Issachar Ber Ryback was a leading light within the 20th century Jewish avant-garde. His output, which encompassed lithography, drawing, painting, sculpture, stage design, and theoretical writing, was linked by his drive to revitalize Eastern European Yiddish culture. He achieved this by creating a modern art based on Jewish folk traditions and the secular values of Haskalah (the so-called "Jewish Enlightenment"). As one of the founders of the Arts Section of the Jewish organization, Kultur-Lige (Culture League), Ryback co-authored (with Russian-American artist, set designer, and art critic Boris Aronson) the seminal theoretical essay, "The Voice of Jewish Painting" (1919). In it, Ryback advocated for a new Jewish art that incorporated Yiddish motifs reconfigured through modernist - in practice largely cubist and expressionistic, and to a lesser extent Futurist - techniques. Ryback in most celebrated for works depicting early 20th-century shtetl (village) life, and for creating the most salient visual record of Jewish communities living under the harrowing spectre of antisemitic pogroms.