Courageous Encounters: Disloyal Live On Material/Inheritance

Episode 17 • 11th August 2023 • Disloyal • Jewish Museum of Maryland

Naomi Rose Weintraub: Disloyal is a podcast committed to a broad representation of thought ideas and creative imaginings. The opinions expressed by guests on this podcast do not necessarily represent the opinions of the staff management board, or volunteers of the Jewish Museum of Maryland.

Rabbi Mónica Gomery: I think we are living right now in a time of vibrant revival of Jewish cultural and spiritual and political production. I think that revival at its best involves a really courageous encounter with what we've inherited, both what we want to preserve or recover from our past, which can sometimes be kept out of our reach through assimilation, or through heteropatriarchy, or whatever it is. And also it's a revival that includes lifting up what we want to transform, or speaking back to our tradition, and how we want to be in critical dialogue with what we've inherited, not by rejecting Judaism, but by really engaging with it on a deep level.

Naomi Rose Weintraub: Welcome to Disloyal, a podcast from the Jewish Museum of Maryland. I'm Naomi Rose Weintraub, and I'm here with my co-host Mark Gunnery. Mark, how are you doing?

Mark Gunnery: I'm doing great, Naomi. How are you doing?

Naomi Rose Weintraub: I'm good too. And I'm really excited to get to share today's episode. It's a live recording that we did earlier this year, part of our occasional Disloyal Live series. It featured a conversation about our recent exhibit, Material/Inheritance, contemporary work by New Jewish Culture Fellows with curator Leora Fridman, artist Adam Golfer and curatorial panelists, Rabbi Mónica Gomery.

Mark Gunnery: I'm really excited about this episode too. If you want to learn more about this exhibit, visit materialinheritance.com. So without further ado, here's the show.

Naomi Rose Weintraub: Let's go, all right, so good evening and welcome to this episode of Disloyal Podcast. If you're new here, Disloyal is a podcast from the Jewish Museum of Maryland. I'm Naomi Rose Weintraub, community artist in residence here at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, and co-host of the Disloyal podcast.

Mark Gunnery: And I'm Mark Gunnery. I'm the director of communications and content here at the JMM, and I'm the other co-host of the Disloyal podcast.

Naomi Rose Weintraub: We are very excited because we're currently recording with an in-house studio audience.

Mark Gunnery: That's right. Thank you to everyone who came out tonight who's joining us tonight at the JMM, and everyone listening to this recording in the future, which I guess would be your present now, listener. So this episode of Disloyal is all about JMM'S. Exhibit Material/Inheritance, Contemporary Work by New Jewish Culture Fellows. Material/Inheritance is a really exciting exhibit. It features 30 different artists whose work has been supported by the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, which we'll hear a little bit more about tonight. The artists work across and between genres and new media, video performance, painting, poetry, sculpture, and more.

Naomi Rose Weintraub: So right now we are joined by the curator of the exhibit and the JMM's curator in residence, Leora Fridman. Leora Fridman is a writer whose work is concerned with issues of identity, care, ability, and embodiment. She's the author of Static Palace, a collection of essays about chronic illness, art and politics, and My Fault, selected by Eileen Miles for the Cleveland State University Press First Book Prize, in addition to other books of prose, poetry and translation. She has nonfiction and fiction books coming out soon too, and she has taught online and in-person universities, homes, retreat centers, and collaborates widely with artists, writers, community groups and museums.

Leora is currently a faculty associate in the narrative medicine program at Columbia University. We interviewed Leora in a wonderful recent episode of Disloyal, which you can check out at disloyalpodcast.com, or anywhere you listen to podcasts. Good to have you back as always, Leora.

Leora Fridman: Thanks so much for having me.

Mark Gunnery: Okay, can we give it up to Leora?

We are also joined by one of the artists featured in the show, Adam Golfer. Adam Golfer is an artist and filmmaker based in New York City. He had solo exhibitions at places like the Brooklyn Artist Space, the 92nd Street Y, and the Goethe Institute of Washington DC. And he's been part of many group exhibitions too. He's a recipient of the Snyder Prize in photography, and Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation Grant, and a Puffin Foundation grant. His short films have been featured at the Frameline Film Festival, Outfest Fusion Film Festival, and NewFest Film Festival. He holds an MFA from Hunter College, and he's a proud member of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective. Welcome, Adam.

