The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture

[This is a re-release of S2E10]

Ketzia Schoneberg is a gifted painter with a unique artistic vision. Her work has been showed widely in galleries in Portland and beyond. We talk about how her work expresses her personal biography and her Jewish identity, we discuss the impact of Judaism on her life and in her work, and we also tease out some of the conncetions between artistic and religious expression. And, of course, she weighs in on the important question of what is the best Jewish food. Enjoy!

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture.

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CALL FOR ARTISTS! Art/Lab is inviting Pacific Northwest contemporary Jewish artists to apply for the 2027 Artist Fellowship Cohort, which begins in January 2027. Be part of this nine month artist laboratory that explores the intersection of Judaism, creative expression, and contemporary culture in order to inspire new works. The theme of this fifth cohort is Democrisis. More information on the Cohort and a link to the application is at http://artlabpdx.org/

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There is an interesting tension in our work at Art/Lab. Think about how much of Jewish life runs through words. We're called the People of the Book. Our central practices are reading, arguing over texts, and praying from a book. Our story of the creation of hte world turns on words creating reality. And there's a long wariness in our tradition about images. The second commandment casts a long shadow. And yet at Art/Lab we are creating space for and holding up Jewish creative work of all kinds: writers and poets, yes, but dancers, directors, painters and visual artists of all kinds.

The Kabbalists noticed that in Genesis, God creates the world by speaking. That would mean the trees, the sky, the light itself are all a kind of divine speech. If that's true, the line between word and image is blurrier than we usually assume.

Every one of us learned to see before we learned to read. A one-year-old doesn't start with a book. We start with pictures. Then the letters slowly take over, and we forget we ever knew how to receive a story any other way.

So I wanted to talk with someone who has spent twenty years trying to bring adults back to that place, and then lead them through images to the Hebrew letters. Sara Harwin is a Portland artist. Her project, Illuminated Letters, unfolds across an entire gallery like a Torah scroll. It is a work that brings together the Jewish mystical tradition with visual and written expression in a totally unique way. We talk about light, roots, sacred geometry, the doubt she had before writing the names of God, and what lives in the white space between the letters. This was a really rich conversation.

Enjoy my conversation with Sara Harwin.

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture.

Notes and Links

•

Illuminated Letters (Sara's project site): https://www.illuminatedletters.net

•

Fred Harwin on OPB's Oregon Art Beat: https://www.opb.org/television/programs/oregon-art-beat/article/eye-paint-prosthetic-fred-harwin-ocularist-portland/. The piece profiles Fred's work hand-painting prosthetic eyes for his clients.

•

Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, where the project was first shown in 2014: https://www.ojmche.org

•

Emil Weddige, Sara's lithography teacher at Michigan: https://tacoma.emuseum.com/people/586/emil-weddige

•

Yaacov Agam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaacov_Agam. He died on June 21, 2026, at his home in Rishon LeZion, aged 98.

•

Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: https://parnassusbooks.net/book/9781580230964

•

Lawrence Kushner, The Book of Letters: A Mystical Hebrew Alphabet: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/238256

•

Rabbi Hanina ben Teradion and the ascending letters (Avodah Zarah 18a): https://www.sefaria.org/Avodah_Zarah.18a

•

Rabbi Akiva and the crowns on the letters (Menachot 29b): https://www.sefaria.org/Menachot.29b

This is a re-release of S3E6

​ In this episode, Merridawn Duckler and Rabbi Josh explore pop culture and high art, Judaism as culture and religion, and challenge these distinctions. Duckler's background as artist and serious student of Jewish religious texts add to the rich conversation. Enjoy.

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture.

Relevant to the Conversation:

https://merridawnduckler.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Levinas

This is a re-release of Season 3, Episode 36.

In this conversation with playwright Andrea Stolowitz, I found myself moving back and forth with her between cities, art forms, and identities. We begin with the contrast between New York and Portland—how New York's sheer density of artistic life (and vastly stronger funding) can make theater feel culturally central, while Portland as a City has to keep stretching to match the artistic talent here. We talk about what it means to make live theater now, when audiences are trained toward screens and when nonprofit theaters are financially squeezed into taking fewer risks. Andrea describes theater as an "artisanal bread" enterprise—inefficient, expensive, and irreplaceably real—especially in an age when people are increasingly unsure what's authentic.

