When artist Mira Reisberg was growing up in Australia in the ’50s, children’s books didn’t have pictures of girls who looked like her, unless they were witches.
“All the good people were blond. All the bad people were dark and often with big noses,” said the dark-haired artist.
Today, as a response, Reisberg is creating her own images. Three of her paintings are on display at an exhibit called “We Are Family: Celebrating Diversity, Embracing Similarities.”
The exhibit of 31 artists will be in the Koret Gallery at the Albert L. Schultz Jewish Community Center in Palo Alto through March 14.
“Jews are part of the multicultural pot, but we don’t seem to have a lot of visibility,” Reisberg said.
Two of her displayed paintings are from a 1992 children’s book she illustrated, “Leaving for America.” The story, written by Roslyn Bresnick-Perry, is set during the Holocaust.
The 43-year-old San Francisco resident describes it as a “bittersweet book with a lot of humor and a lot of sadness, which is kind of the Jewish way.”
One of Reisberg’s paintings from the book portrays a mother and daughter sitting on their suitcase, smiling in anticipation, with a ship coming in the background.
In another painting from “Leaving for America,” two women and a girl sit around a table set with tea and pastries. The border is a collage of images from the ’30s — kosher for Passover cola, Samstein’s kosher meat and poultry market, a barbershop pole.
The third painting on display is of Reisberg’s mother, hair covered, blessing the Sabbath candles.
Reisberg’s images are vibrant, warm and unabashedly Jewish, the kind of images sorely lacking in her childhood books.
The artist’s sense of isolation as a child was compounded by living in a non-Jewish neighborhood in Melbourne.
“We were very culturally Jewish and clearly very different from everyone else around us,” she said. “That’s why I do the work I do.”
As well as painting, Reisberg teaches and leads school workshops in which she talks to children about accepting their own differences.
“I talk about growing up Jewish and being different and wanting to be blond and blue-eyed with an upturned nose and how that wasn’t something I could really do. I try to show in my books that different kinds of kids are beautiful.”
Reisberg has illustrated five books. An upcoming book, “Just Like Home,” should be released in October.
For the past eight years Reisberg has made posters for the Jewish Film Festival. She credits the festival with making her feel good about being Jewish.
“I had internalized a lot of anti-Semitism. It was very painful. Here were these hip, engaging, contemporary Jews that didn’t carry around this incredible grief and sadness. They’ve found a positive, creative way of dealing with their heritage.”
She says she’s now “very Jewishly identified.” She connects with what she calls “the living tradition of being a Jew, taking what’s relevant to me” by creating new rituals such as progressive feminist seders.
“When people used to ask me what I was, I’d say, `European descent.’ Now, I say, `Jewish.'”