We hear from two artists whose work is featured in A Fence Around The Torah.

Val Schlosberg's contribution to the exhibit is a series of clay vessels called golems. Golems are creatures from Jewish mythology that are created using clay and magic in order to protect Jewish communities. Val considers "the golem not only as a vengeful fighter of fascism, but also as an enlivened piece of earth and as a metaphor for the human body."

Coral Cohen is part of a four-artist multimedia installation called I mean...how do you define safety? The installation explores, as the artists wrote in their statement, "what 'safety' means for Jews from Arab lands, who after hundreds to thousands of years of relative safety in the region, were torn from their homes, customs, languages, and ancestral roots upon the establishment of the state of Israel." Coral Cohen devised and directed an audio play along with writer and performer Hannah Aliza Goldman called In The Kitchen.

Val Schlosberg, writer, artist, and educator currently based in Zhigaagoong, also known as Chicago, and working towards ordination as a Hebrew Priestess at the Kohenet Institute

Coral Cohen, director, writer, and performance deviser born and raised in Los Angeles and currently based in Brooklyn, New York, whose short film Wresting Place will premiere this year

Coral Cohen: Through making this piece, we were able to find a way in. And I think that's really what the piece is about, is about how food and cooking is this one small way into a culture that has been taken from us. And a way into relationships with our ancestors who were disconnected from us in so many different ways. And that's through loss of language and their culture and internalized anti-racism, all of these things that disconnected us from our family and our culture. And now being able to, in this small way, connect through food and then the food and the cooking actually opens us up into that connection and that reclamation.

Mark Gunnery: Welcome to Disloyal, a podcast from the Jewish Museum of Maryland. I'm your host, Mark Gunnery. Today on the show, we're continuing our series on 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. I'm speaking with the artists and curators who made the exhibit possible. You can experience the art from this exhibit@afencearoundthetorah.com.

I want to welcome Val Schlosberg. Val Schlosberg is a writer, artist and educator currently based in Zhigaagoong, also known as Chicago. Val got their degree in Art Theory at the University of New South Wales and is currently working towards ordination as a Hebrew Priestess at the Kohenet Institute.

Val's work deals with themes of Jewish mysticism, ecology and ecotheology, speculative futures and apocalypse and gay love and sex. Val created a series of clay vessels or Golems for A Fence Around the Torah. Val Schlosberg, thank you so much for joining us.

Val Schlosberg: Thank you so much, Mark. I'm very delighted to be here.

Mark Gunnery: I'm also joined by Coral Cohen. Coral Cohen is a director, writer and performance deviser born and raised in Los Angeles and currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work interrogates cultural history through personal storytelling and emphasizes creative collaboration and deep engagement with the people and subjects she approaches. Coral has written and directed a short film, Wresting Place, which is slated to premier in this year.

Her submission to A Fence Around the Torah is an audio play entitled In the Kitchen, which is part of a larger group multimedia installation entitled I Mean... How Do You Define Safety? Coral Cohen, thanks for joining us to day.

Coral Cohen: Thank you so much for having me.

Mark Gunnery: So Val, I want to start with you. Can you tell us about the work that you're showing at A Fence Around the Torah?

Val Schlosberg: Yes. My work for the show is five, feisty little Golems.

Mark Gunnery: For people who might not know what's a Golem?

Val Schlosberg: This is absolutely my favorite thing to talk about. The Golem story, which was first recorded around the medieval period, tells of a Jewish population threatened by pogroms. And in order to protect the community, a rabbi goes to the banks of a river and constructs a clay figure called a Golem. Using complex recitation of different combinations of the Hebrew alphabet, the rabbi successfully enlivens the clay and seals it with the word Emeth, which means truth. The Golem awakens and defends the city against antisemitic attacks and then is laid back to rest.

And in some tellings, the Golem gets out of control and wreaks a bit of havoc before being deactivated with the Golem deactivation spell that involves erasing the alef of emet to spell mem, tav, that means dead. The myth has been told and retold usually emerging in times of crisis. And to me, there's something salient about a monster that's so reformable at its essence.

And in particular, as an artist who works with clay, this myth appeals to me. I'm really excited about the idea that clay can take on this anti-fascist life. I also really appreciate that the spell that brings the Golem into life is the alef-bet, this power of language. And in most representations, the Golem doesn't have a mouth or can't speak, but still its power comes from words and language. And I'm a big alef-bet nerd. And I really appreciate that alef, mem, tav, that spells truth is also the first, middle and last letter of the alef-bet.

