Cultural life in Whitechapel in the 1910s The Ben Uri was not the first organization to try to touch East End working-class lives with art – the Whitechapel Gallery, and the work done previously by its founders Canon Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, had already led the way there. 29 Nor was it the first Jewish art organization in Britain. Two Anglo-Jewish painters had been made members of the Royal Academy over the nineteenth century – Solomon Hart and Solomon J. Solomon. In 1891 the latter had founded the Maccabeans, a philanthropic body of artists and writers seeking to further Jewish culture. This in turn led to the establishment of the Jewish Educational Aid Society (JEAS), which helped poor Jewish students progress in their studies, preferably away from the ‘ghetto’ and into English-speaking integration within British society. 30 There had already been several large exhibitions of Jewish art by 1915, and a high-profile modern art exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1914 had featured several young Jewish artists (some of them first-generation East European immigrants) sponsored to study at the Slade by the JEAS. 31 Nor was the Ben Uri a pioneer in offering edifying lectures to an East End public. The Barnetts had also founded Toynbee Hall in 1884, a settlement house where students of Oxford and Cambridge Universities could volunteer their services advocating for tenants’ and workers’ rights on behalf of local people. The hall hosted lectures and reading groups which, by the 1910s, were well attended by a new generation of Jewish intellectuals and artists, later dubbed ‘The Whitechapel Boys’. A brief account of this circle and the form in which its cultural life unfolded is apposite as context for the Ben Uri’s history and allows for an introduction to an important chronicler of this period, Joseph Leftwich. Joseph Leftwich is an interesting figure for the historian, at once invaluable and unreliable. He was undoubtedly an integral member of the Whitechapel Boys, that generation of Jewish East End intellectuals and artists for whom he himself coined the name. The Whitechapel Boys were of a younger generation than the Ben Uri’s founders and had generally arrived in the East End as young children, growing up with both English and Yiddish and very much aware of their bi-cultural heritage. Leftwich’s immediate coterie consisted of John Rodker, Samuel Winsten and Isaac Rosenberg, and the wider group included young East End artists training at the Slade – Clara Birnberg (the only ‘Whitechapel Girl’), Mark Gertler, David Bomberg, Bernard Meninsky and Jacob Kramer. 32 Of the original group, Rodker and Winsten were writers, Rosenberg a writer and artist. Rosenberg is the best known, though his fame was achieved only after he died in the trenches of the First World War, and in great part through the testament of his friends, who saw to it that his poems and plays were published, and his artworks exhibited. Both Rodker and Winsten went on to publish books and articles. Leftwich was a prolific writer but is best known as a translator from Yiddish to English, and a memoirist. The diary he decided to keep for a year when he was 19 is a fascinating record of the years 1911-12, and he drew on this and other, possibly less directly 8