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

21st-century Jewish life has been marked by shifting boundaries—exciting for some, but challenging for those accustomed to inherited lines of demarcation. Demographic changes and evolving patterns of observance have blurred the distinctions between movements and reshaped their identities. More challenging still are the shifting boundaries around intra-communal debate, particularly on Israel and Zi...

Documentary Filmmaker Michael Turner and Rabbi Josh Discuss the relationsship between the past, the present and storytelling.  

This is a conversation Rabbi Josh had months ago with Zac Banik, Art/Lab alumnus and habitual Jewish learner and explorer.  Enjoy. 

Daniela Molnar is an award winning poet and visual artist. She and and Rabbi Josh will be together on August 25th at 7pm at Annie Blooms Books in Portland to discuss her stunning new  work Protocols: An Erasure.  This episode is a rebroadcast of Rabbi Josh's conversation with Molnar from Season One of this podcast.  This week and next, and then periodically thereafter we'll be sharing snippets and...

 To explore how music shapes Jewish cultural meaning, this week Rabbi Josh welcomes Eric Stein — mandolinist, bassist, and artistic director of Toronto's Ashkenaz Festival, one of the world's largest celebrations of Jewish music and culture. (And yes, it might be a little confusing — last week's guest was Eric Stern , another multitalented Jewish musician.) Eric Stein has spent more than 25 years...

Josh (Host): Eric Stern builds Jewish community and is a curator of Jewish culture. He's a very interesting, multi-layered renaissance man who is the irector of Programming at Portland's Eastside Jewish Commons, an important player in the emergent Jewish scene here in Portland Oregon.    Eric is also musician, vocalist, accordionist, pianist, composer, arranger, he trained as a classical singer an...

Part two of Rabbi Josh's conversation with Lou Cove, CEO of CANVAS, an organization seeding "The 21st Cultural Renaissance in Jewish Life". 

In this episode, Rabbi welcomes Lou Cove—writer, cultural strategist, and longtime champion of Jewish arts and storytelling—for a rich and personal conversation about Jewish cultural identity, memory, and the power of creative revival. Lou shares the story of how a casual visit to the Yiddish Book Center unexpectedly transformed his life and career. Raised with little connection to Jewish communal...

Today on the podcast, Rabbi Josh speaks with Ahuva S. Zaslavsky — a Portland-based multidisciplinary artist whose work grapples with the raw, layered questions of identity, transformation, and belonging. Ahuva was born and raised in Tel Aviv in a deeply mixed family — Mizrahi and Ashkenazi, traditional and secular — and it wasn't until a move to the United States as an adult that she unexpectedly...

In this episide, Rabbi Shai Held and Rabbi Josh talk about Rabbi Held's book 'Judaism is About Love,' what it means to have love at the center of Jewish teaching, and why so many in the Jewish community don't understand that Love is central to their own tradition. In this moment of cultural conflict, at a time when the Jewish state is engaged in a horrific war, when Jewish communities are finding...

Rabbi Josh continues his weekly additional episode/reflection on Israel.

Today  Rabbi Rachel Joseph steps into the podcast .   She will become, in 2027,  the Senior Rabbi of Congregation Beth Israel, one of the two largest synagogues in Portland.   Rabbi Josh and Rabbi Joseph have known and worked together over the years, and they met in her office to go deep on a range of topics. They talk about what it means to be a "political rabbi" without preaching politics, the c...

This week Rabbi Josh speaks with  Sonya Sanford — a Portland-based writer, culinary educator, recipe developer, and podcast host.   Sonya is the the author of Braids: Recipes from My Pacific Northwest Jewish Kitchen hwihc has delicious Jewish recipes with flavors of the Pacific Northwest. She is also the co-host of the highly rated Food Friends: Home Cooking Made Easy, a podcast that offers practi...

This week we bring you a conversation that Rabbi Josh had recently with Raghad Jaraisy, a Palestinian-Israeli advocating for Palestinian equality and civil rights in Israel. Jaraisy is the Co-Executive Director, along with Ofer Dagan, of Sikkuy Aufoq, "a shared Jewish and Arab nonprofit organization that works to advance equality and partnership between the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel – de...

Rabbi Micah Streiffer is a friend of the podcast, colleague, a teacher of Jewish ideas, and the founder of the Jewish organization Laasok, which is an online center of liberal Jewish teaching - a virtual 'beit midrash.'  We talk about truth claims and what they mean for the Jewish tradition, we discuss Jewish belonging, the changing landscape of Jewish orgnaizational life and a whole lot more. Enj...

This is the first in what will be an ongoing series of reflections about Israel and the Palestinians and the many complex feelings and thoughts that I have and I bet you do too.

This week I have the pleasure of talking with a graduate of Art/Lab's second cohort, illustrator, humorist, observer of life, and Jewish identity navigator Leanne Grabel. Leanne Grabel is a writer, illustrator, performer  and has written and produced numerous spoken-word multi-media shows. Leanne was the 2020 recipient of Soapstone's Bread and Roses Award for contributions to women's literature in...

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 weigh...

Rabbi Josh discusses the political and 'spiritual' significance of freedom as we head into the end of Passover.  Is there a Jewish take on freedom and what's happening in the United States under Donal Trump?  How should Jewish people think about political and spiritual freedom? 

Shoshana Gugenheim Kedem is a social practice artist, a soferet (Torah scribe), activist, and she also happens to be the Director of Art/Lab, our cohort program for Jewish artists.  We have been working together since the inception of Co/Lab and it's been a powerful partnership. Our conversation covers Shoshana's work, her foray into the ethics of parchment making, synagogues and Jewish creativity...

A reflection about the message of Passover and what it means right now. 

My guest this week is Marc Blattner, President and CEO of Portland's Jewish Federation. How are mainstream Jewish institutions adapting to the rapid pace of change in the Jewish world?  What are the limits of adaptability and flexibility as legacy Jewish institutions engage a Jewish world with shifting attitudes towards synagogues, Jewish affiliation, and.... Israel? What does it look like when an...

Gadi Golan is a Jewish human living in Portland Oregon. Gadi's own Jewish bio says a lot about 21st century Jewish life, and we talk about how his traditional-ish upbringing forms the background of this very modern fella.  He has a fascinating tattoo on his arm, but not as fascinating as Gadi himself.  Enjoy this wide-ranging conversations, plus: learn about the very best kind of matza ball! 

This week's Torah portion has quite a bit to teach us about pretending. We may think of pretending as against our instinct for Judaism's love of authenticity. But let's take a closer look and fold some Kurt Vonnegut into the thing.  Rabbi Josh offers a brief refleciton. 

This week Rabbi Josh and Shoshana Gugenheim Kedem - the Director of Co/Lab's Art/Lab program - have a conversation with the Jewish artists who gathered at last month's Art/Lab Multicohort Retreat.  What you get is Jewish artists from a variety of backgrounds, working in a variety of media - a musician, a painter, a writer, to name a few- discussing contemporary Jewish life in the world of the arts...