The 2022 exhibition She Also Served used contemporary art to recover the stories of Jewish Canadian women whose military service during the Second World War had received limited public attention.
Presented at the Military Museums in Calgary during Canadian Jewish Heritage Month, the exhibition focused on nine women among the more than 250 Jewish Canadians who enlisted across the Navy, Army and Air Force.
Service within a climate of exclusion
The women served Canada while the country maintained a restrictive Jewish immigration policy commonly summarised by the phrase “none is too many.” This contradiction formed an important historical background to the exhibition.
The artworks addressed individual experiences, including Cecilia Feingold’s work in army intelligence. Collaged archival photographs, oil painting, digital prints and paper cutting allowed the artists to approach military records through different visual methods.
All nine participating artists were women. They included Bev Tosh, Anne Petrie and Lily Rosenberg, whose own family histories created further connections with war, migration and memory.
Art extending historical research
Alysa-Beth Engel’s digital collage Jacobs, Spiegel and Bennett Also Served and Razieh Alba’s print Bittersweet: Esther Raber were among the works identified in the exhibition.
Curators Jennifer Eiserman and Saundra Lipton developed the display as part of a wider research project documenting Jewish Canadian servicewomen. A digital version extended access beyond the museum and preserved the biographies alongside the artworks.
She Also Served demonstrated how contemporary artists can make archival research visible without treating history as a simple illustration. By concentrating on individual women, the exhibition challenged a military narrative in which their service had often remained peripheral.