"The Jewish School (Drawing a Golem)" is the first oil painting I made to attempt to cut through the vexing and, to me at least, fascinating questions and arguments swirling around the notion of Jewish art. During my years of discovery before I made the picture and in years of selective learning since it was painted, it never occurred to me to prove that there is such a thing as Jewish art, any more or less than one could "prove" anything much about any art at all. Very roughly speaking, I now feel that there has been no tradition of Jewish art (in the discernible sense of Islamic or Japanese or Egyptian art for instance). And so, the Jewishness of a painting such as this one may have to depend on various diasporist 'Jewish' attentions I sought to lavish upon it. Among my…publications is a study by Isaiah Schachar of the savage, anti-Semitic "Judensau" motif in visual 'art' through the ages, in which I fell upon a nineteenth-century German watercolor caricature called 'Die Judenschule' by G.E. Opitz, the source for my painting. The original picture supposed to show typical chaos in a Jewish schoolroom over which the hapless rabbi can't exert order, the visual implication being to instruct decent Aryan Germans about the plague of alien "Ostjuden" in their midst…I don't wish to inscribe a plot for my painting in stone, but in a plausible drama the teacher, with experience of the notorious blood libel (see inkwell spilling blood), fears he can't save the children, one of whom will resist his fate by attacking a brick wall…and maybe even escaping. The middle boy represents the incredible tradition of Jewish learning which will survive even if the boy doesn't. The third child wants to be emancipated as an artist and draws a Golem on the blackboard (instead of the vile "Judensau" in Opitz). His Golem begins to come alive but not in time because the painting concludes at that moment…"

- R.B. Kitaj, 1995