregations as “hemorrhaging members, aging, merging, and closing.” The institutional map that Vishniac photographed has, in many American cities, thinned considerably. Buildings are sold. Schools consolidate. Federations struggle. The scaffolding that was built in the 1940s has not been uniformly maintained.

And yet the UJA-Federation of New York’s 2025 recontact study — conducted after October 7 — found that a majority of Jewish adults in New York reported increased engagement in some form of Jewish life since the attacks. While not a national study, roughly one in five in New York reported increased participation in specifically communal Jewish life: attending Jewish museums, cultural events, adult education, JCCs, Chabad. Synagogue attendance, by some measures, ticked up. People showed up. They wanted to be with other Jews. They wanted to do Jewish things in Jewish places.

That is the Vishniac parallel made present in his images. In the 1940s, the institutions were built before anyone could be certain who would fill them. Today, the people are arriving and searching despite being wounded over the past few years, and the question is whether the institutions are still there, and strong enough, to receive them. The 1940s answer was construction. The 2020s answer has to be the same. Reconstituting. Reformulating. Rethinking and rebuilding what has atrophied and building anew where the old forms no longer fit and apply.

This is often described as resilience. Resilience is too soft a word in today’s situation. What Vishniac documented, and what this moment demands, is something closer to discipline; the kind that prioritizes long-term survival over short-term ease, that invests in institutions even when the payoff is not immediate, that understands community as something to be maintained rather than merely felt. It is the work of people who do not assume that identity will take care of itself.

I want my son to inherit a Jewish life that is thick rather than thin and authentically rooted rather than curated with a focus on the communal and the individual. I want him to walk into synagogues and schools and camps and community centers that are full, confident, and alive and are places built by people who understood, as Vishniac’s subjects understood, that continuity is not ambient or emerges by fiat. It is constructed.

The Vishniac photographs do not tell us what to build. They do something more useful. They remind us that building is the work, and that the work does not end with one generation. The men and women who commissioned those photographs are gone. The children in them are now old or gone. The institutions they built have carried us this far.

Whether they carry our children further is up to us.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.