Contributors
Hedi Argent was born in Vienna in 1929. She was made aware of antisemitism from an early age and was bullied at school. She was expelled the day after the Anschluss, my father’s law office and our family home were requisitioned by Austrian Nazis. But she and her parents were among the lucky ones. They managed to get visas for England just six weeks before the war, before borders were closed. The rest of Hedi’s childhood in England was a happy one, and her ambition was to become an “English girl”. Life was much harder for her parents and her mother never recovered from the loss of most of her family. Her father was more resilient, in spite of being unable to practice his profession. He was a great chess player and he went on playing chess.
Lisa Brown is a New York Times bestselling illustrator, author, and cartoonist whose picture books include The Airport Book, How to Be, Mummy Cat by Marcus Ewert, and Goldfish Ghost and The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming by Lemony Snicket, as well as the Baby Be of Use series of satirical board books for McSweeney’s. Her latest books include The Phantom Twin, a graphic novel for teens, and Long Story Short, a collection of book review comics. Lisa teaches in the illustration department of The California College of Art in San Francisco.
John Hajdu was born 1937 in Budapest, Hungary into a middle class Jewish family. In 1941, Hungary entered the war, allied to Nazi Germany and he and his family were persecuted for being Jewish. In 1944, during the German occupation John’s mother was taken away to a concentration camp. He suffered anti-semitism. He survived the most inhuman conditions in the Budapest Ghetto and was freed by the incoming Soviet army just before it was about to be blown up. After living through the Hungarian Revolution in October 1956 and escaping life under a barbaric Communist regime, he escaped to Austria, moving from a refugee camp to Vienna where he secured one of the last permits to emigrate to England. John arrived in England in February 1957 with nothing other than his beloved teddy bear and speaking little english. He worked his way up in the hotel business to become Director of International Sales for a large hotel company. He settled down and married in 1972 and now has a lovely family and four grandchildren. In 2020 he was recognized by Her Majesty the Queen with the award of MBE in the 2020 New Year Honours, for services to Holocaust Education and commemoration.
Sophie Herxheimer is an artist and poet. She’s held many residencies including for The National Maritime Museum, The Museum of Liverpool and Transport for London. Her work has been shown at her local allotments, Tate Modern and on a giant mural along the sea-front at Margate. She made a 300-metre tablecloth for the Thames Festival, a life size concrete poem in the shape of Mrs Beeton to stand next to her grave, and a pie on the lawn of an old people’s home big enough for seven drama students to jump out of, singing. Her collection Velkom to Inklandt (Short Books, 2017) was a Poetry Book of the Month in the Observer and a Sunday Times Book of the Year. Her book 60 Lovers to Make and Do, (Henningham Family Press, 2019) was a TLS Book of the Year. She has an ongoing project where she collects and draws stories live with members of the public. Her new collection is INDEX, a box of 78 collage poems, published as a pack of prophetic cards by experimental press, zimZalla.
Stivens Luyo is an ambitious and talented filmmaker, well versed in various art and multimedia disciplines including design, illustration, motion graphics, film production and video editing. He has worked on various film and commercial productions, and has developed extensive knowledge and recognition within the entertainment industry as an innovative professional who delivers a high-quality product.
Yeganyahu Avishai Mekonen is an Ethiopian Israeli filmmaker and photographer living in New York whose past work includes the award winning documentary Video Flour, screened widely at international film festivals and broadcast primetime on Israel’s premiere network. He has directed, produced, written, assistant directed and acted in numerous award winning dramatic, documentary and news programs for Israeli television and international distribution. His projects include 400 Miles to Freedom, a documentary that explores racial and ethnic diversity in Judaism, and Seven Generations, a photography project that focuses on a dying Ethiopian Jewish oral history custom while examining the relationships between the elder and younger generations of Ethiopian Jews in Israel. For the Seven Generations project, Mekonen received the prestigious Six Points Fellowship, a partnership of JDub Records, Avoda Arts, and the Foundation for Jewish Culture. He holds a B.A. in Fine Arts/Film from Tel Chai College of Haifa University/Hebrew University.
Jacqueline Nicholls is a London based visual artist. Her work engages with traditional Jewish ideas in untraditional ways. For recent project, Draw Yomi, Jacqueline drew each page of The Talmud, following the daily daf yomi cycle. Her interest in text and language has lead to research that considers handwriting as a form of drawing. The line that traced the internal thought, mediated through the body, language transformed into a physical presence. Exploring the potential contained within the line, and how even when writing collapses and becomes illegible, it still calls to be read. This interest is informed by her Jewish heritage, a tradition that values scholarly wordplay and textual interpretations. She explores themes of touch, power, embodied language, the effect of illegible traces, and the aura of absence.The work shifts between representation to abstraction as she considers the emotional potency of ambiguity.
Christopher Noxon is a writer and artist and member of the Reboot board. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic and Salon, with illustrations in the upcoming book Can We Talk About Israel: A Guide for the Curious, Confused and Conflicted, by fellow Rebooter Daniel Sokatch. Noxon is the author of the illustrated Good Trouble: Lessons from the Civil Rights Playbook, the novel Plus One, and the nonfiction Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes and the Reinvention of the American Grown Up. He lives and draws in Ojai California.
Rebecca Odes makes media for women, girls and people who don’t hate them. She co-founded Wifey.tv (with Rebooter Joey Soloway) and Gurl.com (way before that). She is an author and illustrator of four books (so far).
Violet Sassooni is an Iranian immigrant who fled her country in 1979 due to the Islamic Revolution and settled in the United States. She has a BA in English Literature from Tehran University. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, has two daughters and three grandchildren, and is active in the Iranian American Jewish community and her local synagogue.
Aurora Zinder was born in Odessa in June 1940.
At the beginning of World War Two Aurora evacuated to the Perm in the Ural Mountains with her mother and older sister to live with her Great Aunt. Aurora’s father, Lev Brodskii, fought with the Red Army and was killed fighting fascists in Ukraine. He was just 28 years old. After the war Aurora’s family returned to Odessa in 1945. She was accepted to medical school in St Petersburg in 1957 and qualified in 1963, working as a primary care physician until 1978. Facing terrible antisemitism in the USSR her family applied to leave in 1977 and were given permission to leave. They were forced to leave many things that they valued behind including handwritten letters from her father and a beloved book of Pushkin’s poetry. They managed to bring small items of china with them. Aurora and her family arrived in New York on August 24th 1978. Aurora worked in the Epidemiology Department of the Kimball Research Institute of New York Blood Center from 1979 until August 1989. In 1991 she graduated from Wurzweiler School of Social Work at Yeshiva University and worked in their outpatient mental health clinic until she retired in 2005. Aurora’s teacups and crockery are now part of the collection at YIVO in New York.