In this first episode of Disloyal we talk 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.

Sol Davis, Executive Director of the Jewish Museum of Maryland

Liora Ostroff, Painter and Curator-in-Residence at the Jewish Museum of Maryland

Liora Ostroff: Jewish artists have a unique set of tools to challenge dominant narratives in our communities and to inspire change and transformation. To inspire people, to look inwards and also to give people different tools, to think about things differently.

And I think that Jewish institutions have largely ignored the power of contemporary Jewish artists or been afraid of it, because artists have politics and artists will go off the cuff, but there is no living Jewish culture without the arts.

Mark Gunnery: Welcome to Disloyal, a podcast from the Jewish Museum of Maryland. I'm Mark Gunnery, Director of Communications and Content for the Jewish Museum of Maryland, and this is our first episode. So before we get started, I want to tell you about the show.

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 15 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've 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.

So 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, "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, into reclaim the word Disloyal.

So like I said, our first series of episodes is about our art exhibit, A Fence Around The Torah and joining us to discuss it, is Sol Davis. Sol Davis is the Executive Director of the Jewish Museum of Maryland. And I'm also joined by Liora Ostroff. Liora Ostroff is Curator-in-Residence here at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, where she curated A Fence Around The Torah.

She's a painter whose work explores themes like queerness, Jewishness, violence and the idiosyncrasies of life in Baltimore. Liora, can you tell us about A Fence Around The Torah, and the ideas behind it and about your goals for the project?

Liora Ostroff: Yeah. The idea for this project came out of conversations within American Jewish communities, over safety plans and response to antisemitism and white supremacist violence, and also similar conversations about safety and exclusion, within the community. And it also came out of themes in existing contemporary Jewish art and cultural projects, which address the same topics.

I had two separate, but sort of harmonious goals for the project. I really wanted to show contemporary Jewish art and demonstrate the breadth of what Jewish artists are concerned with, and what they make, and give artists the opportunity to present their work in a Jewish context and maybe inspire more art and more work.

And my second goal was that I wanted to open up or change conversations happening within the Jewish community. And I was inspired by contemporary abolitionist thinkers and their use of generative questions. Questions that we can ask ourselves to better understand our own experiences and that really allow us to imagine how the world can be different.

And I think that these goals were harmonious because the artwork really successfully opened up, new ways for people to discuss the topics of safety and unsafety in Jewish life.

Mark Gunnery: Sol Davis, can you tell us about how this project came about and why you wanted to use the Jewish Museum of Maryland gallery space, to show this kind of exhibit?

During that time, I was doing a lot of talking about my museum practice and this was really, I kind of saw this as my first big opportunity to translate, that talk into something that people could experience.

This gallery, called the Feldman Gallery. It's a very large gallery that typically holds traveling exhibits, temporary exhibits, in the museum. Its schedule shifted because COVID shifted, exhibit schedules all over the place and created an opening, which I saw as an opportunity to do a couple of things.

One was I wanted to do some experimentation, with different kinds of museum practice. And the other goal for me was to try to, well expand and diversify the museum's audiences who had attracted. And I've encountered this, what I consider I guess, a kind of truism in Baltimore, which is, people support what they helped to create. I believe in that.

And one of the things we wanted to do, in terms of expanding the audience was really draw, some younger Jewish people and artists, creatives to the museum. So we hired Liora as a Curator-in-Residence.

When I was thinking about experimentation, I actually was thinking of other things, not exhibits, but I also, I wanted to hold on to that truism and practice it all the way through. So just, held that space for Liora to develop the concept, which I think it was brilliant on so many levels.

It was also very multifaceted because it included community conversations, the gallery show, the virtual gallery and has evolved to this podcast and other, modes as well. So I guess overall, I mean, I just feel very fortunate and grateful to have this, thought partner and creative partner in Liora.

Mark Gunnery: Sol, as you mentioned, this exhibit happened in the midst of COVID. Can you speak more to how the pandemic shaped the creation of the exhibit and how you see this exhibit, responding to shifting museum practices during the time of coronavirus?

Sol Davis: Sure. I was just having a conversation with somebody where I said, we were kind of building this project as it flies and that's true. And the museum field is changing so dramatically during COVID.

Again, a lot of my practice principles before the pandemic were about bringing people to a Jewish Museum. And in many ways, what I wanted to do there was disrupt, preconceived the ideas about what a Jewish Museum is, because there is a kind of formulaic, stereotype, which in some cases is true, but also it's also a differentiated field, so there's that.

And at the same time, it seems that the combination of the pandemic, uprisings for racial justice have really shifted some dominant conversations, in the world but I'm specifically thinking about the Jewish community.

And this exhibit also was aimed at, really provoking those conversations, teasing them out where certain things were maybe taboo or boundaried. This project intentionally created, space and platforms for really difficult conversations to be held.