Adam Golfer: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

ction, Might Kindred, won the: 2021

Her poems have been awarded the 2022 Sappho Prize for Women's Poets, and the 2020 Minola Review poetry Contest. Her poetry has been published in places like Four-Way Review, Muzzle, Waxwing and Black Warrior Review, among other journals. Mónica serves as a rabbi at Kol Tzedek Synagogue and on the faculty of SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. She's also a co-founder of Let My People Sing. Welcome, Mónica.

Rabbi Mónica Gomery: Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here.

Mark Gunnery: Okay, let's jump right in. I want to start by giving everyone a few minutes to talk about themselves, their work and how they're involved with Material/Inheritance. Let's start with Adam Golfer. Can you tell us a little bit about who you are, what kind of art you make, and what your contribution to Material/Inheritance is?

Adam Golfer: Sure. Well, thanks again for having me. My name's Adam. I'm a filmmaker and a photographer primarily. I went to the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, so it's nice to be home today, visiting. And I studied interdisciplinary media art at Hunter College for my MFA, but most of my work deals with memory and landscape, and the ways in which family histories are intertwined with bigger sociopolitical histories.

So in my case, whether that has to do with histories for my family, which have to do with the Holocaust, and the aftermath, and the immigrant experience of my family moving to the United States, or current geopolitical conflicts that are happening presently in Israel and Palestine, the work that I have in the show right now came about actually during really the beginning days of the pandemic when things were really restricted, and people were not moving around and travel was essentially off the table.

And I'm the type of person that likes to go out and make work and bring it back into the studio, but without being able to do that I found myself sort of lost. And what I inevitably did was start to dig through my own archive of images that I've been making and collecting over almost 20 years, really since living in Baltimore. And that inevitably led me back into narratives that I have again and again revisited in my work. A lot of them having to do with losing my dad when I was in college, and thinking about my relationship with him that was abruptly cut off when I was 21. And so the dialogue with my dad became one way into this work, where I was pulling video stills from home movies in which he's talking to the camera, or talking to me, and starting to intersperse different strands of different projects that I had worked on that were left hanging.

And it started to form into a living archive that deals heavily with mourning. Mourning for my own personal losses through family or through friends, but also feeling very much of the moment when I was starting to make it that the earth was mourning. And so, the projects start to form into what I'm referring to it as a living archive, because I am adding images to it still. And so, the work that's in the gallery right now is actually a three channel slide projection, with something like 240 images, but it's part of a book project that's 500 pages and growing, and it's just perpetually in process as I look back and forward simultaneously. So there's a lot of fragments of different ideas relating to these narratives of Holocaust histories, Israel/Palestine histories, family histories, and also trying to reckon with the moment of COVID and being really separated from the people around me that I love.

So, one of the main things in the projection is a Zoom funeral for my cousin that I watched from my desk in New York, and just everything converged into this moment of watching her kibbutz gather around her remains essentially, and feeling like I couldn't really reach it. And just trying to think about even today like Mo is on Zoom, and that we're so used to these types of disjointed, or stitched together ways of communicating as part of our normal way of life now.

So, that's the work that's in the show, but I came into the show through my affiliation with the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, which is a low residency that runs as a nine-month program that I'm sure we're going to talk about, but that all the artists in the show essentially have passed through this Fellowship, and are all dedicated to very leftist, progressive politics in their thinking about what Judaism is.

Naomi Rose Weintraub: Rabbi Mónica Gomery, what about you? Can you tell us a little bit about who you are, what your creative work is like, and how you were involved in this project?

Rabbi Mónica Gomery: Sure. So, I'm calling in from unseated Lenni Lenape land in West Philadelphia. This is where I live, and I work in this neighborhood as one of the rabbis at Kol Tzedek Synagogue, which is a intergenerational, multiracial Jewish community that hopes to be spiritually rigorous and politically courageous together. I'm also a poet, and I recently published my second full length collection.

