Nazis Murder Jews

Politics and current events typically informed Neel’s art from the 1930s but never more explicitly than in Nazis Murder Jews, a dramatization of the May Day parade of 1936 that drew more than 40,000 "Communists and Socialists of various gradations of revolutionary tendencies," as reported in the New York Times. Neel shows throngs of demonstrators, some carrying bright torches, peacefully marching down the street (the Times account noted the parade’s orderliness), while onlookers line the sidewalk. The prominent figures in the foreground represent other artists in the Works Progress Administration. The painting alludes to Communist organizations’ aspirations to racial equality and emphasizes that they were among the first to call attention to the Nazi regime’s heinous and murderous anti-Semitism.