Mark Gunnery: Liora, can you talk about the process of putting the show together? So how did you put the call for submissions out? How did you generate the questions, that you wanted the artist to respond to? How did you decide whose work would get shown and how it would look, in the gallery?

Liora Ostroff: Yeah. So we put out a call for submissions that emphasized these generative questions, that I wrote to frame the project. And the questions, as I said earlier, were kind of inspired by abolitionist thinkers and were really meant to be kind of open ended.

And I posted the call for submissions to a lot of places, including Baltimore and Maryland art pages and resources. I posted it to colleges and synagogues and a couple of other listservs and to Facebook groups. And I think that the Facebook groups were actually the most important part of, getting this call for proposals to reach the right people.

Sol organized a curatorial panel, consisting of representatives from The Council of American Jewish Museums, the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, LABA, The Hendel Center at The Jewish Theological Seminary of America and the Jews of Color Mishpacha Project.

We received about 40 submissions, and the curatorial panel reviewed the work independently before we met to review it together, and independently we asked them to rank the submissions based on the themes, that the work addressed and how well the work addressed those themes, and which if any of the generative questions, each piece of work addressed. And also when we met together, we each stated our own lens in viewing at the work at the beginning of the meeting.

So for example, a huge part of my own lens in viewing this work is that, I'm an artist myself and work primarily in two dimensional forms like in paint and drawing so I tend to think of that as a bias. And we had a lot of interesting conversations about the work, and even disagreements about what should be shown and why. So it was a really interesting conversation.

And ultimately we selected 15 artists, and I arranged the work in the gallery based on, a sort of story that I wanted to tell about how the works relate to each other and to the themes of the show, and to Jewish communal narratives and conversations.

Mark Gunnery: So the show is divided up into five sections. Liora, can you talk to us about those sections and why you wanted to divide up the work that way?

Liora Ostroff: Yeah. So I don't know if you've ever read As I Lay Dying by Faulkner, but I really relate strongly to the character of Cash Bundren whose stream of consciousness is represented as a list, as like a numbered list. It seemed like a simple way for me, to organize the work myself and then when I gave this list titles, it became something that made sense to share out broadly.

The sections are called dissent, queer life, security, dialogues, and narratives. I created those titles, those sections after we had decided which work we were going to show. So the sections were based on, the work that we had selected.

In selecting the work I spent a lot of time looking at it and thinking about it and I noticed a lot of common threads, and I don't remember exactly, but I think that the first common thread to emerge was, dissent because I sort of wanted to use the work in that section as, a framing device for some of the other work.

So for example, Judith Joseph, Spinoza series was kind of a quick hook for connecting things to historical topics and figures. And Danielle Durchlag's film, Dangerous Opinions kind of sets you up to think about, what's safe to say and when it's safe to say, as you walk through the rest of the exhibition.

And to some extent, I think the sections also emerged from the generative questions that we asked the artists to respond to. So several of the artists referenced policing and security, as a direct response to one of the questions in our call for proposals. And I felt that putting their work together was powerful, because the way that they addressed those themes was different.

But I also wanted to make sure that the artists, that were in the security section were responding to those themes on a direct and personal level and not in generalized terms. But I do think that the work could have been arranged in any number of ways. And when I wrote out the outline for the virtual presentations that we've been giving, I thought a lot about where the work could be moved, or how works in different sections relate to each other.

Mark Gunnery: So speaking of the virtual tours. Sol, this wasn't just a gallery show. A key component of A Fence Around The Torah has been the virtual interactive elements.

Including the online gallery, the virtual tours and online conversations and the lead up to the opening. Can you talk about those elements of the exhibit, and how you think they've gone so far?

Sol Davis: Sure. Well, we've learned a few lessons through this pandemic and one of them that we learned was, to plan to operate on multiple tracks. We actually, the community conversations that I mentioned earlier, were initially planned to happen inside of the gallery.

And we built a room, inside the room of the gallery to hold those and we put a lot of thought into the facilitation of those difficult conversations, and holding those conversations in preparation for this gallery show, then the Delta variant of the pandemic came and we had to move those conversations onto Zoom.

So when we were planning for the gallery show, we knew we needed to plan for both, the show in the physical gallery, and also the virtual gallery as well. And a week or so after the gallery show opened, the Omicron variant came and we closed the gallery. So what was already a short durational show of about 10 weeks, I believe, was significantly reduced in terms of the openness of the museum building but at the same time, the virtual gallery just really took off.

There was a lot of exciting activity and conversation, and promotion for the project happening on social media. And it was also driving people to the virtual gallery, where we had 200 to 300 unique visitors every week, for the duration of the 10 weeks that the exhibit was opened, and even extending beyond the closure of the gallery, the virtual gallery continues to have some traction.

