The savage attacks on New York and Washington two weeks ago were unprecedented in American history, but the sharp rise in anti-immigrant sentiment — including beatings, the removal of Arab passengers from planes, and the murder of a Sikh shopkeeper in Arizona — was all too familiar. From anti-Irish riots in the 1840s to the anti-Semitism of Father Coughlin in the 1930s and internment of Japanese-Americans in the 1940s, for much of its history, America has often pinned internal turmoil on those groups perceived as outsiders.

Over the course of his long and successful career, the artist Ben Shahn was continually inspired by another incident of xenophobia: the trials and execution of the Italian immigrant laborers and anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. As a Jewish immigrant, Shahn profoundly identified with the executed men, believed by many to have been victims of the Red Scare, a period of intense anti-foreigner sentiment suffered by Jews, Italians and others.

Shahn's passionate art is an eloquent commentary on the suffering that ensues when nativism grips the legal system and subverts the civil liberties of Americans. With the Justice Department demanding new powers of wiretapping and immigrant detention, the opening two weeks ago of "Ben Shahn and the Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti" at the Jersey City Museum could not have came at a better time.

"We can really use a Ben Shahn right now," says art historian Diana Linden. Early 20th century anarchists like Sacco and Vanzetti and those responsible for the destruction in Lower Manhattan are very different, she cautioned. Yet she says that Shahn's murals, paintings, gouaches and prints, many of which are included in the exhibition, are a more humanistic response to terror than those who are "quick to judge who is and who isn't an American based on the way they look. Shahn responded to the injustices of the Sacco and Vanzetti case by working with known facts to emphasize human needs and values. He was never a flag-waver," Linden says.

Over 70 years since the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti on Aug. 23, 1927, the case lingers in the American consciousness. Many re-examinations of the trial have been published, yet no consensus has been reached on the guilt of the fish seller and shoemaker electrocuted for the 1921 robbery and murder of a Braintree, Mass., factory guard and paymaster.

Their conviction and eight appeals became an international sensation, rallying writers, artists and workers to protest the prosecution's selective use of evidence and Judge Webster Thayer's apparent bias against the accused. On view through Dec. 16, the exhibition gathers Shahn's art, along with documentary photographs, contemporary posters and pamphlets and strident prints by artists George Bellows and George Grosz, to tell the story of two men who became martyrs of the left.

"Ben Shahn and the Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti" is one of three exhibitions chosen to inaugurate the Jersey City Museum's attractive new $6.5 million building located two blocks from its musty old home on the fourth floor of the public library. With artists and corporations moving into the nearby downtown, Jersey City is in flux. The Shahn exhibition was chosen because it expresses the institution's "commitment to reflecting art that is very much part of the fabric of urban America's spiritual, immigrant and ethnic diversity," says curator Alejandro Anreus.

Anreus, Diana Linden, and other contributors to the exhibition catalogue will gather for an all-day symposium on Oct. 19.

The show is also the last in a cycle of important Shahn centennial exhibitions that began with The Jewish Museum's retrospective "Common Man, Mythic Vision" in 1998 and included "Ben Shahn's New York: The Photography of Modern Times" at New York University's Grey Gallery last year.

Born in 1898 in Lithuania, Shahn as a young boy immigrated with his Orthodox Jewish family to New York. Apprenticed as a lithographer, Shahn learned to paint and traveled to Europe and North Africa in the 1920s. Like many Jews of his generation, Shahn was sympathetic for workers and skeptical about those in power. He found his aesthetic voice in social content by depicting with verve heroic figures and innocent victims. Returning to New York from Paris, Shahn's first attempt in 1930 was to draw figures from the Dreyfus Affair.

Shahn's controversial 1931-32 series of 23 gouaches and temperas, titled "The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti," was first displayed at the Downtown Gallery in 1932 and widely covered in the press, making him famous. The show was attended by crowds of workers and labor organizers flowing from rallies at nearby Union Square, which these days is the site of a large memorial to victims of the Twin Towers attack and a meeting place for antiwar groups.

The works became one of the early landmarks of the social realist style that Shahn would be most identified with and that would dominate the art of the 1930s, particularly that of artists supported by the WPA and inspired by the Mexican muralists.

"I set about revealing the acts and the persons involved with as rigorous a simplicity as I could command," Shahn wrote about "Sacco and Vanzetti" in "The Biography of a Painting," his seminal lecture delivered at Harvard in 1956. He continues: "Yes, one rankles at broad injustices, and one ardently hopes for and works toward mass improvements, but that is only because whatever mass there may be is made up of individuals, and each of them is able to feel and have hopes and dreams."

Shahn later painted series about California labor leader Tom Mooney and the Lucky Dragon, the Japanese fishing boat irradiated during American nuclear bomb testing, but in both form and content, he found his ideal subject in Sacco and Vanzetti. The "human and formal clarity" of Shahn's portraits of the accused and their families, as well as witnesses, lawyers and judges, have the power of "immediate communication," says Anreus.

Arriving at Sacco and Vanzetti four years after their execution, Shahn based his pictures on documentary photographs. Anreus has cleverly displayed a number of Shahn's modestly sized gouaches alongside their source material, and the viewer may better determine Shahn's choices to simplify detail, heighten emotion and hone in on the human side of a story swallowed in politics and protest. The show includes sympathetic words from novelist John Dos Passos and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who is pictured holding a sign reading: "Free them and save Massachusetts! American honor dies with Sacco and Vanzetti!"

Sacco and Vanzetti were "questioning icons for Shahn," says Anreus, best freeing him to critique "the status quo and arrogance of power." Shahn returned to the theme of Sacco and Vanzetti when freedom was threatened in the United States.

In 1952, the 25th anniversary of the execution and the height of McCarthyism, Shahn drew a striking portrait of the couple, handcuffed at the wrist, for the cover of the Nation. In 1958, Shahn added to a larger seriograph of the drawing Vanzetti's famous quote in broken English celebrating his elevation from anonymity to martyrdom.

In 1967, during the escalation of the Vietnam War, Shahn was granted free reign in generating a large mosaic mural for Syracuse University, and chose to revisit Sacco and Vanzetti on the 50th anniversary of their execution. Sadly, only a small photograph of the mural is in the Jersey City exhibition.

Shahn's most famous work, the monumental painting "The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti," was to be in the show, but the Whitney Museum decided not to lend it to a new institution with untested climate controls, Anreus says. A small photograph of Shahn standing in front of the iconic image of Sacco and Vanzetti's open caskets appears in the Jersey City Museum, while the original work remains on view in the Whitney's permanent collection.

Currently an associate professor of art history at William Patterson University in Wayne, Anreus spent eight years assembling the exhibition, the first time these gouaches have been seen together since the 1930s. After emigrating from Cuba to America with his liberal family at age 10, he recalls listening to his grandmother's stories about people who were made into scapegoats. When he came across Shahn's works in a book in the Elizabeth, N.J., public library, the teenage Anreus found a comrade in Shahn, who spent most of his working life in the utopian New Jersey community of Roosevelt.

Because of the fragility of the works, the show will not travel, Anreus says. "Tell your readers, if anyone wants to see it, they have to get on a train to New Jersey."