So, I do a lot of teetering back and forth between those two roles and modes. And in my rabbinic work, I teach Talmud also through SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva, which is a home for Torah learning through the lens of queer and trans lives. And I think the uniting thread through all of that work is that I'm really passionate about supporting people who've been marginalized from ancient and ancestral spiritual practices to gain access to their traditions as a resource for empowerment in their own lives, and as a resource for transformation and healing in the world.

And I was blessed to be involved in the Material/Inheritance Show as a part of the curatorial panel, which means that I interacted with many of the pieces that are in the show at an early stage, and I was invited to think critically and collaboratively and expansively about their inclusion in the exhibit.

Mark Gunnery: And Leora Fridman, can you introduce yourself to our listeners and tell us a little bit about your connection to Material/Inheritance?

Leora Fridman: Yeah, so happy, always an honor to be back on Disloyal. I became involved with Material/Inheritance originally through my own involvement through the New Jewish Culture Fellowship as Adam did. I came to the New Jewish Culture Fellowship when I was writing what's going to be my third book, which was the first book that I was working on that was the most explicitly Jewish and its themes, but also boundary pushing. The book is a lot about Jewish relationships to bodies and embodiment, and the inheritance of trauma through the body, how we relate to that, how we relate to that in contemporary moment, how we relate to that in reflecting upon history.

And I was looking for organizational support, as writers and artists often are, and I came upon the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, which at that point was pretty new. It had only had two cohorts at that point. And I related to some of the things we've been talking about. My year ended up being the kind of deep COVID year of the New Jewish culture Fellowship. And the Fellowship, as Adam alluded to a little bit, supports what we tend to call risk taking or boundary pushing Jewish artists, both financially and communally. Financially, in that we each receive kind of a small stipend to support some kind of project, and also the people meet to support one another's work, the development of that work.

And what I decided to do in order to support the work that I was doing was to convene a reading group about Jewish embodiment, to bring texts with a group of people primarily who ended up being New Jewish Culture Fellows, but it was also open to other people as well who were interested in those topics, and facilitating conversations led by the text that we are reading together. And for me, it was a really natural fit. I'm an educator in various contexts in addition to being a writer. And so for me, a lot of the way that I integrate information is by facilitating experiences with and for other people, and finding ways to have conversations about things, especially things that are difficult to talk about.

So for me, it really opened up a lot in the book to be able to talk about my work and my concerns with a group of other artists from a lot of different kinds of genres, and a lot of non-artists as well who were just interested in those topics. So, I pretty immediately felt like very enveloped in this very dynamic and expansive Jewish arts community because of that, because the New Jewish Culture Fellowship operates in that way, but also because I was particularly operating in a community building mode in my project. And then through that work, and then also through a few other curatorial projects that I did in Jewish spaces and in non-Jewish spaces, I came into contact with the JMM at a time when Sol Davis and Maia Ipp was the director of the New Jewish Culture Fellowship were, I think, brainstorming at that point about how to create something like this, how to create something like this exhibition that would celebrate the work of New Jewish Culture Fellows.

And I was given the honor of helping to curate this work and helping to make this take shape in physical form with the support of Mónica, as well as several other curatorial board members.

Naomi Rose Weintraub: And it was our honor to have you, so wow, okay. We have three amazing people here today that we're talking to, that is very clear. So Adam, let's jump into what you were talking about a little bit with your multichannel slide projection piece titled Kaddish. In this work, I've noticed that the images are very intimate and personal, as you talked about a little bit. Can you speak a little bit about how you chose the images that you did once you went back and looked at those 20 years of work, and then when you placed them together in the ways that you did, the sequential choices that you made?

