The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture

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–October 7 trauma intensified the need for communal vulnerability. They explain circle-based listening, facilitation, and music as living prayer, preview Portland workshops, movement improvisation, and a circle at East Side Jewish Commons, and Amitai recommends his album "Simanim," improvisations on Torah cantillation. Hey Portlanders: Don't miss Zamru live in Portland on June 9th at the Eastside Jewish Commons. Ticket links are below! The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose.   Links Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture: artlabpdx.org  Tix for Zamru: https://events.humanitix.com/zamru-or-jerusalem-sound-portland-night Zamru: https://fuchsbergcenter.org/zamru/ Amitai Mann: https://www.amitai-mann.com Talia Erdal: https://www.taliaerdal.com

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 about music. One of the things that's wonderful about Yankl is that he is one of those artists who was an important part of creating the very scene he now inhabits: the klezmer music scene in Portland, Oregon. And that scene, it turns out, was an important part, in some ways, of the klezmer revival that went far beyond Portland. So we talk about all of that, and I think you'll enjoy this conversation with the wonderful Yankl Falk. Make sure to go to the show notes, where you can find out more about him and his great band, and where you can catch him playing around Portland. Yankl Falk will also be part of the Portland Jewish Music Festival, hosted by the Eastside Jewish Commons and co-sponsored by Art/Lab, along with several other Jewish organizations. So that should be on your radar—and this excellent musician and excellent person should be on your radar, too. If you love Jewish music, Jewish creativty and Jewish stories you will enjoy this conversation. The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose. Links Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts & Culture: www.artlabpdx.org Carpathian Pacific Express (Yankl's Band): www.facebook.com/carpathianpacific Yiddish Book Center interview with Yankl: https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/collections/oral-histories/interviews/woh-fi-0001647/jack-yankl-falk-2024 Musicians mentioned in this episode: Naftule Brandwein Dave Tarras The Klezmorim / East Side Wedding Mickey Katz The Barry Sisters Don Byron / Don Byron Plays the Music of Mickey Katz Frank London / The Klezmatics  Robert Johnson Howlin' Wolf

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 his music after our conversation. If you are watching on The Genesis YouTube channel, you will see Yair performing live in a video from his YouTube channel. If you are listening to the audio podcast, you will hear some of his beautiful music. Either way, I wanted to give you a sense of the kind of artist he is. Yair Dalal is a composer, violinist, oud player, singer, and teacher. Over the last several decades, he has released 12 albums that traverse a wide cultural landscape, drawing on Israeli, Jewish, and Middle Eastern musical traditions. His work reflects deep roots in classical European, jazz, and Arabic music, and we talk in this conversation about how he moved among those worlds and, in some sense, returned to his own roots. Dalal's family came to Israel from Baghdad, and his Iraqi heritage is deeply embedded in his music. Alongside his work as a performer and composer, he has devoted himself to preserving endangered musical traditions, especially the Babylonian Jewish-Iraqi musical heritage and the music of the Bedouins. We speak about his time with the Bedouins, and about the desert, which seems in many ways to be his truest home. Over the years, Dalal has performed in concerts and festivals around the world, including at major venues such as Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, at world music festivals from England to Australia and New Zealand, and also in far more intimate settings, including playing with Bedouins in their tents. Beyond his musical life, Yair Dalal is also a peace activist who has devoted much of his energy to building bridges of understanding and creativity among different cultures, especially between Jews and Arabs. In 1994, he performed at the Nobel Peace Prize Gala Concert honoring Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Yasser Arafat. Dalal has received numerous Israeli awards in recognition of both his music and his contribution to Israeli culture. In 2021, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Israeli Ministry of Culture. He has also been honored by other organizations for his dedication to the oud and for his role in bringing its musical traditions to audiences in Israel and abroad. He was also nominated for a Grammy. He has made a profound impact on Israeli music, Israeli culture, and what we now call world music. I think you are really going to enjoy this conversation with Yair Dalal. And you do not want to miss him—or the other musicians performing at the Portland Jewish Music Festival, which is co-sponsored by Art/Lab along with a host of Portland Jewish organizations. Enjoy my conversation with the remarkable Yair Dalal. The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose.   Links Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts & Culture: www.artlabpdx.org Yair Dalal: https://www.yairdalal.com Portland Jewish Music Festival: https://ejcpdx.org/pjmf26 Documentary About Yair, "Ain't Got no Jeep and My Camel Died": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AOSmzIPG7g Documentary about Iraqi-Israeli music and musicians (recommended by Yair): https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=baghdad+bandstand

