Sigmund R. Balka's collection is an encyclopedic survey of the major European and American Jewish artists and themes in Jewish art during the 19th and 20th century. Assembled over a period of five decades, Balka has sought out paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs by renowned and emerging artists that offer a panoramic impression of Jewish life and Jewish cultural production during a golden era of creativity.

Perhaps to a greater extent than any other individual in recent years, Balka has amassed a body of work that reflects and records Jewish secular and religious experiences in Europe and America. One of the great strengths of his collection, excellent individual examples aside, is that one can read it as a chronological history of those experiences and as such it provides a wonderfully informative visual record of Jewish life over the last two centuries: the Jewish street and scenes of Jewish urban life, the practice of religious life, expressions of nostalgia for the Old World and acculturation in the New World, secular politics of change in which deracinated Jewish identity was channeled into modern political (read socialist) progress during the Depression, artistic responses to the Holocaust, and the emergence of Jewish women artists.