Some years ago John Offenbach decided to embark on a series of portraits of Jews from different ethnicities, such as those from India and China and Ethiopia. Not just the great and the good, it had to include the homeless Jew, as well as the rich Jew. The incarcerated Jew, and the heroin addict. Offenbach took inspiration from People of the Twentieth Century, the series of portraits of German people of the 1920’s by the Cologne-based photographer August Sander, but unlike Sander, he decided not to include the background or the setting for any of portraits, as he didn’t want this collection to be documentary in style or intention; Half way around the world to each other but surprisingly close.

Catch an Argentinian-Jewish cowboy, a murderer, tattooed Jews and more in ‘Jew,’ by John Offenbach, the center of a new exhibit at London’s Jewish Museum through April.

JEW is a new exhibition at the Jewish Museum London by photographer John Offenbach exploring the nature of what it means to identify as Jewish today: from religious to secular, rich to homeless, criminal to lawful through 34 striking large-scale photographs.