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 time together on this episode basically to go through some of the highlights over the course of the festival. There are local talents and talents from elsewhere. A range of performances and styles of Jewish music, and also workshops for musicians and all kinds of really, really wonderful things. So Eric is really here to talk about that during this episode, as he and I do, we sometimes wander off to broader topics and what music means and the experience of listening to music. But by and large, this is a chance for you to find out about this festival, which just keeps getting better and better every year under Eric's leadership and the EJ C'S leadership. So Art Lab is a co-sponsor for the Jewish Music Festival, and we would love for you to benefit from this thing. So after you hear the episode, go to the show notes, get your tickets right away, and I look forward to seeing you there. In the meantime, enjoy my conversation with Eric Stern about the Portland Jewish Music Festival. The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose. Links Art/Lab: artlabpdx.org Jewish Music Festival: https://ejcpdx.org/pjmf26 Yair Dalal (headlining the PJMFestival): https://www.yairdalal.com  

 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 theaters performing silent movie film scores in Texas, and she's brought music to packed jazz and blues Listening rooms in Austria led raucous jams and Chilean bars, as well as other international dives and halls. Not to mention an ongoing gig that she has at her current hometown of Portland, Oregon, where she plays regularly at the Laurelthirst. Flowing into her musical soul, into her sound is her background in classical music. Traditional and original Sephardic. That is Judeo Spanish music, Balkan in Israeli song, klezmer, jazz, blues, rock. It's all in there. Michelle and I talk about family musical calling and the search for a sound that feels rooted and free. We discussed the role that music played in her upbringing, how her Jewish identity finds its way into her work and her projects, and what it takes to find one's unique voice. As an artist, but for me, the core and the most delightful part of this conversation is our discussion about the spiritual quest that is part of musical expression. Take a listen. See what  the show notes contain so you can find her recorded music and take in a performance of hers here in Portland or wherever you might be listening here and beyond. Thanks so much for listening to the genesis. The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose.   Links Art/Lab: artlabpdx.org Michelle Alany: michellealany.com, @michellealanymusic, facebook.com/michellealany, youtu.be/JHoX4USW_zE. , www.youtube.com/live/yzXBAX9tFdk?si=Zr89g-QzBlGLup0N, www.youtube.com/live/HVX3vjceVZ0?si=Hviveui1eOfKRtHa Michelle's Allbums: michellealany.bandcamp.com/ Barbès Brooklyn: barbesbrooklyn.com LaurelThirst Public House: laurelthirst.com      

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 unpredictability of glass, the spiritual intensity of working in a fragile medium, and the way Hebrew letters, liturgy, Torah, and Jewish memory become visual form in her work We discuss the (impossible question of) what makes art Jewish, how artists nourish one another in community, and why ORA has mattered so much in Portland Jewish life. Eddy reflects on ORA's origins, its role in creating exhibition and community space for Jewish artists, and the more elusive but more important work it does in helping people connect Jewishly through creativity. We also talk about a powerful piece she created during COVID in response to anti-Black violence, the spiritual process behind her work, and the way Jewish phrases, texts, and experiences can surface in art even when the Jewish content is not overt.  Enjoy this conversation with Eddy Shuldman.   Links Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture: artlabpdx.org ORA Northwest Jewish Artists: https://www.northwestjewishartists.org Eddy's Blogspot: https://sparksofspiritglass.blogspot.com Rabbi Goldie Milgram: http://www.reclaimingjudaism.org/  

