The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture

(This is a re-release of S3E51)

Jewish artists have always found themselves in relationship with the world around them. Sometimes that relationship is generative. Sometimes it is uneasy. Often it requires artists to negotiate Jewish identity alongside broader ideas of citizenship, Americanness, Western culture, inherited artistic forms, and the cultural languages in which they work.

That tension has become a recurring theme of the Art/Lab Podcast. But it is not new. Jewish artists and Jewish culture have always been shaped by the surrounding world — responding to it, resisting it, borrowing from it...

This is a re-release of S3E2

21st-century Jewish life has been marked by shifting boundaries—exciting for some, but challenging for those accustomed to inherited lines of demarcation. Demographic changes and evolving patterns of observance have blurred the distinctions between movements and reshaped their identities. More challenging still are the shifting boundaries around intra-communal debate, particularly on Israel and Zionism. The Jewish world is fractured along new fault lines, and in the arts—where openness, boundary-pushing, and transgression are often core values—Jewish communities are grappling with what, if anything, Jewish culture stands for collectively.

My...

[This is a re-release of S2E10]

Ketzia Schoneberg is a gifted painter with a unique artistic vision. Her work has been showed widely in galleries in Portland and beyond.  We talk about how her work expresses her personal biography and her Jewish identity, we discuss the impact of Judaism on her life and in her work, and we also tease out some of the conncetions between artistic and religious expression. And, of course, she weighs in on the important question of what is the best Jewish food. Enjoy! 

The Art/Lab...

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CALL FOR ARTISTS! Art/Lab is inviting Pacific Northwest contemporary Jewish artists to apply for the 2027 Artist Fellowship Cohort, which begins in January 2027. Be part of this nine month artist laboratory that explores the intersection of Judaism, creative expression, and contemporary culture in order to inspire new works. The theme of this fifth cohort is Democrisis. More information on the Cohort and a link to the application is at artlabpdx.org

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There is an interesting tension in our work at Art/Lab. Think about how much of Jewish life runs through words. We're...

This is a re-release of S3E6

 ​ In this episode, Merridawn Duckler and Rabbi Josh explore pop culture and high art, Judaism as culture and religion, and challenge these distinctions. Duckler's background as artist and serious student of Jewish religious texts add to the rich conversation. Enjoy. 

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture. 

Relevant to the Conversation: 

https://merridawnduckler.com

https://en...

This is a re-release of Season 3, Episode 36.

In this conversation with playwright Andrea Stolowitz, I found myself moving back and forth with her between cities, art forms, and identities. We begin with the contrast between New York and Portland—how New York's sheer density of artistic life (and vastly stronger funding) can make theater feel culturally central, while Portland as a City has to keep stretching to match the artistic talent here.  We talk about what it means to make live theater now, when audiences are trained toward screens and when nonprofit theaters are financially squeezed into tak...

This is a re-release of Season 3, Episode 20

On this show I've continued to explore the boundary between Jewish culture and Jewish religion. We've talked about for example the flourishing of Yiddish artistic culture in the 19th and 20th century, boldly, undeniably Jewish and largely secular. But we've also found links between Jewish religion and culture, like the continued focus on peoplehood, or the texts of the Jewish tradition, or the urge for transcendence. Today's conversation is all about the place where that line between Jewish creative culture and Jewish spirituality disappears, or is reimagined and leapt over...

Rosh Hashanah is traditionally called the Birthday of the World. I've been thinking about the difference between two ways of talking about the world's beginning. The scientific account describes the world simply coming into being, developing from its earliest state, but our tradition says something different: the world was created. One implication for this podcast: if the world was created, we can approach it the way we approach a work of art, with appreciation and with wonder as to what it means. The Jewish tradition asks us to truly see, not to glance, but to give sustained attention to...

Anyone who takes Jewish sacred texts seriously  has to care about how we interpret these stories, which means how these storeis and myths are re-told, invested with new dimensions and meanings, in each generation.  The stories would get old and become dead, useless, if we insisted that they mean to us what they meant to a jew who lived 1000 years ago. They gain life when we renarrate them, so to speak.

We are grappling in America and Israel both, with the collapse of earlier narratives about what those nations mean. The people who make up these nations do...

My guest today is journalist Rebecca Clarren. Her work has appeared in Mother Jones, High Country News, The Nation, and Indian Country Today. For her reporting, she's won a Hillman Prize, received an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, and earned multiple grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. But as you'll hear in our conversation, she's much more than a journalist.