We talk about The Berlin Diaries, where she uses her great-grandfather's 1939 diary and a journey to Berlin to ask a blunt, painful question: how much of her family's dysfunction is Holocaust inheritance, and how much is ordinary human messiness. What emerges is not just trauma, but the power of omission—the knowledge that never got passed down, the silences that shape identity as much as the facts that are spoken.

We end in the present: the constraints and anxieties around representation, the way scarcity turns "radical hospitality" into competition, and how post–Oct. 7 realities have pushed Andrea to put Jewishness closer to the center of her work—and to confront the fact that sometimes, making art means you can't just compile voices; you have to own an argument. Enjoy the conversation.

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture.

Links:

Art/Lab: artlabpdx.org

Andrea's website: https://andreastolowitz.com/

Berlin Diaries Audio Drama: https://vimeo.com/1164043554?fl=pl&fe=sh

Abbey Theatre: https://www.abbeytheatre.ie

Sabbath Queen:https://www.sabbathqueen.com

Numbered Be Our Days: https://www.cyclonerep.com/numbered-be-our-days

This is a re-release of Season 3, Episode 20

On this show I've continued to explore the boundary between Jewish culture and Jewish religion. We've talked about for example the flourishing of Yiddish artistic culture in the 19th and 20th century, boldly, undeniably Jewish and largely secular. But we've also found links between Jewish religion and culture, like the continued focus on peoplehood, or the texts of the Jewish tradition, or the urge for transcendence. Today's conversation is all about the place where that line between Jewish creative culture and Jewish spirituality disappears, or is reimagined and leapt over - or something.

Rabbi Adina Allen is the co-founder and creative director of the Jewish Studio Project. The work of this influential and growing organization is based on Jewish Studio Process, a unique methodology that unlocks creativity through the fusion of art and Jewish learning that has been embraced by thousands of organizational and community leaders, educators, artists, and clergy across the United States. I recently read her book The Place of All Possibility: Cultivating Creativity Through Ancient Jewish Wisdom. I thought it was going to be a book that just encouraged a creative approach to Jewish learning. It is much much more than that.

As you'll hear today, it's something like a theology of making that is grounded in Jewish learning. Her work is profound and inspiring. In this conversation we talk about creativity as spiritual technology: a disciplined path to encounter the divine and build a community that is grounded in individual expression. We go into some depth about the Jewish Studio Process so you'll why this work is something original and powerful. We also discuss how this work has been used not only to help individuals deepen their connection to and understanding of Jewish sources but also how it is working its way through schools, synagogues and other organizations. I think you'll really like hearing about this meeting point between creativity, religious experience, and Jewish learning.

Finally, RabbiAllen will be here in Portland on December 4th at 7:30 pm, for a book talk sponsored by Art/Lab and co-sponsored by the Eastside Jewish Commons, The Portland Jewish Federation, and the Jewish Studio Project. More information at artlabpdx.org Enjoy my conversation with Rabbi Adina Allen.

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture.

Links: Art/Lab: https://www.artlabpdx.org

Jewish Studio Project: https://www.jewishstudioproject.org

Rabbi Allen's Personal Website: https://www.adina-allen.com

Pat Allen (Rabbi Adina's Mom): https://www.patballen.com

Ayin Press (where you can find Rabbi Adina's book and many other wonderful Jewish titles): https://www.ayinpress.org

Rosh Hashanah is traditionally called the Birthday of the World. I've been thinking about the difference between two ways of talking about the world's beginning. The scientific account describes the world simply coming into being, developing from its earliest state, but our tradition says something different: the world was created. One implication for this podcast: if the world was created, we can approach it the way we approach a work of art, with appreciation and with wonder as to what it means. The Jewish tradition asks us to truly see, not to glance, but to give sustained attention to what is all around us.