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 him to explore both his own connection to Jewish history and a broader claim: that Jewish history in Iran is inseparable from Iranian history itself. We also turn to Dana's more recent self-portrait work, especially his "Interrogation Room" series, in which he repeatedly paints himself under stark light as a way of asking, again and again, "Who are you?" That opens into a rich conversation about painting as self-examination, the tension between talent and technique, and the painter's way of seeing color, shadow, and form. Throughout, Dana emerges as both fiercely individual and deeply rooted: an Iranian-born Jewish artist who is wary of identity categories, yet whose work preserves, reimagines, and complicates Jewish-Iranian memory in striking ways. The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose. Links: Art/Lab: artlabpdx.org Dana's website where you can also encounter the work of his brother Darius Nehdaran: https://www.nehdaran.com/ Dana's Instagram (@dananehdaran_studio):  https://www.instagram.com/dananehdaran_studio/ Dana's Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@dananehdaran1030 Esther's Children catalogue on Dana's site:  https://www.nehdaran.com/assets/pdf/dana-nehdaran-esther%27s-children-dubai-exhibition-catalogue.pdf Esther's Children (the Book): https://www.facebook.com/houman.sarshar 

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 poetry and her work Protocols: An Erasure, which is an extended erasure poem was published in 2025. That extended work is composed from the foundational antisemitic forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion, along with prose meditations on the subject. It is a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. In addition, Daniella's work has been  published and shown widely in public and in private collections here and internationally as well. In this episode, Daniela reads three poems from her forthcoming Memory of a Larger Mind (Link is below): "The World is Full # 145," "Memory of a Larger Mind #2," and "Kaddish #3."  It will be published in October 2026 from Omnidawn. Thank you to Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry for allowing us to use the audio (here) and video (on our Youtube channel, @thegenesisjewishpodcast) from Daniela's appearance with them. Yetzirah's original video, which includes other artists as well, can be found here: https://vimeo.com/1140200036?fl=pl&fe=sh The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose. Links Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture: artlabpdx.org Daniela Naomi Molnar: danielamolnar.com Daniela's Memory of a Larger Mind: https://www.danielamolnar.com/memoryofalargermind Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry: yetzirahpoets.org  

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 bread" enterprise—inefficient, expensive, and irreplaceably real—especially in an age when people are increasingly unsure what's authentic. We talk about The Berlin Diaries, where she uses her great-grandfather's 1939 diary and a journey to Berlin to ask a blunt, painful question: how much of her family's dysfunction is Holocaust inheritance, and how much is ordinary human messiness. What emerges is not just trauma, but the power of omission—the knowledge that never got passed down, the silences that shape identity as much as the facts that are spoken. We end in the present: the constraints and anxieties around representation, the way scarcity turns "radical hospitality" into competition, and how post–Oct. 7 realities have pushed Andrea to put Jewishness closer to the center of her work—and to confront the fact that sometimes, making art means you can't just compile voices; you have to own an argument. Enjoy the conversation.  The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose. Links: Art/Lab: artlabpdx.org Andrea's website: https://andreastolowitz.com/ Berlin Diaries Audio Drama: https://vimeo.com/1164043554?fl=pl&fe=sh Abbey Theatre: https://www.abbeytheatre.ie Sabbath Queen:https://www.sabbathqueen.com Numbered Be Our Days: https://www.cyclonerep.com/numbered-be-our-days  