And that was exciting at the same time, that we were getting some media. One example was the article that appeared in The Forward online, and those online, especially national publications when they featured, A Fence Around The Torah and drove people to the exhibit and we just kept seeing the momentum grow.

Additionally, just all of the partnerships embedded inside of the structure of the project with the curators and the 15 artists, we all worked very collaboratively to uplift and amplify the work, which also drove people to the virtual gallery, so there was that.

And then as we were, preparing to close the physical gallery started to hold these virtual group tours. And the exhibit just translates very nicely into the online format because it's so multimedia. Liora's developed a really nice, elegant, flow for the whole project.

We've taken a variety of groups through and you can watch a video and then hold space for some conversation. Amongst a group, you can listen to Joy Ladin read poetry, or some of the audio pieces and other video installations that, people can take in together and then react to and have some conversations.

So I really think the project has some long legs because, these themes that the exhibit is organized around there, they seem somewhat timeless, but at the same time urgent at this moment, there's a lot of immediacy around them and we can really see, people eager to have these conversations.

I've been working inside of organized Jewish, communal worlds for 15 years, and some of the conversations I've had, I've just never seen people talk about, these sensitive topics with so much openness and courage. And I think it's very inspiring.

And it's just another reason why I'm glad we entrusted Liora to conceptualize this project because as she said repeatedly, it's... I think one of the major factors beyond things that were mentioned already is just that the force of contemporary art, for opening space, for people to have these discussions.

Mark Gunnery: So Liora, you've been leading these virtual tours for A Fence Around The Torah. What have those been like for you as a curator and as an artist? And are there any moments in those tours that have stood out for you or surprised you?

Liora Ostroff: Yeah. I really like giving the virtual tours because I like art history and art criticism. So putting together this presentation has been like working on an extended art criticism essay, that then people get to come and interact with.

And I think that one thing I've been really proud of is, how the artwork really does elicit responses from people and open up conversations as Sol was just talking about. And several people from Jewish groups have commented that, the dissenter security sections really resonate with them, or that the Mizrahi artist collectives installation in the dialogue, section speaks to their own family history and trauma.

I think that also the content is relatable outside of the Jewish community. The non-Jewish audiences that we've brought in, have said that the themes of the exhibition are widely relatable. One of my friends who's also an artist, was so thrilled by Nikki Green's piece, even though he doesn't know much about Shabbat or about Jewish ritual, he understands the idea and the impulse behind Sabbath crock and relates it to his own work as an artist, and to his own life.

And I think also, one thing that I observed when we were able to be in the space in person is that, people who don't interact a lot with the queer community, feel invited to ask questions or see things in a way that they wouldn't, otherwise we've been able to play Joy Ladin's poem in her own voice, for groups that have come through.

Another thing is that, I learned from Arielle Tonkin, from one of the artists that I've opened up, new ways for them of thinking about their own work, particularly as it relates to hybrid identities. And also another thing is just that, some of the participants in these tours have opened up new ways of thinking about the work for me, through the comments that they've made during the virtual presentations.

Mark Gunnery: Sol, I've heard you say that you think of this exhibit as an intervention. Could you expand on that and tell us how you see A Fence Around The Torah fitting into the world of Jewish arts and culture and museums?

Sol Davis: Sure. I mean, I think it's an intervention around some of the taboos I mentioned earlier or boundaries. This exhibit, it goes into a lot of difficult places, it's done so much work to crack open this space for these conversations. And to really imagine, I guess one... I'm trying to think of how to organize my response to the question about intervention.

One of them is that, Jewish Museums are somewhat reflexively focused on the past, in many ways this is the Jewish Museum of Maryland and many people have spoken to me about it as though it's a Jewish history museum. And of course, part of its charge is, as a public history museum and the preservation of the past.

But I think it also has a responsibility to try to enrich the present and help us imagine the future. And that's one piece that I'm really focused on, is sort of turning the temporal lens towards the future and using Jewish museum spaces, as platforms for imagining Jewish futures.

And this exhibit also has purposefully done that, by encouraging us to think more expansively around Jewish safety, not just specifically about physical security, but in more expansive ways, thinking about emotional harm and moral injury and psychological forms of safety and unsafety.

And then imagining it, purposefully imagining what a more just Jewish future might look like. Those are a couple of the interventions. One is thinking about Jewish futures. Another is breaking some of what was formally a taboo areas for discussion in Jewish community.

Mark Gunnery: Same question to you, Liora. How do you see this exhibit fitting into Jewish arts and culture and museums?

Liora Ostroff: I think that this exhibition shows us how we can ground contemporary art in Jewishness. And I also think that Jewish artists have a unique set of tools to challenge, dominant narratives in our communities and to inspire change and transformation. To inspire people to look inwards and also to give people different rules, to think about things differently.

And I think that Jewish institutions have largely ignored the power of contemporary Jewish artists or been afraid of it, because artists have politics and artists will go off the cuff, but there is no living Jewish culture without the arts.

