BRUCE DAVIDSON

In the 1980s the Subway in New York was poorly run, poorly lit and considered dangerous. Photographer Bruce Davidson decided to head underground to embark on what he called 'a voyage of discovery'. In Davidson's own words, 'I wanted to transform the subway from its dark, degrading, and impersonal reality into images that open up our experience again to the colour, sensuality, and vitality of the individual souls that ride it each day.' With its striking portraits ranging from gang members to a blind man, Subway is considered one of the finest photography projects ever completed. From his home in New York, Davidson talked to TateShots about the series. 

DAVID GOLDBLATT

 the youngest of the three sons of Eli and Olga Goldblatt. His grandparents arrived in South Africa from Lithuania around 1893, having fled the persecution of Jews in the Baltic countries

Goldblatt worked in his father's men's outfitters, attended Krugersdorp High School, and graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand with a degree in commerce.

Goldblatt began photographing in 1948 and has documented developments in South Africa through the period of apartheid to the present. He has numerous publications to his name and is held in high esteem, both locally and internationally. His book, South Africa: The Structure of Things Then, published in 1998, offers an in-depth visual analysis of the relationship between South Africa’s structures and the forces that shaped them, from the country’s early colonial beginnings up until 1990. During apartheid, Goldblatt documented the dreadfully extensive and uncomfortable twice-daily bus trips of black workers who lived in the segregated "homelands" north east of Pretoria in his work The Transported of KwaNdebele. According to Goldblatt, the conditions of South Africahave not changed that much for poor people since apartheid. He also states, "It will take generations to undo the consequences of Apartheid." He continues to photographs of the area including the landscape.

TUVIA TENENBOM

(born in Tel Aviv, Israel) is a theater director, playwright, author, journalist, essayist and the founding artistic director of the Jewish Theater of New York, the only English-speaking Jewish theater in New York City. Tenenbom was named "founder of a new form of Jewish theatre" by the French Le Monde and a "New Jew" by the Israeli Maariv.

ED KOCH

For the inscription on his memorial tombstone, Koch requested that the marker bear the Star of David and the words from the Hebrew prayer Shema Yisrael, "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One" as well as the last words of journalist Daniel Pearl before he was murdered by Islamic terrorists in 2002: "My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am Jewish." Underneath which it reads: "Daniel Pearl, 2002, just before he was beheaded by Muslim terrorists"He died on the same day as the 11th anniversary of Daniel Pearl's murder. The tombstone included a final epitaph that Koch wrote himself: "He was fiercely proud of his Jewish faith. He fiercely defended the City of New York, and he fiercely loved its people. Above all, he loved his country, the United States of America, in whose armed forces he served in World War II.

SHLOMO RECHNITZ

Shlomo Rechnitz is an ambitious entrepreneur with more than a decade of innovative business experience in the health care industry. Early in his career, Shlomo Rechnitz co-founded TwinMed, LLC, with his brother in Los Angeles. The company initially focused on providing select medical supplies to a small number of nursing homes in the local region. Under the leadership of Mr. Rechnitz, TwinMed quickly expanded to become one of the nation’s largest medical supply distributors. Currently, TwinMed maintains supply warehouses located throughout the country. Additional information regarding the products and services offered by TwinMed is available online at www.twinmed.com.

Beyond his continued leadership role in the medical supply industry, Shlomo Rechnitz also owns the quality care provider, Brius Healthcare Company. He founded the company in 2004. Since that time, Brius Healthcare has grown to employ more than 8,000 individuals throughout the country. Shlomo Rechnitz also maintains a leadership role in the medical field through his professional memberships. For example, he presently serves as a member of the Cedars-Sinai Board of Governors. In academia, he is active as a guest lecturer at the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Stanford Business School.

Over the course of his career, Shlomo Rechnitz has received a number of prestigious honors and awards. Most recently, he received the Icon Award for Visionary Leadership in Business and Philanthropy from the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2011, he won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. As a prominent member of the Jewish community, he had the honor of hosting the 2012 celebration for the completion of Talmud studies at MetLife Stadium in New York. The event was recognized as the largest celebratory gathering in honor of Jewish learning since 70 A.D.

Shlomo Rechnitz holds a Bachelor of Talmudic Law from the Mir Institute of Talmudic Law. He currently resides in Los Angeles.

