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 artists, curators, musicians, historians, archivists, and more. It's hosted by Jewish Museum of Maryland Director of Communications and Content Mark Gunnery.

New episodes every Friday.

Hi, I’m Mark Gunnery, Director of Communications and Content for the Jewish Museum of Maryland, and I want to tell you about our brand new podcast, Disloyal.

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 artists, curators, musicians, historians, archivists, and more.

In the first series of episodes, we’re talking 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 mutual aid mean in today’s world. The exhibit focuses on how people who have been marginalized and excluded from Jewish institutional spaces experience physical and emotional harm and safety. It was on view in person at the Jewish Museum of Maryland this past winter, and lives on online at afencearoundthetorah.com.

Why are we calling this podcast Disloyal?

Well, a common antisemitic trope holds that Jews are disloyal, especially to the state, and the charge of disloyalty has been wielded against Jews for generations. And within Jewish communities, social, religious and political issues are often understood in terms of loyalty and disloyalty.

The Disloyal podcast asks: What does it mean to be loyal or disloyal, to a people, to a state, to an idea, to an artistic practice, to a family, to a political commitment?

The Disloyal podcast takes its name from the poem We Are The Disloyal Ones by Ami Weintraub of the RAYJ (Rebellious Anarchist Young Jews) Collective.

Part of that poem reads, quote,

“The disloyal ones create defiant encampments with the mixed multitudes who remain ungovernable. Together, our beauty turns your curses into blessings.”

We chose to call our podcast Disloyal to do just that, to turn curses into blessings, and to reclaim the word “Disloyal.”

Listen to Disloyal wherever you listen to podcasts, subscribe on your favorite podcast app, or find it online at Jewish Museum M-D dot org. New episodes drop each Friday.

We hope you tune in.

For the Jewish Museum of Maryland, thanks for listening.