Her debut novel, which we touch on, is Kickdown, which was shortlisted for the PEN Bellwether Prize. Clarren is also a published poet; her work has appeared in North American Review, Catamaran, CutBank, and Poetry Northwest.

A Reflection by Rabbi Josh

In this episode, I sit down with multi-instrumentalist David Rosman — guitarist, violinist, and klezmer devotee — to talk about how he found his way into klezmer music not through inheritance, but through a winding path: John Zorn's avant-garde Jewish compositions, a deep dive into Zohar and Jewish mysticism, and an eventual hunger for community that led him back to tradition. We discuss what "appropriate innovation" looks like inside a musical tradition whose continuity was violently severed, the fidl-pauk-kapelye (the poorer, older, more melancholic wedding-band repertoire he drew on for his latest album), the push-and-pull rhythmic elasticity he compares to Charles Ming...

This is a re-release of Season 3 Episode 43.

Welcome to The Genesis. If you heard my episode with Eric Stern, then you already know that today's guest will be performing at the Portland Jewish Music Festival on Saturday, May 16. If you have not heard that episode, go back and listen to it—you will hear about all the remarkable things happening at this year's festival.

I was especially grateful to have the chance to speak with today's guest, Yair Dalal. Because I was able to talk with Yair before he comes to Portland next mo...

In this episode, Rabbi Josh sits down with Portland-based dancer, choreographer, and Jewish educator Jen Gwirtz to explore the meeting place of Judaism, language, and the body. Gwirtz's 2022 work Kol b'Isha reimagines the ancient rabbinic phrase kol isha erva—"the voice of a woman is nakedness"—through wordplay, dance, and lived experience. Their conversation ranges from the poetic depths of Hebrew to the invisibility of middle-aged women, from rabbinic trauma after the destruction of the Temple to the embodied practice Jen calls "dancing Torah." Along the way, they discuss how Hebrew's verb-driven structure lends itself to movement, why improvisation has...

S3E11 Tom Haviv

Anyone who takes Jewish sacred texts seriously  has to care about how we interpret these stories, which means how these storeis and myths are re-told, invested with new dimensions and meanings, in each generation.  The stories would get old and become dead, useless, if we insisted that they mean to us what they meant to a jew who lived 1000 years ago. They gain life when we renarrate them, so to speak.

We are grappling in America and Israel both, with the collapse of earlier narratives about what those nations mean. The pe...

Summer schedule update: Art Lab is slowing down for the summer — fewer new episodes (about one a month), plus some re-released favorites. Behind the scenes, we're prepping for our Jerusalem Biennale exhibition this September and developing our next fellowship and artist workshops. Note: in re-released episodes you'll hear the old name, "The Genesis" — same podcast, we just changed our name to the Art/Lab Podcast. Support Jewish art and artists at artlabpdx.org/donate.

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I sit down with Art/Lab director Shoshana Gugenheim—my longtime collaborator—to clarify what changed since Co/Lab went on hiatus...

One of our recent guests, David Winitsky, was asked to recommend a work of art he loves — he chose Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. I found myself returning to its insomnia plague scene: a plague that causes forgetting so total that the community must label everything just to function ("this is a cow, you must milk it") — a meditation on what happens when a society tries to forget its political violence and darker episodes. The novel insists that memory is essential to identity, individual and collective. America feels like it's walking into a forgetting plague...

One of our recent guests, David Winitsky, was asked to recommend a work of art he loves — he chose Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. I found myself returning to its insomnia plague scene: a plague that causes forgetting so total that the community must label everything just to function ("this is a cow, you must milk it") — a meditation on what happens when a society tries to forget its political violence and darker episodes. The novel insists that memory is essential to identity, individual and collective.

America feels like it's walking into a forg...

Judy Margles, longtime director of the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, joins me to talk about the institution she spent a career building — and the tensions built into its dual mission of Jewish cultural memory and Holocaust education. We discuss how Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education (OJMCHE) "third leg," pluralism, became the connective tissue between those two mandates, and how October 7th has complicated that commitment both toward the broader world and within the Jewish community itself. Judy shares a story about discovering that every parent in her friend group had a child at...

I think about language a lot. Understanding and translating Hebrew is a core part of what keeps me busy and engaged, and in my study of Kabbalah I often confront the limits of what language can convey. But language isn't just a philosophical puzzle — in our broader culture it's being used and abused, deployed in culture wars, for political division and demagoguery. Language can also be a form of self-determination, of pushing back against oppression.

Think of how Jews in the late 19th century reclaimed Hebrew — turning it from a sacred religious tongue into a living secular lang...