So to me, there's something about the responsibility that comes with wielding language, the way that words create worlds and the way that in itself, the speaking of truth can be a weapon against fascism.

Mark Gunnery: In your bio, you've identify yourself as a ritualist and a propagandist. Can you explain more what you mean by those two words and how you see ritual and propaganda showing up in the work that you're including in A Fence Around the Torah?

Val Schlosberg: Yes. Thanks for asking that. I tend to see my work as falling into one or both of those categories. And definitely they can be blurry categories for me. For me, the role of a ritualist is to make space. And I am trying to make space in my work for people to meet themselves for some transmission or transformation to be possible. And as for the propagandist piece, that to me is about using my creations, my work and my life to shame, mock, attack Empire and its agents. And at the same time to celebrate and uplift militant joy to express and honor freedom and always to promote homosexuality and anarchy.

Yeah, much of my Jewish ritual life tends to be about uplifting everyday moments and elevating them, blessing them. And a lot of my work in A Fence Around the Torah includes pieces of liturgy or blessings. On one piece, there's the blessing for pursuing justice. And right next to that is a Golem is a spiked bat saying, "No Nazis, no apologists." And on another piece I included the blessing that I say when I rap to fill in just from Hosea 2:21 says, "I will betroth you to me with righteousness and justice and love and compassion." Placing that next to another Golem with a flag. So to me, the combination is about sanctifying and recognizing the holiness of everyday struggle against Empire, against oppression and toward freedom and dignity.

Mark Gunnery: You said that each of the five vessels in your series quote, "respond to a form of unsafety and express a vision of safety and solidarity," end quote. Can you share more about the specific forms of unsafety you were responding to in these vessels?

Val Schlosberg: When Liora Ostroff reached out to me about submitting a proposal for the show, I was immediately excited and challenged by the central provocations, safety and unsafety in Jewish life is a topic. That's rife with trauma inherited, experienced and inflicted. And so I tried to ground my response in that Golem myth, considering the Golem not only as a vengeful fighter of fascism, but also as an enliven piece of earth and also as a metaphor for the human body, which is actually how it appears in Torah.

And then one of the pieces that I made specifically for this show, the piece titled This Living Land. I was thinking about the impossibility of talking about Jewish safety without talking about Palestine. The ways that Zionism is founded on the idea that Jews can only ever be safe in the State of Israel. And the way that this myth has justified the brutal colonization of Palestine and the ongoing ethnic cleansing of people and culture, the destruction of the land there, the burning of Olive trees, the demolition of homes and holy these sites, the violently upheld physical division of the Holy City, it's like very painful.

The title of the piece comes from the last line of Psalm 27, the protective Psalm that's traditionally recited during Elul, the month of return and repentance that says, "How I trusted that I would see God's good in this living land?" In that piece, I'm visioning Jewish futures that are made possible through solidarity, knowing that safety is insured through mutual caretaking of our planet and its people across borders and beyond colonialism.

Mark Gunnery: Coral Cohen, I want to turn to you. You contributed an original theater project to this exhibit titled In the Kitchen, along with your collaborator, Hannah Aliza Goldman. Can you tell us about In the Kitchen?

And then with the pandemic, we no longer could do a full performance. So we did an audio play paired with the recipe box. What was really important about the piece was that it basically featured Hannah's interviews with many women who identified as Mizrahi Jews, Arab Jews or just Jews from Arab lands. And through those interviews, developed some themes.

And then when I came on board, we edited a lot of Hannah's own personal writing, added a little bit more structure to the piece. And then when we made it into an audio play, we paired it with The Recipe Box with Annabel Rabiyah of Awafi Kitchen, who's also part of the installation. And we adapted the piece to fit the recipe so that people would really be making the recipe while listening to the audio piece.

They were both getting instructions for the cooking, as well as the stories and Hannah's own writing. So it's kind of been a long road to get to here. And then what we have presented in the exhibit is four excerpts from the audio play. So it's not the full audio play. It's only these four excerpts I think that are really representative of the piece. And they're paired with some great artifacts from Annabel Rabiyah's Kitchen and family, as well as some beautiful paintings by Arielle Tonkin.