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're watching this on YouTube (as opposed to just listening on the podcast), you'll actually get to see some of the work—we throw images up on screen as we talk. In our conversation we get into Jewish pop, "kosher pop art," and Jewish futurity—what it means to make Jewish art and culture feel alive, contemporary, and relatable, especially for people who maybe didn't grow up with it but are open to it now.  Steve is also deeply rooted in the Jewish tradition, and that comes through most clearly when we talk about learning. He does a lot of daily study. We talk about Daf Yomi—daily Talmud study—and he has a really interesting take on the very aspects of Talmud that some people find off-putting: the minutiae, the details, the endless specificity. He loves the discipline of doing it every day, and he's found real beauty in the details. We also talk about teshuvah—what it looks like for people who haven't been connected to Jewish tradition to return to it—and how his work is an expression of that process for him. If you haven't seen his show at the museum, I really encourage you to go. And one more reminder: the Portland Jewish Film Festival is happening right now. Head to the Oregon Jewish Museum's website—our partner in so much of this work—to see what's playing around town and what you can stream online. Enjoy my conversation with Steve Marcus, and thanks so much for listening.  The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose. Links: Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture: www.artlabpdx.org Oregon Jewish Museum Exhibit: www.ojmche.org/events/psychedelicatessen-a-powerful-dose-of-art-by-steve-marcus/ Artist's Website: www.smarcus.com 

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 the subject of the film and her radical insistence that "maintenance labor" is both essential and worthy of dignity. Freilich and I also  discuss Ukeles's institutional critiques (including her famous "mummy/vitrine" intervention at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art), her reframing of "invisible" work, and the film's Jewish ethical undercurrent (tzelem Elohim and a values-based Jewish imagination rather than "ritual-object" Judaism). Finally, my guest  offers a rare window into craft: the years-long fundraising, the editorial architecture shaped with her editor Anne Alvergue, and the deliberate design choices that keep the film visually "clean" while dealing with the aesthetics and politics of waste. Enjoy my conversation with Toby Perl Freilich. The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose. Links Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture: https://artlabpdx.org  Maintanance Artist, film website: https://www.maintenanceartist.com Portland Jewish Film Festival (at OJMCHE): https://www.ojmche.org/events/portland-jewish-film-festival/sting  Mierle Laderman Ukeles and the Art of Work - at the New Yorker Magazine.    

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 the world, then ritually burned unopened.  We also talk about "witchy" earth-based spirituality: daily contemplative walks, attention to river/trees/wind, and the moment a tree became her realtor (!)  We connect that to creativity, to the feeling of being small in the face of the gorge and the river's deep time, and to the trickster energy of making community in public. Dana Lynn Lewis is truly a one-of-a-kind - enjoy part two of our conversation.  The Genesis is created, produced and edited by Rabbi Joshua Rose and is supported by Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music composed by Rabbi Joshua Rose Links Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture - www.artlabpdx.org/ Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education - www.ojmche.org/ Dana Lynn Louis: CLEARING" (2014) —www.lclark.edu/live/news/26500-dana-lynn-louis-clearing  

My guest this week is Dana Lynn Lewis, a Portland artist whose work is fabulous but does not stay politely inside the gallery by any means. Dana is the founder of Gather:Make:Shelter, a long running collaborative project that brings professional artists together with people experiencing houselessness and poverty making work side by side, sharing meals. Paying participants for their time and then bringing those stories and objects into public view in a way that refuses the kind of usual us and them bifurcation that so many cities dealing with homelessness confront. She really breaks that down with her incredibly beautiful work  approach. In this conversation, we go back to the moment that this work really ignited Dana's time in Senegal during the 2016 election. She discusses the kinda strange clarity that came from being far away looking in on the United States, people around her with every reason to be cynical, insisting that something important was happening and something good would come out of this. And she embraced that idea. She talks about her return to Portland in a very important human moment under the steel bridge that became the seed of an idea. It quickly became gather, make shelter through the beautiful work that she does. We also talk about connection and the central role that plays in her life and work.  We venture into her background and her Jewish upbringing and the role that Jewish summer camp played in her work, and we also talk about the idea that there's Dana, the artist, and Dana, the activist. For her, it's all emergent out of this sense of connection. Finally, we do talk about her beautiful, beautiful, multimedia artistic work, and there are links for you to encounter her work up online, including the link to Gather:Make:Shelter. This is a two-parter because we had so much to talk about. The second part of the conversation will be out next week. Enjoy my conversation with the one and only Dana Lynn Lewis The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose.   Links: Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture: www.artlabpdx.org Gather:Make:Shelter www.gathermakeshelter.org/ Dana Lynn Louis: www.danalynnlouis.com/ Russo Lee Gallery: www.russoleegallery.com/exhibitions         