My guest this week, Fred Harwin, has spent his life looking more closely than almost anyone. He has studied the textures of living tissue in the operating room at two in the morning, the flecks of color in a stranger's iris from a few inches away, and the shadow of Douglas firs moving across his garden. Fred is an ocularist, someone who makes prosthetic eyes. Before that, he was a medical illustrator who spent years standing behind Dr. Albert Starr in the OR to illustrate the Manual of Cardiac Surgery, a work that may be Fred's masterwork. Fred has a background in the fine arts, and he brought that skill and artistic vision to his work in the medical field.

We talk about why he insisted on drawing every procedure before a word of text was written, and how he created the illusion of a dilating pupil with nothing but paint and light. Fred also explains why making an eye for a self-conscious teenager became his work of tikkun olam, the repair of the world. Along the way, we explore the human body as a work of art and the Hebrew root that connects emunah, faith, with omanut, art. Coming just after Rosh Hashanah, this felt like the right conversation to have. I hope you enjoy this winding theological, medical, and artistic conversation with Fred Harwin. Thanks so much for listening.

Show notes / references

• Fred Harwin's website (includes a media page collecting his press and video coverage): https://www.fredharwin.com/fred-harwin-movie-and-media.php
• OPB, Oregon Art Beat: "Fred Harwin Hand-Paints Windows To The Soul" (2017). This is the mini-documentary you mention in the episode. It shows how he molds, carves, paints, and polishes a prosthetic eye, work that takes around eight hours over four visits with the patient. The Kid Should See This

• Article: https://www.opb.org/television/programs/oregon-art-beat/article/eye-paint-prosthetic-fred-harwin-ocularist-portland/
• Video: https://www.opb.org/video/2017/09/23/ocularist-fred-harwin/

• Manual of Cardiac Surgery (Harlan, Starr, Harwin; Springer-Verlag). It was originally published in 1980–1981 as a two-volume set, then revised into a single volume with new full-color illustrations. AbeBooks

• Volume 1 (1st ed.): https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4684-0076-2
• 2nd edition: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4612-2474-7
• Illustrated Handbook of Cardiac Surgery, adapted from the second edition for a broader audience: https://books.google.com/books/about/Illustrated_Handbook_of_Cardiac_Surgery.html?id=-Mm5BgAAQBAJ Springer

• Fred Harwin Collection, OHSU Historical Collections & Archives. This is the archive Fred mentions at the end. It consists mostly of his original illustrations, including work from both editions of the manual, and is open to the public. Some images have been digitized in OHSU Digital Collections. Archives WestArchives West

• Finding aid: https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv756660
• Digital Collections (search "Harwin"): https://digitalcollections.ohsu.edu/

• OHSU exhibit, "Illustrating Medicine: The Visionary Work of Fred Harwin." It is listed among OHSU HC&A's exhibits, but I couldn't confirm whether it's currently on view: https://www.ohsu.edu/historical-collections-archives/exhibits OHSU
• OHSU Oral History Program. Harwin is listed as an interview subject, and most transcripts are available online through OHSU Digital Collections. https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv684447 Archives West
• Sara Harwin, Illuminated Letters: Threads of Connection (Fred's recommendation). The project draws on illuminated manuscripts and sacred geometry, using large panels and hanging mobiles. https://www.illuminatedletters.net/ Illuminatedletters

Anyone who takes Jewish sacred texts seriously has to care about how we interpret these stories, which means how these storeis and myths are re-told, invested with new dimensions and meanings, in each generation. The stories would get old and become dead, useless, if we insisted that they mean to us what they meant to a jew who lived 1000 years ago. They gain life when we renarrate them, so to speak.

We are grappling in America and Israel both, with the collapse of earlier narratives about what those nations mean. The people who make up these nations do not share an overarching narrative that binds them. Our stories seem broken, and disfunctional.

This week's guest, Tom Haviv, thinks about narratives, how they work and what it means when they break - when they stop working. Tom is the co-founder and Executive Director of Ayin Press, an independent publishing platform and interdisciplinary creative studio rooted in Jewish culture. He is also an artist and a poet in his own right.

With Ayin Press Tom and his co-founder Eden Perlstein have created an outlet and inspiration for superb Jewish work, and work that reaches beyond the Jewish world as well. Ayin published Daniela Molnar's Protocols: An Erasure, which you've heard about on this podcast and a visit to their website http://ayinpress.org/ will reveal an impressive range of new works, from philosophy, to mysticism, to a Jewish tarot deck and more.