Adam Golfer: Yeah, sure. I think the process of selecting images and sequencing them is a very intuitive one for me. And what I started to say before is that because the specter of these different ghosts, in a way, from my family just come in and out, both losing my dad, losing my cousin, another friend from Baltimore passed away, and all of them permeate throughout the work. But the heaviness of that is only one element of how I want the work to function. And so, there will be moments that are heavy, and picture of my dad in the hospital, but then there's a picture of the moon or followed by a picture of my partner's pink underpants, and then followed by a rainbow in Iceland. I think what I'm really interested in is that it's a thicket of emotions and memories that are all competing to be at the front all the time.

you went into the gallery at: 11:05

There might be a Nazi reenactor, next to my grandmother's hands, next to anything, really, but there's text on the bottom of a lot of the images and I treated that as subtitles for the work. So sometimes there's multi-slide stories that go through. They are a voice that's narrating a motion sequence that's broken down into stills, and one such sequence is the one of my cousin [inaudible 00:19:00] funeral on Zoom. There's an out of out-of-body experience of trying to reckon with grief and absurdity of trying to engage in the sadness of this moment, while also just making dumb observations about the things happening in the frame, because I wasn't actually, physically there. So I think a lot of that work is about what rectangles we look through to access experiences and memory, and trying to smash those things together in ways that are hopefully surprising.

Naomi Rose Weintraub: It also, I don't know if you want to say anything about this, Mónica, but it also makes me think about your work, and the ways that you write poems about death and embodiment and physicality and playfulness and plants, all in the same poem, and how that's also a core aesthetic and ethical gesture.

Rabbi Mónica Gomery: Yeah, thank you so much for that. I was so struck by the language of, "A thicket of emotions and experiences." And right when you said it, Adam, I felt like, "Oh, that's such a great description of what I experience when I'm arranging a collection of poetry." And the whole point is you're kind of bringing all these disparate valences and textures and experiences and images together for the sake of a greater whole, but I love thinking about it how would you depict that in visual art? There's the constantly shifting sequence of images that conjure that, and it's also my experience of the Material/Inheritance show as a whole is that it's so poly-vocal, there's so much variety, everything is happening at once and it feels like a very true depiction of art and life.

Mark Gunnery: Rabbi Mónica, I want to stay with you here for a second. So, you are a rabbi and you sat on the curatorial panel for this show. As someone who's deeply involved in Jewish community building and Jewish cultural production, I'm curious how you see the work in Material/Inheritance fitting into Jewish life today. And after Mónica talks, I want to hear from y'all too.

Rabbi Mónica Gomery: Yeah, I see so many points of connection between the show and contemporary Jewish life. It's such a pleasure to think about it, and to experience it in different modalities. I think we are living right now in a time of vibrant revival of Jewish cultural and spiritual and political production. It's what this podcast is devoted to, I think is creating a platform to give some of that revival a voice.

And I think that revival, at its best, involves a really courageous encounter with what we've inherited, both what we want to preserve or recover from our past, which can sometimes be kept out of our reach through assimilation, or through hetero patriarchy, or whatever it is. And also it's a revival that includes lifting up what we want to transform, or speaking back to our tradition, and how we want to be in critical dialogue with what we've inherited, not by rejecting Judaism, but by really engaging with it on a deep level.

I think that's a very old cycle. I'm excited to talk more about that together. I think that cycle is built into Jewish tradition, which has reinterpretation and evolution at the heart of it. It's a living, changing organism. It's an Etz Chaim, a tree of life. And what I love about this show is that it showcases how we do that in our time. It's, like I said before, it's poly-vocal, it's diasporic, it exists at the intersections of ritual life and technology, at the intersections of queerness and tradition. I think it really bravely talks back to some of the oppressive expressions of Jewishness in our time, like the Israeli occupation of Palestine, like expressions of Jewish wealth in America. It grieves environmental destruction and global warfare. It engages with Christian hegemony and antisemitism.

And maybe my favorite part is that the show does all of that and simultaneously lifts up so many joyful, almost euphoric, expressions of Jewish life. So there's this multiplicity to it. It feels like this incredible abundant cross-section of Jewish life today, and of what the role of a Jewish artist can and should be in the midst of all of that, in our time. And it feels like a very honest depiction to me, this rich depiction across a wide range of creative and intellectual and spiritual and emotional engagements, deep engagements with Jewishness and Judaism, that there's this fullness to it. There's so much packed into it.