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 Holocaust Education. She lives in California now, but was a Portlander for a time. Her multi-media work is in a sweet spot between engaged in real world problems and ethereal other-worldliness. Cara is also influenced by mysticism, and is a student of it. So I was eager to sit down with her and learn more about her and the work she's brought into the world. Cara describes Carve; The Mystic Is Nourished From This Sphere, a large-scale "bowl / hole" that doesn't just hold people's words, but amplifies them—turning the gallery itself into an instrument and a vessel for community care. That opens into a conversation about what happens when an artwork accidentally (and then intentionally) becomes a structure for collective ritual and shared vulnerability. From there we go into pain. We cover the surprising role that migraines play in her creative thinking and what she learned about surrender. The conversation dips into the worldliness of her work as we touch on her piece This Is Not a Gun. And of course, we finish off with her sharing something she loves and her opinion on the best Jewish food. Enjoy the conversation.   Links Art/Lab: artlabpdx.org Cara Levine caralevine.com Oregon Jewish Museum & Center for Holocaust Education OJMCHE.org Beit Kohenet —https://www.beitkohenet.org/ Rabbi Jill Hammer —https://jillhammer.net/ Bruce Nauman https://www.artdex.com/bruce-nauman-the-art-and-irony-of-revealing-mystic-truths/ Brian Eno's Apollo: https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Apollo:_Atmospheres_…   The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose. 

This episode takes a different tack on one of this podcast's central themes; Jewish culture—how it's made, displayed, argued over, and lived. In this episode, I sit down with Rebekah Sobel, the Director of the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education (OJMCHE), for a conversation that treats museums not as neutral storehouses, but as active cultural engines: places where communities decide what gets remembered, how it gets framed, and who gets to speak. Rebekah comes to this work through anthropology and archaeology. She says that objects don't "tell the truth" on their own—people interpret them. One of the through lines of our conversation is that Jewish culture is always being curated, whether it's in a gallery, a classroom, a feed, or a synagogue. And right now—especially post–October 7—the Jewish communal conversation is being curated by outrage and polarization more than by the tradition's own capacity for multi-vocal debate. Rebekah describes the museum's work in light of this moment: holding public trust while admitting that every exhibit is perspectival; creating spaces for people to be together again before they make declarations; and pushing access to Holocaust education statewide.  Finally we talk about what it looks like when Jewish culture is presented in real time to a real public—like OJMCHE's programming around Steve Marcus's "Psychedelicatessen," where religious symbolism collides with counterculture humor. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Rebekah Sobel. Links: Art/Lab www.artlabpdx.org More on Rebekah Sobel here: www.linkedin.com/in/rebekah-sobel-5321b75/ Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education: www.ojmche.org/ Polin Museum (Warsaw) polin.pl/en/about-museum   The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose.

In this episode I sit down with writer, poet, and Alexander Technique teacher Eve Bernfeld to talk about what it means to sustain a creative life in the middle of parenting, teaching, and everyday obligations. We talk about discipline and devotion — daily writing practices, working through creative resistance, and what happens when you take yourself seriously as an artist even when time, energy, and certainty are in short supply. Our conversation moves through Jewish prayer, fairy tales, and Jewish magic as living creative resources rather than abstract traditions. Eve reflects on discovering tkhines (vernacular women's prayers), writing contemporary poetic prayers that emerge directly from domestic life, and finding her way back to speculative and magical fiction rooted in Jewish sources. Along the way we talk about vulnerability, belonging, the body as part of artistic practice, and how creativity can be a way of reclaiming parts of ourselves we thought we had left behind.   Show Notes  Art/Lab (Portland) — https://artlabpdx.org/ Eve Bernfeld's Website: http://www.evebernfeld.com/ Tkhines (Yiddish women's prayers) — YIVO Encyclopedia — https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article.aspx/Tkhines The Artist's Way (Morning Pages origin) — Julia Cameron — https://juliacameronlive.com/the-artists-way/ "Shitty first drafts"  https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/10332/bird-by-bird-by-anne-lamott/ Alexander Technique (general overview) — AmSAT — https://www.amsatonline.org/alexander-technique/what-is-the-alexander-technique/ Omer: A Counting https://www.ccarpress.org/shopping_product_detail.asp?pid=50132 Grimm tale "The Jew in the Thorns https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm110.html   The Genesis is created, produced and edited by Rabbi Joshua Rose and is supported by Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music composed by Rabbi Joshua Rose  