But Tom's own life story and his poetic work digs deep into myth and narrative, and what they mean for our lives and our world. He was the perfect partner for an exploration of this topic which is perhaps more relevant now than it has been in at least a generation.

Enjoy the conversation with Tom Haviv.

Links-----

www.tomhaviv.com

www.ayinpress.org

My guest today is journalist Rebecca Clarren. Her work has appeared in Mother Jones, High Country News, The Nation, and Indian Country Today. For her reporting, she's won a Hillman Prize, received an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, and earned multiple grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. But as you'll hear in our conversation, she's much more than a journalist.

Her debut novel, which we touch on, is Kickdown, which was shortlisted for the PEN Bellwether Prize. Clarren is also a published poet; her work has appeared in North American Review, Catamaran, CutBank, and Poetry Northwest.

We spend most of our time talking about The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance, an extraordinary book in which she turns her journalistic eye on her own story—and her family's. It was named a Best Book of 2023 by several publications, won the Will Rogers Medallion Award, and was shortlisted for the High Plains Book Award and the Great Plains Book Award.

Rebecca and I talk about Jewish identity and values, and how those shape her work. She has a passion for amplifying marginalized and silenced voices—and for uncovering the stories that get buried beneath the dominant narrative. We talk about storytelling, contested truth, and what it means to hold multiple perspectives at once.

We also talk powerfully about grief and loss, and how they've informed her life and her work. Israel and Gaza come up because we're talking about competing narratives and moral urgency—and she offers a striking framework for balancing truth and compassion, rooted in learning with her rabbi.

It's a rich conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it. This is my conversation with Rebecca Clarren.

The Art/Lab Podcast is created, produced and edited by Rabbi Joshua Rose and is supported by Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music composed by Rabbi Joshua Rose

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Links & Show Notes

Art/Lab: artlabpdx.org

Rebecca's website: https://www.rebecca-clarren.com/

Indian Land Tenure Foundation: https://iltf.org/

Peter Beinart's Being Jewish Adrer the Destruction of Gaza: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/775348/being-jewish-after-the-destruction-of-gaza-by-peter-beinart/

This is a re-release of S3E28, originally titled "Can We Find Truth Amidst Competing Narratives?"

A Reflection by Rabbi Josh

In this episode, I sit down with multi-instrumentalist David Rosman — guitarist, violinist, and klezmer devotee — to talk about how he found his way into klezmer music not through inheritance, but through a winding path: John Zorn's avant-garde Jewish compositions, a deep dive into Zohar and Jewish mysticism, and an eventual hunger for community that led him back to tradition. We discuss what "appropriate innovation" looks like inside a musical tradition whose continuity was violently severed, the fidl-pauk-kapelye (the poorer, older, more melancholic wedding-band repertoire he drew on for his latest album), the push-and-pull rhythmic elasticity he compares to Charles Mingus, and the influence of ethnographer S. An-sky, who saw preserving Jewish folk tradition as inseparable from creating something new with it. It's a conversation about grounding innovation in real fluency with a tradition, rather than skipping straight to reinvention. Enjoy my conversation with David Rosman.

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture.

------ Links

*Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture: artlabpdx.org

*David Rosman's Music on Bandcamp: dancedancejews.bandcamp.com/music

*On S An-Sky's The Dybbuk: yiddishbookcenter.org/educational-programs/resources-teachers/resource-kits-teachers/yiddish-theater/dybbuk

*YIVO Institute article on Walter Zev Feldman's Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory: yivo.org/Klezmer-Music-History-Memory

*Publisher's page on the Pritzker version of the Zohar: sup.org/books/series/zohar-pritzker-edition

This is a re-release of Season 3 Episode 43.

Welcome to The Genesis. If you heard my episode with Eric Stern, then you already know that today's guest will be performing at the Portland Jewish Music Festival on Saturday, May 16. If you have not heard that episode, go back and listen to it—you will hear about all the remarkable things happening at this year's festival.

I was especially grateful to have the chance to speak with today's guest, Yair Dalal. Because I was able to talk with Yair before he comes to Portland next month, I thought it was only right to include a little of his music after our conversation.