MILTON GLASER

Glaser was born into a Hungarian Jewish family in New York. Glaser was educated at Manhattan's High School of Music and Art (now Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts), graduated from the Cooper Union in 1951 and later, via a Fulbright Scholarship, the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna under Giorgio Morandi. He was greatly inspired by his sister's partner, who had studied typography in great depth.

In 1954 Glaser was a founder, and president, of Push Pin Studios formed with several of his Cooper Union classmates. Glaser's work is characterized by directness, simplicity and originality. He uses any medium or style to solve the problem at hand. His style ranges wildly from primitive to avant garde in his countless book jackets, album covers, advertisements and direct mail pieces and magazine illustrations. He started his own studio, Milton Glaser, Inc, in 1974. This led to his involvement with an increasingly wide diversity of projects, ranging from the design of New York Magazine, of which he was a co-founder, to a 600-foot mural for the Federal Office Building in Indianapolis.

Throughout his career he has had a major impact on contemporary illustration and design. His work has won numerous awards from Art Directors Clubs, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Society of Illustrators and the Type Directors Club. He is a member of Alliance Graphique International (AGI), and in 1979 he was made Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Glaser has taught at both the School of Visual Arts and at Cooper Union in New York City. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Glaser is the subject of the 2009 documentary film To Inform and Delight: The World of Milton Glaser

HANNAH ARENDT

 (October 14, 1906 – December 4, 1975) was a German American political theorist. She often has been described as aphilosopher, although she rejected that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular" and instead, she described herself as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world." Arendt's work deals with the nature of power, and the subjects of politics, authority, and totalitarianism.

Adolf Eichmann Trial

In her reporting of the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker, which evolved into Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), she coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe Eichmann. She raised the question of whether evil is radical or simply a function of thoughtlessness, a tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without a critical evaluation of the consequences of their actions and inaction.

Arendt was sharply critical of the way the trial was conducted in Israel. She also was critical of the way that some Jewish leaders, notably M. C. Rumkowski, acted during the Holocaust. This caused a considerable controversy and even animosity toward Arendt in the Jewish community. Her friend Gershom Scholem, a major scholar of Jewish mysticism, broke off relations with her. Arendt was criticized by many Jewish public figures, who charged her with coldness and lack of sympathy for the victims of the Shoah/Holocaust. Due to this lingering criticism, her book has only recently been translated into Hebrew. Arendt ended the book with:

Just as you [Eichmann] supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations—as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world—we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang

AHARON LOFT

Rabbi Aharon Loft: Ein Yaakov & Maamarim & Shaar Yichud veHaEmuna

Ein Yaakov:

Ein Yaakov is a compilation of all the Aggadic material in the Talmud together with commentaries. It was compiled by Jacob ibn Habib and by his son Rabbi Levi ibn Habib.

It is stated in the Tanya (Igeret HaKodesh 23): “Give glory to the Lord…by studying…the inner part (pnimiyut) of Torah, i.e. the Aggada contained in the work Ein Yaakov. For most of the secrets of the Torah are concealed in it…

AARON SWARTZ

Aaron H. Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, writer, archivist, political organizer, and Internet activist. Swartz co-authored the "RSS 1.0" specification of RSS, and built the Web site framework web.py and the architecture for the Open Library. He also built Infogami, a company that merged with Reddit in its early days, through which he became an equal owner of the merged company.

Swartz also focused on sociology, civic awareness and activism. In 2010 he was a member of the Harvard University Center for Ethics. He cofounded the online group Demand Progress (best known for its campaign against SOPA) and later worked with US and international activist groupsRootstrikers and Avaaz.

On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested in connection with systematic downloading of academic journal articles from JSTOR, which became the subject of a federal investigation. On January 11, 2013, Swartz was found dead in his Brooklyn, New York apartment; it is reported that he had hanged himself.

JOYCE PIVEN

Joyce Hiller Piven is a director, teacher and actress. She and her late husband, Byrne Piven, were actors in the Compass Players. Later they founded the Piven Theatre Workshop in Evanston, Illinois and became a teacher to a generation of stars such as John Cusack, Joan Cusack, Aidan Quinn, Adam McKay, and their son Jeremy Piven.

She currently still teaches at the workshop and serves as the artistic director