And I think that, this exhibition can demonstrate also how Jewish institutions can trust artists and culture makers and what we can do and what we can achieve when we do that.

I also think that it's interesting to think about what Sol was just saying, about history museums. And one of the things that I think about is, the lens that we are viewing that history through and who is telling the story. And I think that this exhibition also addresses that.

Mark Gunnery: Sol. I know that you were particularly struck by the poem and graphic called, We Are The Disloyal Ones by Ami Weintraub of the Rebellious Anarchist Young Jews Collective. And that's where this podcast Disloyal got its name. So thank you Ami for that.

I'm curious why that particular piece and this idea of disloyalty moved you so much that you wanted the museum to create a podcast named Disloyal?

Sol Davis: Yeah. I mean, I was really drawn to that piece, those pieces immediately. And I think part of it is, I'm just interested in the ways that epithets in this case like an antisemitic, epithet of disloyalty, how those kinds of epithets can be turned around and co-opted by those who, they're intended to harm, and they can be embraced and imbued with new meanings.

On the one hand, I was also just, somewhat enamored with the design of the Disloyal poster and the way that the Yiddish boy was pronounced inside of it. And then the poem, which did all of that work, to turn the charge of Disloyal as a negative kind of othering, into a uniqueness that was embraced by the author, Ami Weintraub.

And while the exhibit was up, there was the controversy in the Tennessee school district about the book Maus, which does, this was part of the same tradition of taking the epithet of the Nazi, epithet of Jews as a vermin and using that as the framework for a kind of intergenerational, memory project.

And also that, disloyal was adjacent to queer life in Judaism. And I also think that, the word “queer” could also be thought of in similar ways. So all of that kind of stuff was swirling in that one corner of the gallery, where, which ended up being a kind of, an organic landing point where a lot of juicy conversation happened.

Mark Gunnery: So I want to wrap up by asking both of you, if there are any lessons you learned from this project that you are going to take with you in your next artistic or curatorial or museum projects. So I want to start with Liora.

Liora Ostroff: I think part of this was a learning experience for me. So I feel like there are a lot of details that I learned about putting an exhibition together that I would take with me next time.

But I think that one thing that I learned and that stays with me now is just to kind of stick with a vision and also to trust the artists that we're working with.

Which I think I knew intuitively at the beginning because I'm an artist and because I want to present my work the way that I want to present it, but I feel like that was reinforced for me during this project.

Mark Gunnery: Yes, Sol. What have you learned from this project that you're going to take with you?

Sol Davis: I learned so much. I mean, I feel like part of what's happening for me is that, with this project my practice started to catch up with my thinking. I have certain thinking, about museum practice and certain principles.

One that I hold close it's actually comes from a line, from a Susan Sontag essay called, On Courage and Resistance, where she writes that a moral principle is something that puts one at variance with accepted practice. So when we talk about this project being an intervention, I'm thinking about it, as one that's put us at variance with accepted practice in this field.

I don't want to operate from a place of fear or scarcity. And there were so many decisions that had to be made along the way of this project, where I could have fallen back into a place of fear, or concern about scarcity but I didn't.

Also, as Liora was talking about just trusting in our partners, that includes both of you. You know we had a lot of big conversations along the way here, and just kind of acted from that place of trust, in both of you, and so many of our other partners.

The other thing is kind of turning over authorship or, and control because as a person in the position of Executive Director, that is a position of power, but I really wanted to turn this space over, as much as possible to the Curator-in-Residence and trust that person.

And I'm again, going to say it for maybe the third time, that I just feel so fortunate that it was, Liora is the person that I connected with upon arrival here and who's been this amazing creative partner.

The last thing I'll just say is, I also trust enchants, and it just happened along the way that, Mark you lent me this Heschel book. I said, I wanted to do some reading of Heschel, and you gave me these essential writings.

And that's where I found the essay by Heschel titled, Dissent and the epigraph for the entire exhibit which is, Acts of Dissent, proved to be acts of renewal comes from this essay.

And I guess in terms of my final word here, I'll just want to read this other line, because I'm looking at that essay right now where Heschel asks the question, "Is there dissent in Judaism today?" And then he answers it, "Creative dissent comes out of love and faith, offering positive alternatives and a vision."

Mark Gunnery: That's Sol Davis. Sol is the Executive Director of the Jewish Museum of Maryland. Thanks Sol.

Sol Davis: Thank you, Mark.

Mark Gunnery: And I was also talking to Liora Ostroff. Liora Ostroff is Curator-in-Residence here at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, where she curated A Fence Around The Torah and she is a painter, whose work explores themes like queerness, Jewishness, violence, and the idiosyncrasies of life in Baltimore. Liora thanks for joining us.

Liora Ostroff: Thank you, Mark.

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-in-Residence. 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.