Soshana Afroyim was an Austrian painter of the Modernism period. Soshana was a full-time artist and traveled frequently, exhibiting her work internationally. During her journeys, she portrayed many well known personalities and her art developed in different directions. Her early period artwork was largely naturalistic in nature, showing landscapes and portraits. Later her style developed towards abstract art, strongly influenced by Asian calligraphy.
Soshana Afroyim in her studio in Paris, 1956
Outside Havana, oil on canvas, painted by Soshana, 1947
Kyoto, ink on paper, painted by Soshana, 1957
Pinot Gallizio and Soshana in Alba del Piemonte, Italy, 1960
Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967), was a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, which ruled that citizens of the United States may not be deprived of their citizenship involuntarily. The U.S. government had attempted to revoke the citizenship of Beys Afroyim, a man born in Poland, because he had cast a vote in an Israeli election after becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen. The Supreme Court decided that Afroyim's right to retain his citizenship was guaranteed by the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. In so doing, the Court struck down a federal law mandating loss of U.S. citizenship for voting in a foreign election—thereby overruling one of its own precedents, Perez v. Brownell (1958), in which it had upheld loss of citizenship under similar circumstances less than a decade earlier.
A 1961 letter from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service reporting Beys Afroyim's loss of citizenship
Official record of Beys Afroyim's U.S. naturalization in 1926
Hugo Black wrote the opinion of the Court in the Afroyim case.
John Marshall Harlan II wrote the dissent in the Afroyim case.