Jewish artists have always found themselves in relationship with the world around them. Sometimes that relationship is generative. Sometimes it is uneasy. Often it requires artists to negotiate Jewish identity alongside broader ideas of citizenship, Americanness, Western culture, inherited artistic forms, and the cultural languages in which they work.

That tension has become a recurring theme of the Art/Lab Podcast. But it is not new. Jewish artists and Jewish culture have always been shaped by the surrounding world — responding to it, resisting it, borrowing from it, arguing with it, and transforming it.

In this ep...

Hi friends, and welcome to the Art Lab podcast. I'm Rabbi Josh.

My guest this week is Brontë Grimm, an Art Lab alum and multimedia artist whose work wrestles with difficult Jewish and other themes, including disability, grief, pain, and suffering.

In this conversation, Brontë and I talk about work that is visually striking and sometimes difficult to behold, but that also carries its own kind of tender beauty. We also discuss her experience as part of the Art/Lab cohort that began just after October 7th, how that moment affected her work, and how di...

This is a Greatest Hits episode - a re-release of the second part of my conversation with Lou Cove, from Season 2 Episode 21 (the interview spanned episdoes 20 & 21). 

Lou Cove is the director of CANVAS, an organization that is very important to Art/Lab, in terms of funding, guidance, netwworking iwth other Jewish creative organizations, and inspiration.   Art/ Lab is part of the CANVAS network.  Lou heads up CANVAS, but his impact is far greater than that.  

He's an author, a speaker, and really a maven in the field of nonprofit fundraising. But his professional life has been...

Welcome to The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture (previously The Genesis).

Mark Rubin is a multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter, bassist, tuba player, bandleader, producer, and educator whose work sits at the  crossroads of American roots music and Jewish culture. 

Mark has spent more than three decades moving across musical boundaries: bluegrass, country, western swing, Tex-Mex, polka, klezmer, Roma brass, Cajun music, punk, and old-time American string-band traditions. His own shorthand for his recent work is "Southern Americana from a Jewish POV."  

He first became widely known as a co-founder of the Aust...

Here's one of my favorite stories from the Talmud. I hope you find some inspiration in it. 

Please note that starting next week the podcast will have a new name: The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture.  If you are a subscriber you don't need to change a thing. You will notice some changes in the artwork for the podcast (see below), but everything else will remain the same.  But do make a note about the new name so you can tell other folks what to look for when they need great podcasts! 

Th...

We are re-releasing this episode recorded back in February because our guest is coming to Portland for a residency starting May 18th.  But even if you're not here in the City of Roses the conversation is worth re-visiting. It's one of my favorites and Cara offers a lot to think about in her approach. 

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Original Introduction: 

In this episode I sit down with artist Cara Levine and we discuss how grief informs her work in tangible ways. Cara's work is on exhibit right now at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Hol...

Rabbi Josh hosts Amitai Man and Talia Erdal of Jerusalem's Zamru Ensemble, a Fuchsberg Center project, ahead of Zamru's June 8–10 Portland residency presented with ArtLab. They describe Zamru as a network that began as a fellowship for prayer leaders and musicians and grew into weekly prayer circles and a touring ensemble creating participatory musical-prayer spaces rather than performances. Amitai (Jerusalem-based clarinetist/singer/composer with Orthodox Mizrachi roots) and Talia (cellist/composer/prayer leader, principal cellist of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, raised secular and later Orthodox) discuss bridging Israeli religious–secular divides, finding spirituality and ecstasy in prayer, and how post...

Welcome to The Genesis. I'm Rabbi Josh.

My guest this week is Yankl Falk. We've been on a bit of a tear interviewing musicians—Michelle Alany, Yair Dalal, and now Yankl Falk, who is a fabulous klezmer musician and a wonderful person. If you live in Portland, Oregon, you may have heard Yankl playing around the city with his fabulous band.

We talk not just about klezmer, but about growing up Jewish and growing up in a particular kind of Jewish world. We talk about Yiddish and Yiddish culture, and then, of course, we talk abo...

Welcome to The Genesis. If you heard my episode with Eric Stern, then you already know that today's guest will be performing at the Portland Jewish Music Festival on Saturday, May 16. If you have not heard that episode, go back and listen to it—you will hear about all the remarkable things happening at this year's festival.

I was especially grateful to have the chance to speak with today's guest, Yair Dalal. Because I was able to talk with Yair before he comes to Portland next month, I thought it was only right to include a little of...