If you are watching on The Genesis YouTube channel, you will see Yair performing live in a video from his YouTube channel. If you are listening to the audio podcast, you will hear some of his beautiful music. Either way, I wanted to give you a sense of the kind of artist he is.

Yair Dalal is a composer, violinist, oud player, singer, and teacher. Over the last several decades, he has released 12 albums that traverse a wide cultural landscape, drawing on Israeli, Jewish, and Middle Eastern musical traditions. His work reflects deep roots in classical European, jazz, and Arabic music, and we talk in this conversation about how he moved among those worlds and, in some sense, returned to his own roots.

Dalal's family came to Israel from Baghdad, and his Iraqi heritage is deeply embedded in his music. Alongside his work as a performer and composer, he has devoted himself to preserving endangered musical traditions, especially the Babylonian Jewish-Iraqi musical heritage and the music of the Bedouins. We speak about his time with the Bedouins, and about the desert, which seems in many ways to be his truest home.

Over the years, Dalal has performed in concerts and festivals around the world, including at major venues such as Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, at world music festivals from England to Australia and New Zealand, and also in far more intimate settings, including playing with Bedouins in their tents.

Beyond his musical life, Yair Dalal is also a peace activist who has devoted much of his energy to building bridges of understanding and creativity among different cultures, especially between Jews and Arabs. In 1994, he performed at the Nobel Peace Prize Gala Concert honoring Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Yasser Arafat.

Dalal has received numerous Israeli awards in recognition of both his music and his contribution to Israeli culture. In 2021, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Israeli Ministry of Culture. He has also been honored by other organizations for his dedication to the oud and for his role in bringing its musical traditions to audiences in Israel and abroad. He was also nominated for a Grammy.

He has made a profound impact on Israeli music, Israeli culture, and what we now call world music. I think you are really going to enjoy this conversation with Yair Dalal. And you do not want to miss him—or the other musicians performing at the Portland Jewish Music Festival, which is co-sponsored by Art/Lab along with a host of Portland Jewish organizations.

Enjoy my conversation with the remarkable Yair Dalal.

The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose.

Links

Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts & Culture: www.artlabpdx.org

Yair Dalal: https://www.yairdalal.com

Portland Jewish Music Festival: https://ejcpdx.org/pjmf26

Documentary About Yair, "Ain't Got no Jeep and My Camel Died": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AOSmzIPG7g

Documentary about Iraqi-Israeli music and musicians (recommended by Yair): https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=baghdad+bandstand

In this episode, Rabbi Josh sits down with Portland-based dancer, choreographer, and Jewish educator Jen Gwirtz to explore the meeting place of Judaism, language, and the body. Gwirtz's 2022 work Kol b'Isha reimagines the ancient rabbinic phrase kol isha erva—"the voice of a woman is nakedness"—through wordplay, dance, and lived experience. Their conversation ranges from the poetic depths of Hebrew to the invisibility of middle-aged women, from rabbinic trauma after the destruction of the Temple to the embodied practice Jen calls "dancing Torah." Along the way, they discuss how Hebrew's verb-driven structure lends itself to movement, why improvisation has a distinctly Jewish resonance, and how the body itself can be read as a kind of text. What emerges is a vision of Judaism not just as a religion of study and words, but as something enacted through voice, gesture, and choreography.

Links and Notes

https://www.artlabpdx.org

https://www.jennifergwirtz.org

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/546694/on-tyranny-by-timothy-snyder

www.annahalprin.org

S3E11 Tom Haviv

Anyone who takes Jewish sacred texts seriously has to care about how we interpret these stories, which means how these storeis and myths are re-told, invested with new dimensions and meanings, in each generation. The stories would get old and become dead, useless, if we insisted that they mean to us what they meant to a jew who lived 1000 years ago. They gain life when we renarrate them, so to speak.

We are grappling in America and Israel both, with the collapse of earlier narratives about what those nations mean. The people who make up these nations do not share an overarching narrative that binds them. Our stories seem broken, and disfunctional.

