Jewseum

Artist Merav Tzur, through her alter-ego Sarah Gray, has formed a research institute promoting impossible tasks – like recreating the Tree of Knowledge – and performance spaces where everyone can make art. It’s what happens when an artist mixes a kibbutz with a laboratory, then adds YouTube.

Cartoonist and comedian Michael Capozzola describes how humor is truth stretched to its limit, and how he has funneled his Jewish/Italian heritage and ambivalence about technology into his popular comic strips and standup routines.

David Katznelson is all about music. As a founder of the Idelsohn Society, the Grammy-nominated producer helped created the CJM exhibitions Jews on Vinyl and Black Sabbath. In this interview, learn why record covers tell the story of a people, and why “history sounds different when you know where to start listening…”

Ellen Ullman is a writer and computer programmer, whose new novel By Blood takes place in dystopic 1970s San Francisco. We talk with her about the promise and threat of that time in the Bay Area, the difference between human and computer language, and some of the barriers to there being more female programmers.

Comedian Moshe Kasher gets serious (but not too serious) about humor, addiction, and his memoir Kasher in the Rye: The True Tale of a White Boy from Oakland who Became a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16. Also, the comedy club as grad school, and the backlash to his jokes about Hasidic Jews and his deaf parents on Conan.

In "Dissolving Localities," a multi-media installation at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley, Israeli musician, composer, and curator Emmanuel Witzthum created a dialogue between his hometown of Jerusalem and Berkeley. In this conversation, Witzthum explores how contemporary culture, Jewish identity, and Israeli life function best when the “open platform” of art is applied...

Is directing a play similar to designing a building? And in both drama and architecture, when is silence preferable to speech? American Conservatory Theater Artistic Director Carey Perloff, author of the new playHigher, explores the complex rituals of architecture, theater, and memory in her drama about a competition to build a memorial in Israel.

Rachel Schreiber is a historian and artist who works with text and image, often at the same time. Her project Site Reading, which includes photographs of Bay Area places with unexpected stories, was commissioned for the current CJM exhibition California Dreaming: Jewish Life in the Bay Area from the Gold Rush to the Present. In this conversation she explores her artistic process (which begins with...

Biographer Kenneth Silverman on Houdini's upbringing, his Jewishness, his innovations as a performer, and the psychics and mediums he worked to discredit. And then there's the matter of Professor Silvermans's own magical past...

Deborah Oropallo is known for her boundary-blurring mixed media work, but she thinks like a painter. She discusses what artists and magicians have in common, and how she embraces the creative gifts of the digital age.

Poet, teacher, and Girls in Trouble front-woman Alicia Jo Rabins discusses her "religiously Jewish, culturally Protestant" upbringing, and how she gets into the minds and hearts of the biblical women she sings about.

Architect and designer Stanley Saitowitz discusses the ideas behind his thoughtful contemporary structures, and what the iPhone and his new line of modern Judaica have in common.

Renowned conjuror Joshua Jay on truth, deception, the difference between good and great magic, and why there are so many Jewish magicians.

Tiffany Shlain, Director of "Connected: An Autoblogography About Love, Death & Technology", explores the ways contemporary culture uses technology to both isolate and relate.