And I think that feels true to me, that when we engage deeply in Jewish life, both celebrating it and speaking back to it, wrestling with it, it helps us access the tools we need for lament, the tools we need for critical and political engagement, and the tools we need for a fuller sense of embodiment and resilience. So, every time I interact with the show, I just feel very energized and very hopeful about being alive in this time, and the gift of receiving this authentic, courageous, wholehearted, artistic expression from the artists among us.

Mark Gunnery: What do you all think, what do you think about where this show fits into Jewish life and culture today?

Leora Fridman: I think that Mónica can speak best to this on an institutional level. Seeing Jewish life, the primary lens that I have on Jewish life is through the cultural, in the sense of arts and culture. One of the things I was thinking about earlier when we were talking about the role of grief, and the way that grief weaves through some of the work in the show, is the way that that grief is also echoing the grief of assimilation, which Mónica touched on. And I think that a lot of what I see in this show is this cycling through grief and renewal, in this really deep and effusive, I think, to echo what Mónica was saying, this really effusive desire to re-encounter inheritance, and to re-inherit in a certain way, to find new ways to echo the title of the show, to make that inheritance into material.

And I think that that is also really grounded in our politics of the moment. It's really coming out of a place of a lot of people working to work with the cultural material that they've inherited, as opposed to culturally appropriating, finding spiritual connection to their own ethnic inheritance, religious inheritance, even if they grew up in households like I did that were very much assimilated households, that really had very little contact with traditional Jewish religious life.

And I think there is this constant echoing between the grief and the renewal, because the renewal is always done in fragments. Which of course, as I think Mónica was gesturing towards too, is a very Jewish way of doing things, ingathering the fragments. And I think that a lot of the artists in the show are really working, as Adam beautifully articulated about his own work too, are really working to come to terms with the reality of a life built in and from fragmentation.

Adam Golfer: Yeah, I can speak to that a little bit as well because I totally agree with what both of you have been articulating. Someone from my current or recent, but current NJCF cohort, Katz Tepper, said something like when we were reflecting on the year of looking at one another's work and trying to support each other, and trying to be open to accepting what we're all working on separately side by side, Kat said... And I'm going to totally misquote them, "But maybe the thing that defines a certain type of Jewish art making, at least in our group, is this fraught relationship to Judaism." In terms of renewal or fragmentedness it's like wrestling with something because you don't actually know where you stand with it, and from my personal experience, I haven't been in an institutional Jewish space in an art context in 15 years, because I perpetually avoided it because of politics relating to Israel.

And so, I just have stayed away, because I deeply disagree with what a lot of Jewish institutional spaces continue to maintain as the status quo about what the occupation is in Palestine, and various interconnected politics that everybody here is probably somewhat familiar with. But being back in a space where I feel like other artists around me are coming from similar places of being concerned, and wrestling with what these opinions or stances could be, feels like being surrounded by comrades, in a certain kind of way. Even though I have a problem with that word also, but there's a sense that you're working side by side, and I think anybody in the show that you look at their work, they're all grappling with what their relationship is to Jewish culture, and that can be the most secular or the most spiritual. There's a whole gamut of that. So, I am very excited about the ideas that have come out of the show and to be a part of it, because it feels really true to what my current experience is.

Naomi Rose Weintraub: Yeah, it's also really interesting that you brought up and quoted Katz Tepper because they're one of the, I think maybe the only person, that is in the current cohort for the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, and was a part of our contemporary art show last year, A Fence Around The Torah: Safety and Unsafety and Jewish Life. And so, it's just interesting to think about them grappling with that when they are being put in now the same situation that all the New Jewish Culture Fellows were given, but being able to show their contemporary work in a Jewish museum institutional space. It goes with our next question also, luckily, and I'm going to throw this to you first, Adam, but I'm also curious what Mónica and Leora think about this, but you're showing your work in a Jewish space, the Jewish Museum of Maryland, what do you think about having your work shown in a Jewish institution framed as contemporary Jewish art, specifically?