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. We spend most of our time talking about The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance, an extraordinary book in which she turns her journalistic eye on her own story—and her family's. It was named a Best Book of 2023 by several publications, won the Will Rogers Medallion Award, and was shortlisted for the High Plains Book Award and the Great Plains Book Award. Rebecca and I talk about Jewish identity and values, and how those shape her work. She has a passion for amplifying marginalized and silenced voices—and for uncovering the stories that get buried beneath the dominant narrative. We talk about storytelling, contested truth, and what it means to hold multiple perspectives at once. We also talk powerfully about grief and loss, and how they've informed her life and her work. Israel and Gaza come up because we're talking about competing narratives and moral urgency—and she offers a striking framework for balancing truth and compassion, rooted in learning with her rabbi. It's a rich conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it. This is my conversation with Rebecca Clarren. The Genesis is created, produced and edited by Rabbi Joshua Rose and is supported by Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music composed by Rabbi Joshua Rose ----   Links & Show Notes Art/Lab: artlabpdx.org Rebecca's website: https://www.rebecca-clarren.com/ Indian Land Tenure Foundation: https://iltf.org/ Peter Beinart's Being Jewish Adrer the Destruction of Gaza: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/775348/being-jewish-after-the-destruction-of-gaza-by-peter-beinart/

A Christmas message (!) from Rabbi Josh

Rabbi Josh Rose sits down with writer Nikki Schulak to talk about humor as survival strategy, artistic method, and truth-telling device. What begins as a discussion of comedy quickly opens into an exploration of trauma, Jewish family life, grief, and the way humor can both conceal and reveal what hurts most. Nikki reflects on how comedy functioned in her childhood, in her eccentric Jewish family, and in the complicated dynamics between piety, cruelty, affection, and love. The conversation moves into Nikki's radical commitment to honesty on the page. Known for writing with almost no filter, Nikki talks openly about shame, depression, sex, marriage, mental health, and the personal costs of telling the truth publicly. From her seventh-grade journals to her current Substack, vulnerability wasn't a strategy she adopted—it's who she's always been. Along the way, she shares the story behind her Prozac tattoo, her experience with depression, and why making mental health visible matters to her. Josh and Nikki also dig into questions of marriage, intimacy, and unconventional family structures. Nikki speaks frankly about her long marriage, having an affair, the therapy that followed, and the surprising, hard-won equilibrium her family ultimately found. The discussion is not theoretical or ideological—it's grounded in lived experience, with all the discomfort, humor, and tenderness that entails. The episode closes with reflections on parenting, teaching preschool, politics, and why humor remains an essential tool for surviving a tragic and absurd world. It's a conversation about truth, timing, and courage—about what happens when you refuse to look away from your own life, and insist on telling it as clearly and honestly as you can. Links Art/Lab artlabpdx.org The Genesis on Youtube: youtube.com/@thegenesisjewishpodcast Nikki Schulak's Website: nikkischulak.com Her Substack: nschulak.substack.com 

