"I enjoy the idea of recontextualizing Christian iconography and Christian symbology in order to replace it with a Jewish perspective that is missing. And I am basically inserting myself and inserting the Jewish perspective into an art historical canon that erased Jewish bodies and Jewish stories."

-Rosabel Rosalind

Visual artist Rosabel Rosalind discusses the work she contributed to the Jewish Museum of Maryland's exhibit A Fence Around The Torah. It's a series of drawings featuring both historical and ahistorical figures like Queen Isabella I of Castile, King Ferdinand II of Aragon, and Holofernes from the deuterocanonical Book of Judith. They are depicted with Hebrew text covering their faces and bodies, watched over by a bird that is present in each drawing. The bird has a human nose, and a stereotypically "Jewish" one, instead of a beak.

We discuss the use of antisemitic tropes and symbols in Jewish art, depictions of Jewish bodies in Christian art, Rosalind's upcoming comic project, and Barbara Streisand.

Rosabel Rosalind is an artist based in Pittsburgh who received her BFA in printmaking, painting, and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University. She’s been included in group exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hyde Park Art Center, and Sullivan Gallery in Chicago, and solo exhibitions at Vienna's Museums Quartier and Improper Walls Gallery.

Liora Ostroff is Curator-In-Residence here at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, where she curated A Fence Around The Torah. She is a painter whose work explores themes like queerness, Jewishness, violence, and the idiosyncrasies of life in Baltimore.