Descendants of an enslaved Black artist are fighting to regain works of his that are being held by a number of museums. Among those rooting for their success are the family and friends of a Jewish artist enslaved by the Nazis, who have been fighting for years to regain her paintings from a Polish museum.

Fate, it seems, has again linked the Black and Jewish communities in tragedy, determination, and the fight for justice.

A recent feature story in The New York Times described how the great-great-grandchildren of David Drake have been pleading with major U.S. museums to surrender dozens of artistic jars, some engraved with poetry, that Drake was compelled to create when he was a slave in South Carolina.

They are currently on display at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the de Young museum in San Francisco. Five years ago, a Drake “poem jar” was auctioned for $1.56-million, a new world record for American pottery.

The family’s argument, the Times explained, is that “these objects were essentially stolen from Drake,” because they were “made under duress, and sold or traded without his consent while he was enslaved.”

That sentence struck me when I read it, because as a Holocaust historian, I have been involved with the efforts of the family of the artist Dina Babbitt to retrieve portraits that she, too, made under severe duress — as a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz. Although the horrors of American slavery and of the Nazi Holocaust obviously differ in significant ways, there are also cruel overlaps that unite the families of Black Americans and Jewish survivors in seeking to reclaim the property of their loved ones.

I called Babbitt’s daughter, Michele Kane, to ask her how she felt about the David Drake story. “It was inspiring to read about the Drake family’s campaign,” she told me. “It feels as if we........

© The Jewish Week