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

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 debu...

A Christmas message (!) from Rabbi Josh

Rabbi Josh Rose sits down with writer Nikki Schulak to talk about humor as survival strategy, artistic method, and truth-telling device. What begins as a discussion of comedy quickly opens into an exploration of trauma, Jewish family life, grief, and the way humor can both conceal and reveal what hurts most. Nikki reflects on how comedy functioned in her childhood, in her eccentric Jewish family,...

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 synagog...

THIS THURSDAY, DECEMBER 4TH AT 7:30 PM AT THE EASTSIDE JEWISH COMMONS IN PORTLAND YOU CAN COME LEARN IN PERSON WITH THE GUEST ON THIS EPISODE, RABBI ADINA ALLEN. GO TO ARTLABPDX.ORG FOR TICKETS. DON'T MISS THIS WONDERFUL TEACHER!   *This is a re-release of Episode 20 from this season.*   On this show I've continued to explore the boundary between Jewish culture and Jewish religion. We've talked ab...

Don't miss Art/Lab's special guest Rabbi Adina Allen (a guest in episode 20 of this season) IN PORTLAND THIS THURSDAY at the Eastside Jewish Commons. Go to artlabpdx.org for the registration link.    In this week's episode, I talk with puppeteer and theater maker Ora Fruchter about what actually happens when an object comes alive on stage. Ora walks me into the inner mechanics of puppetry in a way...

In this episode I sit down with illustrator Youki Iimori for a frank conversation about the realities of building an artistic life—creative identity, comparison, intention, and the pressure to make work that "sells."  Youki was part of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture's third cohort.  Youki talks openly about early talent, hitting a wall of self-comparison, an ADHD diagnosis that arrived much late...

Today's conversation is with artists historian and Jewish educator, Leila Wice, someone whose life pretty much explodes the idea that Judaism has to be either religious or secular, or traditional or creative. In fact, it can be all those things. Leila is an art lab alum but started out as a historian of 19th century Japan, so she's journeyed quite away. She was obsessed with the idea that objects...

Reminder: Stephen Arnoff will be in Portland tomorrow evening - that is Thursday, November 13th - for the Art/Lab event, The Jew-ish Spiritual Wisdom of Bob Dylan | An Evening of Music and Conversation with Dr. Stephen Arnoff (w/special guest Alicia Jo Rabins on violin). If you haven't heard my conversation with Stephen, go back and listen to episode 16 from this season. Such an interesting guy wi...

Today I am speaking with artist Jessica Rehfield, whose work lives at the intersection of art, Jewish identity and resistance. Jessica was in our first art lab cohort and her big, bold paintings at the first exhibition. I can still remember. Jessica is not a wallflower in their work or their life, and is a self-described big old queer Jew. And that Jewish and Queer self understanding isn't just de...

 One of the unexpected pleasures of hosting these conversations with Jewish artists is noticing the recurring themes that emerge without my planning them. Again and again, I see points of convergence between important Jewish religious questions and the experience of artists in their creative work. I continue to hear resonances between between artistic vision and spiritual yearning, between creativ...

One of the enduring questions of Jewish life is this: How do we hold on to individual expression while remaining rooted in inherited tradition? Another is equally urgent: What is the role of art in a world in crisis? My guest today lives at the heart of these tensions and turns them into music. Aaron Kahn is a trumpet soloist, educator, and creative force—described recently as a "Portland-based tr...

Portland residents take note: Today's guest, Stephen Arnoff, will be in Portland on Thursday November 13th at 8pm at the Eastside Jewish Commons as a guest of Art/Lab. Register for this night of Dylan's music and for reflection on Dylan's Jewish spiritual wisdom at artlabpdx.org I've been circling two questions for a long time on this show. First: how do traditions actually stay alive—who keeps th...

You can find this and other episodes on the podcast's Youtube channel, @TheGenesisJewishPodcast I've been thinking lately about the tension between individual artistic expression and the weight of tradition and communal forms in Jewish life—and that's precisely why I was so eager to speak with Holly Goodman. Holly is a writer, teacher, and longtime contributor to The Oregonian. She is also an Art/...

In this episode, Rabbi Josh speaks with writer Daniel Elder , whose deeply personal nonfiction grapples with intimacy, loneliness, and identity. Elder discusses his journey from playful fiction to raw self-revelation, and the ways his involvement with Corporeal Writing opened up a body-centered approach to storytelling. He reflects on the paradox of being an "exhibitionist" who still feels vulnera...

Mariah Berlanga-Shevchuk is the Head of Public Engagement at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education—OJMCHE's first person in that role—where she's widening the museum's public programs and community partnerships.  Before Portland, she co-curated LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes' landmark exhibition "afroLAtinidad: mi casa, my city," a home-shaped journey through Afro-Latinx histori...

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 renarra...

Rabbi Josh talks about his own path from religious to cultural Jew.

Rencently Rabbi Josh and Oregon Book Award winner and Art/Lab Alum Daniela Naomi Molnar sat down for a public conversation at Annie Bloom's Books. They discussed Molnar's recent book (Ayin Press) Protocols: An Erasure.  This beautiful and important work reworks, reimagines, and reflects upon the deeply anti-semitic work The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This episode is a recording of that conve...

***** The deadline for applications for the next Art/Lab Cohort is midnight this coming Saturday August 30th…. If you are a Jewish artist or know someone who is, now's the time! Artists consistently tell us what a powerful experience their time in Art/Lab was. Don't miss out.  Go to artlabpdx.org for the application.  ***** Today  I'm joined by Shir Ly Grisanti, an artist, curator, and cultural le...

Rabbi Josh's reflection: What if Judaism is not a religious tradition, but an artistic one?

 ​  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.  Relevant to the Conversation:    https://merridawnduckler.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Levinas  

Rabbi Josh: Springsteen and Dylan on Art and Politics

Hello, listeners. Yesterday's podcast conversation contained  some editing errors, including the DEADLINE FOR THE ART/LAB FELLOWSHIP.  The deadline is AUGUST 30TH. This has been correected in this version of the conversation. ______  In the 21st century it feels that the seams of our world have come undone. American citizenry is profoundly fractured. Old political allignments have broken apart; no...

Rabbi Josh offers a reflection about art, ideology, art for art's sake, and the current state of affairs for Jewish artists.  Referred to in this episode:  Seamus Heaney's "The Flight Path" https://fawbie.info/the-spirit-level/the-flight-path/ Shostakovich, Lament for a Dead Infant, https://music.apple.com/us/album/from-jewish-folk-poetry-op-79-i-lament-for-a-dead-infant/1452151175?i=1452152698