And also the sensory feeling of cooking and what that means for reconnecting to culture. I think what we ended up making with the audio play with the recipe box was something really special in that the audience actually became the performer themselves in listening to the piece in embodying the cooking. They actually experienced what Hannah and what we were trying to communicate with the piece. And I think even though it was a pandemic adaptation, it ended up being the most true form of this piece. And in some way I think the audio play with the recipe box was really a special experience for the people who were able to experience it.

But then in the exhibit, I think how it's presented at the museum as well as online on the virtual exhibit, it's really great because people who weren't able to experience the recipe box still get those stories, still get that audio. A lot of the most I guess, for lack of a better word, potent audio moments are in the excerpts and paired with Annabel's recipes and the paintings. It gives you a different type, but still a real embodiment of what we were trying to communicate in what we were making.

Mark Gunnery: This play and the group installation it's part of, how do you define safety, deals with cultural loss and reclamation for Mizrahi Jews, the Arab Jews and Jews whose ancestors were from Arab lands. Can you talk about how you as an artist reckon with that cultural loss and reclamation both in the creation of your work and in the presentation of it?

Coral Cohen: Yeah. I think that all the work that I do comes from my own questions of my own identity and how I wrestle with them alone. And then I wrestle with them with collaborators, with people. And I think that in creating this piece specifically, it made me understand myself and made me understand my identity so much more in listening to the audio and then having the conversations with Hannah and our other collaborators. And understanding how, although all of our experiences are different, there is a commonality of this yearning of this sense of loss, erasure and disconnection from our ancestors and our culture.

And I think through making this piece, we were able to find a way in. And I think that's really what the piece is about, is about how food and cooking is this one small way into a culture that has been taken from us and a way into relationships with our ancestors who were disconnected from us in so many different ways. And that's through loss of language and their culture and internalized anti-racism.

All of these things disconnected us from our family and our culture and now being able to in this small way, connect through food. And then the food and the cooking actually opens us up into that connection and that reclamation. So I work primarily as a theater artist. So it's always been the way that I get into work is physically through the body and through the senses. And I think that's why experiencing the action of cooking and I'm not like particularly a chef or really deep in the kitchen at all as a person. But just through this project, through my collaboration with Hannah, it opened up in myself so much. And it's not just the food, but the food is just the lens and the door basically.

And then, so in the presentation, I think as I describe the different iterations that this piece went through, I think most successful or purist was the audio play. I think in the presentation, in the exhibit, what was really exciting about that is that the audience was able to listen to those excerpts and be amongst the art of Arielle and the recipes that Annabel contributed. And to really be able to sit in community in a way that with the audio play, the audience was really in their own kitchens having a really isolated experience.

Whereas in the museum, there is a sense of literal space. It's an actual room where all of this work is and the audience can sit there and listen. And really feel that connection through multiple artists and art forms and stimuli. And I think that is really exciting.

And then with the virtual exhibit, I'm really, really happy that we were able to get the virtual exhibit and the audio on that virtual exhibit, because this the most accessible my work has ever been. And that's really exciting to be able to share with anybody in the world who can really experience the piece and the visual art that is paired with it. I'm really excited by the fact that literally anyone in the world can experience it right now. And listen to it multiple times if they want.

And the people for whom they may have felt isolated in their feelings about their identity, whether it's Mizrahi or not, can connect to that community the way that making this piece connected me to my community. And I think overarching ending of the piece is that in that connection and in feeling into that community and culture, it really connects you to yourself and it grounds you in something more than this isolation.

And I think so many of us are feeling both as diasporic Mizrahi Jews in the US, so disconnected in so many different ways from our origins. And being able to have that, show that and for people to listen to it and find that connection and relate in some way to that yearning is really, really special to me. I'm really, really happy to have it out there.

Mark Gunnery: Val, I'm wondering if you have any thoughts here about cultural loss and reclamation, maybe in light of your studies to become a Hebrew priestess at Kohenet Institute or just through your art in general?

Val Schlosberg: Yeah. It's beautiful to hear you speak on that, Coral. And I think for me, so much of my Jewish life and my practice both as an artist and a Jew is about memory and working with the contours of cultural memory. And in a way how that practice of experiencing a lineage, that's for me, ghostly in the sense that it's felt, but not always tangible. It helps me practice a different kind of time travel, helps me be open to creating a speculative culture moving into the future. Yeah.

Mark Gunnery: So Coral, in your artist statement, you and your collaborators wrote quote, "This piece explores the questions, longings and desires of the women who are descendants of those who left. Although much was lost, stolen and erased, remnants of our food, language and other anchors connect us to our ancestors." End quote. Can you talk about why telling the stories of women in particular was important to this project?