This week's guest, Tom Haviv, thinks about narratives, how they work and what it means when they break - when they stop working. Tom is the co-founder and Executive Director of Ayin Press, an independent publishing platform and interdisciplinary creative studio rooted in Jewish culture. He is also an artist and a poet in his own right.

With Ayin Press Tom and his co-founder Eden Perlstein have created an outlet and inspiration for superb Jewish work, and work that reaches beyond the Jewish world as well. Ayin published Daniela Molnar's Protocols: An Erasure, which you've heard about on this podcast and a visit to their website http://ayinpress.org/ will reveal an impressive range of new works, from philosophy, to mysticism, to a Jewish tarot deck and more.

But Tom's own life story and his poetic work digs deep into myth and narrative, and what they mean for our lives and our world. He was the perfect partner for an exploration of this topic which is perhaps more relevant now than it has been in at least a generation.

Enjoy the conversation with Tom Haviv.

Links-----

www.tomhaviv.com

www.ayinpress.org

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Summer schedule update: Art Lab is slowing down for the summer — fewer new episodes (about one a month), plus some re-released favorites. Behind the scenes, we're prepping for our Jerusalem Biennale exhibition this September and developing our next fellowship and artist workshops. Note: in re-released episodes you'll hear the old name, "The Genesis" — same podcast, we just changed our name to the Art/Lab Podcast. Support Jewish art and artists at artlabpdx.org/donate.

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I sit down with Art/Lab director Shoshana Gugenheim—my longtime collaborator—to clarify what changed since Co/Lab went on hiatus and Art/Lab spun out as its own org and we tackle the basic question: why a Jewish contemporary arts fellowship, and why now? We talk about creativity as core to being human and Jewish, and how Art/Lab serves artists and audiences who don't always find a home in synagogues or legacy institutions.

We reflect on October 7 and the year that followed: how Jewish artists across the country were censored or sidelined, and how our cohort became a rare room where people could bring divergent views, grief, and complexity without an ideological litmus test. That experience also shaped the (paused-for-now) gallery vision: a space for experimentation and public-facing work by contemporary Jewish artists in the Pacific Northwest.

Then we lay out what Art/Lab looks like today: the flagship nine-month fellowship (this year's theme: memory), public workshops drawn from our growing network of 38 artists, this podcast, deep partnerships with the Oregon Jewish Museum and Eastside Jewish Commons, and new educators joining our text study series. We also share two big updates: Art/Lab's selection for the 2026 Jerusalem Biennale and fresh support from CANVAS—along with the real-world fundraising trade-offs arts programs face.

Finally, Shoshana name-checks what she's loving right now and we close with some breads-and-spreads talk and an open invite to learn more, get involved, or support the work.

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture.

Links from the Show

•

Art/Lab website — https://www.artlabpdx.org/

•

CANVAS — https://bycanvas.org/

•

Jerusalem Biennale — https://jerusalembiennale.org/

•

Oregon Jewish Museum & Center for Holocaust Education — https://www.ojmche.org/

•

Eastside Jewish Commons — https://ejcpdx.org/

•

Guerrilla Girls at the Getty — "How to Be a Guerrilla Girl" (Getty Research Institute) — getty.edu

One of our recent guests, David Winitsky, was asked to recommend a work of art he loves — he chose Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. I found myself returning to its insomnia plague scene: a plague that causes forgetting so total that the community must label everything just to function ("this is a cow, you must milk it") — a meditation on what happens when a society tries to forget its political violence and darker episodes. The novel insists that memory is essential to identity, individual and collective. America feels like it's walking into a forgetting plague of its own making — asked to forget the norms of democracy, and asked to forget the harder parts of our past.

Memory and forgetting have been on my mind. Jews are commanded to remember, but being Jewish has also always meant forgetting — every generation, ours included, has had to let go of some of what came before in order to recreate itself. I wanted to talk through all of this, so I sat down with Rachel Atias — a wonderful writer with a fertile mind — on day one of her Art Lab alumnihood. (This cohort of Art Lab artists just completed the program; she's the first to be interviewed, with more voices to come.) Rachel recently taught a workshop on forgetting and on writing the pieces of our forgotten selves, at The Shuk, the Jewish Day of Learning sponsored by Art/Lab along with the Jewish Federation here in Portland. Forgetting came up a lot in our conversation — but so did hope, and whether hope is warranted.