Adam Golfer: It makes me deeply uncomfortable. And that is part of my own fraught relationship to it. It's like I love it, I feel at home in it and I'm running away from it all the time. But I think it's because I'm constantly trying to define what is it? What does that even mean? What is art in a Jewish context? What is a Jewish artist? What is an artist who sometimes references Jewish things? And I don't have any answers to any of them. All I'll say, I guess, is that it feels sort of empowering, knowing, again, what I was just alluding to, that it feels like there's community in this space, because there are so many people investigating aspects of their own identities within that umbrella, that whether I'm making work about my dad or someone else is making work about queer identity, or someone else's making work about environmental things, or birth, there's just a multiplicity of voices that are very exciting to see all in one room. Even though it loosely falls within this J word.

Leora Fridman: The J word. Yeah, I think I love following this thread of this very Jewish idea of definition by what one is not. In poetics we have this term negative capability, which is it refers to the capacity to hold the unknowable, or the capacity to deal with what is unknown. And I love the intersection of these two ideas, that one is sort of almost like the dealing publicly, like Adam is, with the reality of feeling embarrassed, and feeling confused about how we want to identify. And at the same time seeing that skillset as an essential one, that the ability to deal with what we don't know, what we're ashamed of, what we're confused about, is something that the artist can face, and the artist has tools to face.

Mark Gunnery: Mónica, do you have any thoughts?

Rabbi Mónica Gomery: Yeah, I did. I wanted to name that I have been so personally galvanized by the essay that Maia Ipp wrote, Kaddish for an Unborn Avant-Garde, which I know has motivated some of the core questions and frameworks through which Leora curated this show. And in that essay, Maia has this analysis of how Jewish institutions have missed the mark with regard to Jewish artists. And I feel really moved that the artists in this show can show their work and be hosted in a Jewish museum, and I hope this is the kind of artwork that we can invite into Jewish communities and institutions.

When we were curating the show, one of the questions that Leora invited the curatorial panel to consider, when we were viewing the artist submissions, was about how their work blends or bends genres. And I experienced that blending across the whole exhibition. This idea that we don't have one simple or clean narrative, as people engaging with Judaism and Jewishness, that it's messy and that it's open to interpretation, and that all of that doesn't have to be a threat to Jewish communal life, but can actually be an indicator of our strength and of our gifts, that has been really meaningful and it feels like a reframe, or like Leora said, a kind of reinheritance of how we define ourselves by our complexity.

I'm sad that there are very few places to show this kind of work, and that there are so few Jewish institutions that would welcome this kind of artistic expression. A number of the artists, many of the artists I think in this show, have talked about how they couldn't necessarily show this work in a Jewish institution anywhere else, without this framework and this lens, or without the support of the New Jewish Culture Fellowship. And I hope that this show, and also the fence around the Torah Show that precedes it, are indicators of a changing landscape.

Mark Gunnery: I want to see if anyone in the audience has any questions. We have a question up here.

Audience Member 1: Oh, hi. I was thinking about the work by Shterna Goldbloom that's in the exhibit. I know we don't have it in front of us here, but it's the little scrolls. And so I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the artistic qualities of it, because I found it very interesting, but didn't quite know how to think about it. It is built to resemble a Torah scroll, but it's very contemporary secular writing. And then when you think of, "Oh, is this a new Torah? Is it holy, is it secular?" It's also written very informally, whereas the Torah we might think of is written in prose or poetry. I was wondering about the artistic qualities of that piece.

Naomi Rose Weintraub: It's funny you bring that up. I was also going to ask about that, because of the way that you were talking about your work, Adam, it felt very scroll-like kind of, when you're creating this circular rotating thing of images. And I know that Shterna's in the same cohort as you, and so you've been able to talk and discuss as photographers together. So, I'm so glad you brought that up. Yeah.