My guest this week is Eric Stern. If you're a long time listener to the podcast, you may remember the episode that I did with Eric way back when, but that time it was really just a goal to get to know Eric as a musician and as a creative person, which he is. But this time I have Eric on because he is the Director of Programming and Cultural Arts Ambassador at the East Side Jewish Commons, which is hosting the festival.  It's coming up on from May 6th to May 17th Eric and I  and I use th...

 My guest this week is Eric Stern. If you're a long time listener to the podcast, you may remember the episode that I did with Eric way back when, but that time it was really just a goal to get to know Eric as a musician and as a creative person, which he is. But this time I have Eric on because he is the Director of Programming and Cultural Arts Ambassador at the East Side Jewish Commons, which is hosting the festival.  It's coming up on from May 6th to May 17th Eric and I  and I use the...

 Welcome to the genesis. In this episode, I talk with violinist, vocalist, and composer Michelle Elani, who was part of the first art lab cohort way back when. She is a musician who weaves together different musical and cultural universes into a totally unique and beautiful fabric.

Michelle has lit up a great many venues with her music. She's toured internationally with both her own music. And is a supporting artist in various capacities around Europe. She's toured with a fusion rock driven Viking blues band. She's played with the Trans Siberian Orchestra and then sold out t...

Rabbi Josh offers a perspective on the artistic significance of the Exodus.

In this episode, I speak with Portland fused-glass artist Eddy Shuldman, co-founder of ORA: Northwest Jewish Artists, about the long path by which art, teaching, and Jewish life became inseparable for her. Eddy describes how she first turned to art not out of artistic ambition, but as a discipline of humility while working with at-risk youth: she wanted to keep learning hard things, failing publicly, and modeling perseverance for her students. That path eventually led her from stained glass to fused glass, where, as she puts it, the medium finally came alive for her. We talk about the technical u...

In this episode, I speak with painter Dana Nehdaran about art, memory, and the complexity of Jewish-Iranian identity. Dana resists being reduced to a label and prefers to think of himself simply as a painter, but our conversation shows how deeply history and identity can still inform an artist's work without confining it. We discuss his upbringing in Iran in a traditional but not especially religious Jewish family, the Jewish community of his hometown, and the way he came to create Esther's Children, his series based on archival photographs of Iranian Jewish life. Dana describes how those images allowed...

We're starting something new here at the podcast. Periodically, we're going to Jewish invite artists to share their work directly with you.

So today we bring you Daniela Naomi Molnar reading three of her poems. Daniela is an Art/Lab alum. I interviewed her for this podcast, so you might be familiar with her work. I interviewed her back in season number one and last season she and I hosted a conversation at Annie Bloom Books.

You may also know Daniella from her published work. Daniella's debut book Chorus won the 2024 Oregon Book Award for...

In this conversation with playwright Andrea Stolowitz, I found myself moving back and forth with her between cities, art forms, and identities. We begin with the contrast between New York and Portland—how New York's sheer density of artistic life (and vastly stronger funding) can make theater feel culturally central, while Portland as a City has to keep stretching to match the artistic talent here.  We talk about what it means to make live theater now, when audiences are trained toward screens and when nonprofit theaters are financially squeezed into taking fewer risks. Andrea describes theater as an "artisanal bre...

My guest this week is Steve Marcus, a New York–based artist who's on our radar because he's currently on exhibit at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. His work is visually striking—sometimes funny, always interesting—and it's a genuinely profound engagement with Jewish ideas and identity through the language of pop culture.

A lot of his aesthetic is rooted in the comic-book, counterculture world of artists like Robert Crumb and others who rose to prominence in the '60s and '70s, but Steve puts a distinctly Jewish twist on it. And if you...

In this episode, I speak with filmmaker and journalist Toby Perl Freilich about why some subjects demand the documentary form. Freilich contrasts writing's breadth with film's "shallow medium that packs a punch," arguing that moving images—especially archival footage—can create an unusually immediate kind of understanding.

Our discussion centers on  Freilich's feature documentary Maintenance Artist, centered on Mierle Laderman Ukeles—best known as the long-time artist-in-residence for the New York City Department of Sanitation.  That movie, along with several others, are featured as part of the Portland Jewish Film Festival later this month. 

We explore t...

In this second part of my conversation with Dana Lynn Lewis, she reflects on how art can be  "political" even when it isn't issuing explicit slogans: in a culture that underfunds artists and treats art as decor, simply insisting that creative work matters is political.  We get into the difference between message-forward political art and art that opens a capacious vessel—inviting people to express through their shared humanity without hammering them with ideology.

A centerpiece is Dana's participatory project "Clearing"—hundreds  of tiny anonymous envelopes people filled out with whatever they wanted to "clear," sent from around...