I think you'll enjoy this one, and enjoy getting to know Rachel's writing. Links in the show notes as usual. Enjoy the conversation.

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture.

Links

Art/Lab: artlabpdx.org/

Rachel's Website: rachelattias.com

Gefilte Fish — Portland Review: portlandreview.org/gefilte-fish-by-rachel-attias/

Pond Scum — Does It Have Pockets: https://www.doesithavepockets.com/fiction/rachel-attias

A Fish in the Bathtub: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fish_in_the_Bathtub

Judy Margles, longtime director of the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, joins me to talk about the institution she spent a career building — and the tensions built into its dual mission of Jewish cultural memory and Holocaust education. We discuss how Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education (OJMCHE) "third leg," pluralism, became the connective tissue between those two mandates, and how October 7th has complicated that commitment both toward the broader world and within the Jewish community itself. Judy shares a story about discovering that every parent in her friend group had a child at the Gaza rallies, and what that revealed about generational change. The conversation moves into the state of Jewish arts and culture right now — from the fight over the Israel Pavilion at the Venice Biennale to the movement of art across borders during wartime — and into bigger questions: what makes art endure, whether artists owe the Jewish community anything, and where Jewish culture actually comes from. Enjoy.

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose.

Links

•

Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture: http://artlabpdx.org/

•

Our podcast on Youtube: @theartlabpodcast

•

Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education: https://www.ojmche.org/

•

Rothko Chapel, Houston: https://rothkochapel.org/

•

The Jewish Museum, New York — current exhibitions (including the Walter Benjamin photography show Judy references): https://thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/

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Portland Art Museum: https://portlandartmuseum.org/

I think about language a lot. Understanding and translating Hebrew is a core part of what keeps me busy and engaged, and in my study of Kabbalah I often confront the limits of what language can convey. But language isn't just a philosophical puzzle — in our broader culture it's being used and abused, deployed in culture wars, for political division and demagoguery. Language can also be a form of self-determination, of pushing back against oppression.

Think of how Jews in the late 19th century reclaimed Hebrew — turning it from a sacred religious tongue into a living secular language. In doing so, they largely turned away from Yiddish, the vernacular of diaspora Jewish life. Hebrew was the language of return; Yiddish was the language of exile.

But in recent decades, Yiddish itself has undergone its own reclamation — not as a language of exile, but of resistance. For many Jews outside or critical of the Zionist mainstream, Yiddish carries a different kind of Jewish identity: diasporic, radical, rooted in solidarity and working-class organizing. You may recall my conversation with Mark Rubin, who draws on some of that same tradition in his own protest music. Today's guests are very much in that spirit.

Maia Brown and Stefanie Brendler of Brivele are a Seattle-based Jewish duo making Yiddish music rooted in anti-fascist, anarchist, and labor organizing. Their latest album draws from the Proletpen — radical Yiddish writers working in New York between the 1920s and 1950s — and the music is as urgent as anything being made today.

We talk about what drew them to Yiddish, how punk shaped their sound, and what it means to perform this music in Jewish spaces right now, when the community is so fractured. It's a rich, sometimes challenging conversation. I'll say upfront: my guests hold strong views on what's happening in Gaza — views I don't entirely share, and said so during our conversation. I think that exchange is worth hearing, and I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

Enjoy the episode.

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose

Notes

Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture: artlabpdx.org

https://www.brivele.com/

YIVO Encyclopedia entry on Yiddish: https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/235

Information on Dora Teitleboim: hcongressforjewishculture.org/people/4097/Taytlboym-Dora

Jewish artists have always found themselves in relationship with the world around them. Sometimes that relationship is generative. Sometimes it is uneasy. Often it requires artists to negotiate Jewish identity alongside broader ideas of citizenship, Americanness, Western culture, inherited artistic forms, and the cultural languages in which they work.

That tension has become a recurring theme of the Art/Lab Podcast. But it is not new. Jewish artists and Jewish culture have always been shaped by the surrounding world — responding to it, resisting it, borrowing from it, arguing with it, and transforming it.