Leora Fridman:I was just going to comment on the beautiful way that you asked that question, which I think actually really says a lot about the way that a lot of this work is positioned. You brought up a couple of like, "Well, maybe it's this, maybe it's the Torah you read this way, but it's doing this in a different way, and how am I supposed to think about that?" And I think that's exactly the frame. As a curator, that's exactly the kind of reaction that I want people to have to this work, is a lot more open questions. And also the possibility of offering your own ideas about what things might mean.

And I think that you're already speaking to it really beautifully. Also, for listeners who aren't looking at the work, if you want to look up the work, the project is called Feygeles, it's a set of scrolls. There're two in the gallery. A set of scrolls highlighting the lived experiences of queer Jews in particular, and their relationship to Jewishness, their relationship to queerness. As you are articulating, it's presented in a scroll format and also includes images, includes screenshots from texts, includes a lot of contemporary text. So I think the invitation is definitely to consider how these contemporary voices might be made sacred in being presented in that form, and how they are making themselves sacred in the forms that they're using, to understand themselves in contexts that they're traditionally and often have been excluded from.

Mark Gunnery: Okay. Do you have any thoughts, either of you about Feygeles, or any of the other pieces?

Adam Golfer: Well, my thought about it is adjacent to what Leora just said, but that at least my impression of Shterna's work is that the use of the scroll is questioning about who and what is inscribed into history, or who what is inscribed into culture. And I think by writing, talking to different younger queer Jews, like Shterna is trying to, in many ways, question not only the power structures that have defined this document that Jews historically have followed for thousands of years, into this smaller, intimate space that is a bit ambiguous. And I think similarly, the openness of it is maybe what is really interesting to me about it.

Mark Gunnery: Do you have any thoughts, Mónica?

Rabbi Mónica Gomery: Yeah, I love these pieces so much. I can't really look at them without wanting to weep. I share the interpretations that Adam and Leora have already offered, and I think two things come up immediately for me when I see them. I pulled them up in front of me just now. One is a teaching that one of my professors in rabbinical school offered, which is that every single human being that we encounter in front of us in our lives, we should know that we are in the presence of a living Torah scroll, a living sefer Torah. And that's what these are.

And just thinking about embodiment and how we treat a Torah scroll, in some ways, maybe in the tenderest ways, that we also treat and honor human life and human bodies at our best when we're living up to the most humanizing parts of Jewish tradition when it comes to the body. So work that is scribed on a cloth, or includes the name of the divine is buried in the earth in a genizah, in exactly the way that we would bury a human body after a death. We kiss the Torah, the way we kiss human beings. There's just a lot, I think, to be said for the relationship between the body of a Torah scroll and the body of a human being. And I think these pieces are really calling out the disconnect between the way queer lives and experiences are not honored as sacred sources of Torah in so many Jewish communities. And just making it larger than life, making it the size of a scroll, putting it in public space. So very, very moved by them.

Naomi Rose Weintraub: So, I think we have time for one more audience question and then we're going to wrap up the episode.

Mark Gunnery: Any other questions?

Naomi Rose Weintraub: Oh, we have a question over here. Wonderful.

Audience Member 2: I was curious with work that's been shown in secular spaces as well as the Jewish space, if it changes in this context, or how you've experienced the change of the work in this environment, and maybe reactions of viewers and that kind of thing?

Leora Fridman: I can speak to how the work has shifted for me seeing it together here. Some of this work has been shown in other contexts and some of it hasn't, some of it was made particularly for this show. I think for me, and I think this has come up a lot throughout our conversation, for me a lot of what happens when I see this work together is a real sense of how interrelated people's practices are, and how much they're in conversation with one another, even if it's not intentional. There are several pieces in the show about mourning of different kinds, and different valences as Adam mentioned. And not all of those people already were aware of one another's practices, but they really intersect with each other in really interesting ways. And I think for me become this really interesting teaching about how mourning, it can be iterative and context specific.

There's also a lot of work, like we've spoken about, that's about humor and the role of humor in Jewish life. And I think each of the people who made those specific pieces of work probably thought they have their own weird sense of humor. And then when you see it together, it feels related. It feels like family. Which it may or may not be. It may just be because things are placed together in a room. But I think also curatorially, that's always an interesting thing to me, is the minute you put something next to something else, it becomes related, even if it's completely different. And that's also interesting to me.

