[4] A 1935 Woolley Fellowship from the Institute of International Education enabled him to travel throughout Europe for more than a year, and he returned to the United States in November 1936, by way of Egypt, Asia and the Pacific Ocean.

To see the kind of organized spirit of cooperation was — I don't know what the Navy's Medical Corps is like now, but at that time during the war to see a lot of wonderful improvisation made for material for good sketching and painting and drawing.

— Joseph Hirsch[8]Hirsh often used an intimate scene to suggest the enormous emotion of a subject: The Lynch Family (1946) depicts a young black mother holding a baby, distraught at the murder of her husband.

[9] The painting was published as an illustration in the Communist journal The New Masses,[10] following the July 1946 lynching of two black men and their wives in Monroe, Georgia.

[13] Hirsch's poster for the original 1949 Broadway production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman depicts a beaten-down Willy Loman trudging onward with his heavy suitcases.

His version of The Crucifixion (1945) is a closeup view from behind, and focuses on the busy workman preparing to nail Jesus's hand to the cross.

"[3] Among his popular lithographs were Lunch Hour (1942), depicting a black youth asleep at his school desk;[15] Banquet (1945), a closeup of a black man and an old white man sitting side by side at a lunch counter;[16] and a color lithograph of the Boston Tea Party, published at the time of the 1976 Bicentennial.

[5] The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation commissioned him in the late-1960s to create illustrations documenting construction of the Soldier Creek Dam (completed 1974), in Wasatch County, Utah.

[20] Hirsch was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study and work in Paris for a year, and he and his family arrived in France in September 1949.

Hirsch's Fulbright was renewed,[21] but, as the end of its second year approached, he sold his house on Cape Cod to extend his family's stay in Paris.

[20] Expatriate Hirsch was later denounced as a Communist sympathizer, and public pressure was put on the Dallas Museum of Art to remove his award-winning Nine Men (1949) from an exhibition.

[20] Instead, the museum moved Nine Men, a painting by Diego Rivera, and one by George Grosz into a separate room, and asked museumgoers to judge the Communist influence for themselves.

[26] One of Hirsch's war paintings was included in the Artists for Victory exhibition, that began at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in late 1944, and toured the country.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art held its first annual exhibition in 1951, and awarded him Fourth Prize for Nine Men, the only non-abstract painting among the winners.

[34] The Crucifixion won him the Butler Institute of American Art's 1964 purchase prize, and the painting remains BIAA's permanent collection.

[2] NAD awarded him the Altman Prize (best figure painting exhibited by an American artist) three times: 1959 for The Book, 1966 for [work], and 1978 for Tuba.