Coral Cohen: Yeah. I think it came very organically. I have to say, it originated with Hannah. So it wasn't my decision to do that. Although my other work is also very based in familial memory and specifically matrilineal memory, just as those voices had been so erased. So it certainly wasn't my wheelhouse.

But it came from when Hannah was first commissioned to do this piece, she was asked to basically create a piece about going to Morocco as a Mizrahi Jew and the overarching feeling that she felt as she was trying to articulate what she had experienced, was the overwhelming patriarchy of Morocco and of traveling with her father and how she had experienced her identity was so colored by patriarchy. And so that led her to want to just connect to other women who share this identity and to see what they thought about it and what their feelings were.

And then, so that is how the piece started. It started with just conversations between women. And so it continued in that way. And then one huge theme that came through all of those interviews was cooking with grandma basically. And how the easiest and sometimes the only way to connect back is through cooking and through those generations, through mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, et cetera.

So I think it came so organically, just from the very beginning of the project, in just a real urge to connect to other people and to find other women who might have felt the same way or felt some other different way that maybe informs Hannah's ideas about all of these things. So it really came from Hannah and from the very beginning of the piece and its development.

Mark Gunnery: Val, you wrote that you see your work as being quote, "In service and allyship to my communities and the communities that I'm in solidarity with." End quote. One of your pieces that you mentioned has an image of the Palestinian flag, so I assume Palestinians are one of the communities that you're talking about being in solidarity with. What kind of role do you think that artists and especially Jewish artists have in movements and actions for solidarity, especially the Palestine solidarity movement?

Val Schlosberg: Yeah. Thank you for asking that. I definitely hope that my actions and my work can be in service and in allyship. That's my intention and aspiration. For me, this means not separating my belief that all beings deserve dignity and freedom, from my art or from any other part of my life. So any space that I'm granted access to as a person with privilege as a white Ashkenazi person, in my career I'm going to try and use that space to amplify the calls of people fighting for their dignity. I'm going to try and put the Palestinian flag in the Jewish Museum. Artists with privilege just like anyone in any field or situation I feel have the obligation to shake the table.

I believe in the value of propaganda, as I described it earlier, the value of consistently mocking and attacking Empire and agents of order and evil. I believe in this often quoted idea from Toni Cade Bambara that, "The role of the artist or cultural worker is to make revolutionary irresistible."

And I also really appreciate the words of Rosza Daniel Lang/Levitskywho said that, "What we do as Jewish cultural workers is to act as a channel from the static archive of cultural materials, into the active repertoire of living culture. That we are comrades in our movement's use." And part of my goal as a Jewish artist, making Jewish work is to lift up diasporic culture to claim identity, ritual, liturgy and to make work that's unambiguously Jewish and proud of its Jewishness. And that's also antizionist.

I hope to make work in the world that can convey that Jewish culture, history and the Jewish future don't belong to the state of Israel. And I also want to mention that artists beyond the content of our art have the ability and the obligation to engage in solidarity in direct ways. Things like redistributing resources, money, holding fundraising, art auctions, lending time and skills to create flyers and banners, which are some of my favorite art.

It also means refusing to collude in harm. And I'm thinking in particular right now of many of my friends and peers working on Cadigal land in Sydney, Australia who are engaging right now in a boycott of the Sydney Festival. Because the festival received funding from the Israeli Embassy. And dozens of artists over the past couple of weeks have pulled out in Solidarity with Palestinians, despite being plenty short on paid gigs throughout the pandemic.

So this type of solidarity is really inspiring and crucial. And yeah, knowing that BDS includes institutional, cultural boycott which was a tactic successfully used in apartheid South Africa. It makes sense that artists have a role now to heed those calls and potentially make sacrifices in service of solidarity.

Mark Gunnery: Coral, your piece also addresses Zionism. I'm curious, what you both as an individual and as part of this four-person group installation we're trying to say about Zionism, especially here in an exhibit at a Jewish institution?

Coral Cohen: I think my feelings about Zionism grew alongside my awakening as a Mizrahi person. There is no Mizrahi identity without Zionism. There's no reason why all these disparate communities would all be in one place and able to organize as a group without having been brought to the state of Israel by the Zionist regime.

