In a city where Jewish life is marked as much by loss as renewal, Hannah Eve Rothbard’s Mein Volk emerges from a year of living, researching, and painting in Berlin on a Fulbright Award. The works gathered here, mixed media paintings and handmade papers, examine what it means to be a Jew in Berlin today. Rothbard wrestles with ideas of presence and absence inherent in German Jewish life, drawing inspiration and material from extensive archival research into Jewish communities in Germany before, during, and after the Holocaust.
The title of the exhibition, Mein Volk, is borrowed from a prewar poem by German Jewish Modernist poet Else Lasker-Schüler, who fled Berlin in 1933. The word Volk bears the burden of its later appropriation by Hitler in the language of racial purity, but Rothbard reclaims the term as her own; Mein Volk is a testament to the Jewish community she found and established in Berlin, and an honor to those who came before.
81 Leonard Gallery
81 Leonard Street, New York, NY 10013
Jan 29 – Feb 28, 2026, Tuesday-Saturday 12-6pm
Reception open to the public Saturday, Jan 31 from 6-8pm
If you cannot attend the opening, the Jewish Art Salon will have a session at the gallery about Hannah’s work on February 25th. Join our email list for more info in February’s newsletter.
Hannah Eve Rothbard is a multimedia artist and curator based in New York. She works primarily in mixed media painting, using collected and manipulated paper materials in a layered process. She holds a BFA from New York University. Rothbard has exhibited at venues including 80 Washington Square East Gallery (NY), High Line Nine Galleries (NY), Soft Times Gallery (San Francisco, CA), Halfsister (Berlin, Germany), the Jerusalem Biennale (Israel), and the New York City Poetry Festival. She has held residency at the Materia Prima Foundation (Tuscany, Italy) and received a Fulbright award to Germany for her painting project exploring the contemporary regeneration of the Jewish community in Berlin. She is also the recipient of a 2024 Puffin Foundation Grant.
Image: Ghosts and the Guilty, 2025, Mixed media collage, acrylic paint, oil pastel, ballpoint pen, and graphite on watercolor paper; 30 x 28.5 in
Text by Goldie Gross – goldiegross1@gmail.com