In this episode, Rabbi Josh Rose speaks with David Winitsky, founder and Executive Artistic Director of the Jewish Plays Project, the nation's leading development house for contemporary Jewish theater. David has spent years thinking about how Jewish theater has changed over time, what questions Jewish artists are asking now, and what it means to create serious Jewish culture in the 21st century.

David has directed and assisted on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regionally, with work connected to institutions including Paper Mill Playhouse, Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre, New World Stages, and others. Through the Jewish Plays Project, he has helped develop 49 plays, 27 of which have gone on to production or further development in New York, London, Tel Aviv, and across the United States.

This conversation explores what makes a play Jewish, how contemporary Jewish theater moves beyond inherited mid-century stories, and why Jewish culture needs not only institutional support but active participation. David is a sharp and generous thinker about Jewish art, theater, identity, and the role of culture in shaping Jewish meaning today.

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture.

Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts & Culture artlabpdx.org

Jewish Plays Project: jewishplaysproject.org/ Jewish Playwriting Contest: https://jewishplaysproject.org/jewish-playwriting-contest/ One Hundred Years of Solitude: broadwaybooks.net/book/9780060883287

Hi friends, and welcome to the Art Lab podcast. I'm Rabbi Josh.

My guest this week is Brontë Grimm, an Art Lab alum and multimedia artist whose work wrestles with difficult Jewish and other themes, including disability, grief, pain, and suffering.

In this conversation, Brontë and I talk about work that is visually striking and sometimes difficult to behold, but that also carries its own kind of tender beauty. We also discuss her experience as part of the Art/Lab cohort that began just after October 7th, how that moment affected her work, and how different aspects of her identity — including her Jewish identity — find their way into her creative process.

You can find this episode, along with our other conversations, on YouTube. Our channel's new name is Art Lab Podcast, and our handle is @theartlabpodcast, where you can watch this and other conversations about Jewish arts and culture on video.

In this case, Brontë does not appear on screen, but throughout the conversation we've woven in examples of her work. As we speak, you'll be able to see images of the pieces we're discussing.

I think you'll appreciate this conversation with Brontë Grimm, and I hope you'll give it a listen.

And again, please make a note of our new YouTube home: the channel is Art Lab Podcast, and the handle is @theartlabpodcast.

Thanks so much for listening and watching.

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose.

Links

Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts & Cultulre: artlabpdx.org

Art/Lab Podcast at Youtube: @theartlabpodcast

Bronte Grimm's Website: brontegrimm.weebly.com

Shoshana Gugenheim Kedem: shoshanagugenheim.com/

Expressionism at the Tate: tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/expressionists/exhibition-guide

This is a Greatest Hits episode - a re-release of the second part of my conversation with Lou Cove, from Season 2 Episode 21 (the interview spanned episdoes 20 & 21).

Lou Cove is the director of CANVAS, an organization that is very important to Art/Lab, in terms of funding, guidance, netwworking iwth other Jewish creative organizations, and inspiration. Art/ Lab is part of the CANVAS network. Lou heads up CANVAS, but his impact is far greater than that.

He's an author, a speaker, and really a maven in the field of nonprofit fundraising. But his professional life has been about standing at the center of Jewish creativity and the kind of renewal in Jewish arts and culture that's been such an important part of the story of the last generation.

Lou is a champion fundraiser. He has raised more than $75 million for the causes he cares most about, and he has really used that skill and his insights into how to get people connected to one another and how to motivate people and to how to inspire people to really breathe new life into the Jewish world.

He was the former executive director of Reboot, a network of leading young Jewish creatives devoted to rebooting modern Jewish culture such as digital entrepreneurs at Google and YouTube, creators of TV shows and films like Lost, Orange is the New Black, Transparent, Anchorman and Star Trek, journalists in the New York Times, et cetera.

I am actually part of reboot myself. So that's another thing that Lou and I have in common. Besides music and many other things, it was a total joy to talk to him. So this is the second part of the conversation.

I'm re-releasing this one today in part because it touches upon some of the themes that will show up in upcoming episodes.

So. Enjoy my conversation with Lou Cove. Thanks so much for listening.

Links

Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts & Culture: artlabpdx.org

CANVAS: bycanvas.org

Lou's personal website: loucove.com