And Mizrahi are inextricably linked to the oppression of Palestinians because they were brought to Israel to demographically beat the Palestinians. And in that, the Zionist regime had to make their Arabness disappear essentially. And that's a lot of what the piece is about, is about that erasure that came from the movement from their homelands to a new place where they had so much culturally in common with Palestinians way more than they did with their Ashkenazi compatriots, I guess, that there was a huge propagandist effort to disentangle Arab culture, language, food, et cetera from Mizrahi Jews, so that they would not be associated with or be in solidarity with Palestinians.

When the Mizrahi Black Panthers in the '70s were organizing, they were very much in solidarity with Palestinians because they could see how the Zionist regime was treating them as less than because of their closeness to what was seen as the enemy and for so many other reasons. And the Zionist regime brought, like I said, people over to replace Palestinians in often really coercive and in manipulative ways. There's documented that agents of the Israeli government did terrorist actions to the Baghdadi Jewish community so that they would leave a place where they had cultural capital, wealth and social status to go to Israel. And leave their Homeland to go to Israel, where they were treated as second class citizens, where they were promised so much and just treated like animals when they were brought in. And that was in so many communities with the Moroccan community, with the Iranian community.

My grandfather immigrated to Israel when he was 10 years old and was sprayed with deet as a 10-year old. And this is the story of so many Mizrahi people who came from all over the Middle East. So it is through understanding that and learning that and really feeling that I really understood how Zionism is personal to me and that not just in what I was taught as a Jew in America about Zionism, but about how it literally created me.

I would not be here, had my grandfather not come to Israel, had he not met my grandmother, had my mother not grown up in Israel and left because she was discriminated against because of her skin color. So it's personal to me. And I think for so many people and so many people in the interviews, it's really personal because they understand in their bodies how Zionism disconnected them from who they are.

And it's only now that we're able to reconnect in some way. But there's so much loss because of Zionism. It has been a long journey for me personally, to get to this point. I grew up very Zionist. My Ashkenazi side, my father and his whole family were labor Zionists and went to Israel in '69 when my dad was 3 years old to be part of the Zionist Revolution. And that is a huge part of my life. And again, I felt it in my body because I could feel and I could see growing up how my Ashkenazi side of my family treated the Mizrahi side of my family. How my Mizrahi family internalized that treatment, not just from the family, but also from the society that they lived in Israel.

So yeah, I think being proudly Mizrahi, being an artist of Mizrahi descent and making work about this, it's inextricable from Zionism and from reckoning with Zionism and reckoning with what it did to us and also what that meant for Palestinians. So it's really important to me to reckon with that.

And I think especially in a Jewish institution, in a show that's reckoning with safety and unsafety in Jewish community, this is so much of why Mizrahi Jews feel unsafe is because their literal body skin, culture and language is associated with what they are told for so long to hate. Yeah, it's just inextricable. It's in the body. It's in the experience. And the more that you understand, or at least for me, the more that I understood who I was as a Mizrahi person, the more I understood how Zionism was responsible for it, for a lot of the pain of that.

And that's where I am now. And I'm sure that in a year I'll be somewhere else. Probably more antizionist. But right now that's where I'm at. I'm at the point where I've experienced it in my body and so I have to create work about it and I have to be in solidarity.

Mark Gunnery: And Val, my last question for you is that you wrote in your artist statement that, "All golems are real golems." What did you mean by that?

Val Schlosberg: What I mean by that, is that anything that you pour intention into, that you bless with language and that you invoke as truth, has real power to come alive, to move beyond the purpose that you created it for and to either create or confront violence.

Mark Gunnery: Val Schlosberg, Coral Cohen. Thank you so much.

Val Schlosberg: Thank you.

Coral Cohen: Thank you.

Mark Gunnery: Thank you so much for listening to Disloyal. We hope you enjoyed the podcast. And we'd love to hear your feedback. Our email address is disloyal@jewishmuseummd.org. You can follow us on Twitter @jewishmuseummd. Or on Instagram @jewishmuseum_md. And if you're in Baltimore, come visit. Go to jewishmuseummd.org for more information and to become a member if you're interested in supporting content like this podcast. Visit afencearoundthetorah.com to check out our latest art exhibit.

Disloyal is a production of the Jewish Museum of Maryland and is produced and hosted by me, Mark Gunnery. With production assistants from Naomi Weintraub, the Jewish Museum of Maryland's community artist and residents. Our executive director is Sol Davis. You can subscribe to Disloyal wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes each Friday. Until next time, take care.