Disloyal

“The thing that I am fighting against is the same thing that I think that the impulse to found the Lesbian Herstory Archives in 1974 was. We are in a life struggle project, which is to stop erasure and build stronger coalitions with people that are battling a lot of repression. And I think that liberatory projects absolutely depend on intergenerational knowledge sharing.” -Ariel Goldberg Last year...

Disloyal is back with a live episode!  Mark Gunnery (he/him) and Naomi Rose Weintraub (they/them) hosted a live taping of Disloyal at the Jewish Museum of Maryland on June 1, 2023, to discuss the JMM's latest exhibit, Material/Inheritance: Contemporary Work by New Jewish Culture Fellows , with:  Leora Fridman (she/her), writer, educator, New Jewish Culture Fellow, JMM Curator-in-Residence, a...

Disloyal is back! In this episode, co-hosts Mark Gunnery and Naomi Weintraub speak with Leora Fridman about the Jewish Museum of Maryland's newest exhibit, Material/Inheritance: Contemporary Work by New Jewish Culture Fellows . An exhibition of boundary-pushing, community-building contemporary Jewish art, Material/Inheritance features 30 artists whose work has been supported by the New Jewish Cult...

Welcome back to Disloyal! We’ve been on a production break over the summer, and will be back in your feeds soon with a brand new series about the Jewish Museum of Maryland’s current exhibit Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare.  But this week we have a special episode hosted by Naomi Weintraub (they/them), production assistant for Disloyal and Community Artist-in-Residence at the Jewish Museum...

"If you are able to cook the food you grew up with, you can recreate home wherever you go. " -Annabel Rabiyah In the final installment of our series on A Fence Around The Torah we're joined by two artists who were part of a four-person group multimedia installation for the exhibit titled “I mean…how do you define safety?” Annabel Rabiyah and Arielle Tonkin discuss Jewish Iraqi food, recipes a...

"I enjoy the idea of recontextualizing Christian iconography and Christian symbology in order to replace it with a Jewish perspective that is missing. And I am basically inserting myself and inserting the Jewish perspective into an art historical canon that erased Jewish bodies and Jewish stories." - Rosabel Rosalind Visual artist Rosabel Rosalind discusses the work she contributed to the Jewish M...

Visual artist Judith Joseph discusses the work she contributed to the Jewish Museum of Maryland's exhibit A Fence Around The Torah; a series of hand-pulled woodblock prints about Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza was a 17th century Jewish Dutch philosopher who was excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam for his ideas about God, nature, and philosophy, which were viewed at the time as heretical...

"For any of us who hold hybrid identity and specifically us three, who hold categorically 'impossible' identity, in air quotes, in order for us to breathe and be whole, we have to melt down these false boundaries, because literally we can't exist if they're there." -Arielle Tonkin As part of our ongoing series on the contemporary art exhibit A Fence Around The Torah, we’re joined by three artists...

"I think that any kind of engagement with transness and Jewishness feels exciting to me...It actually feels like not just a trans practice, but actually quite a queer practice, of not seeing yourself reflected in the world around you, and so needing to look deeply, creatively at that world to interpret what you're seeing as queer." -Nicki Green As part of our ongoing series on the art exhibit A Fe...

We discuss two pieces of art in the Jewish Musuem of Maryland's A Fence Around The Torah exhibit. One, In The Kitchen, is an audio play and piece of communal oral history made by and for Jewish women with heritage in Arab lands. As artist Hannah Aliza Goldman puts it, "it explores themes of home, of culinary heritage, of womanhood, of family, and collective memory." The other, Dangerous Opinions,...

"What Jewish life feels like today, as humans, is not reflected by most of our Jewish institutions...I think we all feel that there is a different Jewish experience in the 21st century than what we can even understand from the 20th century. And it's heading in a direction that is like nothing our museums are accustomed to. Jewish life is going to look and feel and present so differently in fifty y...

"G-d for me was of my first model of an out and proud queer person, and a queer person who insisted that the entire community, really the entire world, change themselves to deal with G-d on G-d's own terms. And that's really the core of what became my approach to trans theology." - Joy Ladin We discuss poetry and trans theology with one of the artists featured in A Fence Around The Torah, poet Joy...

In this first episode of Disloyal we talk about A Fence Around The Torah, the Jewish Museum of Maryland's latest contemporary art exhibit. It explores how Jewish communities navigate the concepts of safety and unsafety in traditional, contemporary, and futuristic ways. The fifteen featured artists tap into ancestral and historical Jewish narratives, while imagining what safety, solidarity, and mut...

In our ongoing series on the art exhibit A Fence Around The Torah we talk about Katz Tepper's film Roasted Cockroach for Scale. Here’s how Katz describes the film in their artist statement: “ Roasted Cockroach for Scale expands an intergenerational experience of disability, epigenetic illness, and ableism into a social practice-turned-film project made with my Jewish-Polish-Ukrainian-Israeli-Ameri...

We hear from two artists whose work is featured in A Fence Around The Torah. Val Schlosberg's contribution to the exhibit is a series of clay vessels called golems. Golems are creatures from Jewish mythology that are created using clay and magic in order to protect Jewish communities. Val considers "the golem not only as a vengeful fighter of fascism, but also as an enlivened piece of earth and as...

We talk about physical and emotional safety in Jewish spaces, experiences of Black Jews in predominantly white Jewish institutions, the nourishing power of Shabbat, and the creative possibilities of kosher cooking with an artist and a curator who contributed to A Fence Around The Torah. Marisa Baggett, a multi-discipline creative who, as she puts it, combines contemporary sensibilities with belove...

We talk about reclaiming Jewish ritual, Jewish antifascism, and creating safety without police in Jewish communal spaces with two members of the RAYJ (Rebellious Anarchist Young Jews) Collective. Naomi Weintraub, artist, educator, Artist-in-Residence at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, production assistant for Disloyal Ami Weintraub, teacher, organizer, writer, rabbinical student in the Aleph Ordina...

Welcome to Disloyal, a new podcast from the Jewish Museum of Maryland. Disloyal is a weekly podcast about art, culture and history that uses the Jewish Museum of Maryland’s exhibits, programs, and collections as launchpads for talking about Jewish life today. Disloyal is a place to talk about the political, cultural, and spiritual trends shaping the world through a distinctively Jewish lens with a...