I think like Adam expressed, I think a lot of the artists in the show had anxiety about showing their work in a Jewish context, to speak to your question a little more specifically, and were nervous about what it would mean for their work. I think a lot of people have found that it has, on the whole, resulted in a really deeply rooted sense of community and new relationships, connecting with old relationships as well. But also some fear about what it means for their work, if it means that their work is going to only be Jewish, or being pigeonholed as such. If it means that their work will have to be about that forever. How other people will see their work. Which these self-consciousness questions are also questions that I think are familiar to many of us.

Adam Golfer:I think there's the anecdote about who would want to be in a club that would have you in the club. That is something I've been thinking about a lot. But I agree with what Leora is saying it's like it does feel like there's conversations between a lot of the work that maybe all of the artists who were not familiar with one another suddenly we're like, "Wait a minute, you're working on this thing that's so similar to what I'm working on, but it actually looks nothing like it, but it's still hitting on the same something."

And I think the something is the subtext of a lot of what's there, even if it's not being said. I also think just personally, the title of my project is Kaddish, and I don't know that I would've necessarily... I was mulling over using that title for a while, because now I'm probably going to butcher this, but in Judaism, like you say the mourner is Kaddish when someone close to you dies. But when I was working on this project, I was thinking more and more about how the words in the actual text don't mention death at all. And that my impression, as a lay person, is that it's actually an affirmation of life, of living. And that if that is something I could express in a space where there's more nuance about the reception of that, that's interesting and new to me, at least, whether or not it's received, it's a space in which it's permissible to maybe go there.

Leora Fridman: It's also just interesting to think about how any piece of work changes with its name, changes with what room it's in. And that's also a magical thing about art making is that every viewer meets it in a different way.

Adam Golfer: Completely.

Mark Gunnery: Mónica, do you have any final thoughts here?

Rabbi Mónica Gomery: Yeah, well, just Adam, you didn't butcher it at all. You nailed it. It was beautiful. Something that I'm curious about with this show, because there's so many artists, because it's so kaleidoscopic and diverse and diasporic, I appreciate about it that we might have these sort of static ideas of what affinity and difference are in relation to this question about Jewish art. Like that when Jewish artists show work in the Jewish space, they're in an echo chamber of sameness. But we know obviously that's not the case about Jewish communities or experiences, and it's definitely not the case about this show.

And I think there's something about how an artist moves between spaces of home or affinity and spaces of bridge building across difference. And for me, all those anxieties that Leora named resonate really deeply. Sometimes I find that space of affinity to be in non-Jewish art spaces, and the space of bridge building across difference to be in Jewish spaces. And sometimes I find that opposite is true, and I'd be so curious to hear from all of the artists in this show how they relate to that dynamic. I think it changes and shifts and that artists move between spaces and worlds in maybe a unique way there.

Mark Gunnery: That's Rabbi Mónica Gomery. Rabbi Mónica Gomery, thanks for joining us on Disloyal today.

Rabbi Mónica Gomery: Thank you so much. It's an honor to be here.

Mark Gunnery: And we also heard from Leora Friedman. Thank you, Leora, back again.

Leora Fridman: Thanks for having me.

Mark Gunnery: And Adam Golfer. Thank you so much.

Adam Golfer: Thank you. It's nice to be here.

Mark Gunnery: Yeah. Thank you all.

Naomi Rose Weintraub: Yeah, thank you.

Thank you so much for listening to today's show. We hope you enjoyed the podcast and we'd love to hear your feedback. You can send us an email to disloyal@jewishmuseummd.org, and follow us on Instagram @jewishmuseum_MD. Visit disloyalpodcast.com, and while you're there, sign up for the Jewish Museum of Maryland email list to stay up to date with everything happening at the museum. Disloyal is a production of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, and it's produced by Mark Gunnery and Naomi Rose Weintraub. Our executive director is Sol Davis. You can subscribe to Disloyal wherever you listen to podcasts. Until next time, take care.

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