I sit down with Art/Lab director Shoshana Gugenheim—my longtime collaborator—to clarify what changed since Co/Lab went on hiatus and Art/Lab spun out as its own org  and we tackle the basic question: why a Jewish contemporary arts fellowship, and why now? We talk about creativity as core to being human and Jewish, and how Art/Lab serves artists and audiences who don't always find a home in synagogues or legacy institutions. We reflect on October 7 and the year that followed: how Jewish artists across the country were censored or sidelined, and how our cohort became a rare room where people could bring divergent views, grief, and complexity without an ideological litmus test. That experience also shaped the (paused-for-now) gallery vision: a space for experimentation and public-facing work by contemporary Jewish artists in the Pacific Northwest. Then we lay out what Art/Lab looks like today: the flagship nine-month fellowship (this year's theme: memory), public workshops drawn from our growing network of 38 artists, this podcast, deep partnerships with the Oregon Jewish Museum and Eastside Jewish Commons, and new educators joining our text study series. We also share two big updates: Art/Lab's selection for the 2026 Jerusalem Biennale and fresh support from CANVAS—along with the real-world fundraising trade-offs arts programs face. Finally, Shoshana name-checks what she's loving right now and we close with some breads-and-spreads talk and an open invite to learn more, get involved, or support the work.   Links from the Show Art/Lab website — artlabpdx.org   CANVAS  — bycanvas.org   Jerusalem Biennale  — jerusalembiennale.org   Oregon Jewish Museum & Center for Holocaust Education — ojmche.org   Eastside Jewish Commons — ejcpdx.org   Guerrilla Girls at the Getty — "How to Be a Guerrilla Girl" (Getty Research Institute) — getty.edu    

THIS THURSDAY, DECEMBER 4TH AT 7:30 PM AT THE EASTSIDE JEWISH COMMONS IN PORTLAND YOU CAN COME LEARN IN PERSON WITH THE GUEST ON THIS EPISODE, RABBI ADINA ALLEN. GO TO ARTLABPDX.ORG FOR TICKETS. DON'T MISS THIS WONDERFUL TEACHER!   *This is a re-release of Episode 20 from this season.*   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 - or something. Rabbi Adina Allen is the co-founder and creative director of the Jewish Studio Project. The work of this influential and growing organization is based on Jewish Studio Process, a unique methodology that unlocks creativity through the fusion of art and Jewish learning that has been embraced by thousands of organizational and community leaders, educators, artists, and clergy across the United States. I recently read her book The Place of All Possibility: Cultivating Creativity Through Ancient Jewish Wisdom. I thought it was going to be a book that just encouraged a creative approach to Jewish learning. It is much much more than that. As you'll hear today, it's something like a theology of making that is grounded in Jewish learning. Her work is profound and inspiring. In this conversation we talk about creativity as spiritual technology: a disciplined path to encounter the divine and build a community that is grounded in individual expression. We go into some depth about the Jewish Studio Process so you'll why this work is something original and powerful. We also discuss how this work has been used not only to help individuals deepen their connection to and understanding of Jewish sources but also how it is working its way through schools, synagogues and other organizations. I think you'll really like hearing about this meeting point between creativity, religious experience, and Jewish learning.  Finally, RabbiAllen will be here in Portland on December 4th at 7:30 pm, for a book talk sponsored by Art/Lab and co-sponsored by the Eastside Jewish Commons, The Portland Jewish Federation, and the Jewish Studio Project. More information at artlabpdx.org Enjoy my conversation with Rabbi Adina Allen.  Links: Art/Lab: www.artlabpdx.org Jewish Studio Project: www.jewishstudioproject.org Rabbi Allen's Personal Website: www.adina-allen.com Pat Allen (Rabbi Adina's Mom): www.patballen.com Ayin Press: www.ayinpress.org (where you can find Rabbi Adina's book and many other wonderful Jewish titles)

Don't miss Art/Lab's special guest Rabbi Adina Allen (a guest in episode 20 of this season) IN PORTLAND THIS THURSDAY at the Eastside Jewish Commons. Go to artlabpdx.org for the registration link.    In this week's episode, I talk with puppeteer and theater maker Ora Fruchter about what actually happens when an object comes alive on stage. Ora walks me into the inner mechanics of puppetry in a way that has nothing to do with tricks or clever engineering. Instead, she talks about breath, presence, and the strange collaborative agreement between performer and audience—the shared moment when everyone decides that a piece of tissue or wood is breathing. Hearing her describe how she "listens" to an object and lets it guide the next movement was one of the most arresting parts of our conversation. As we keep talking, something deeper opens up. Ora grew up in a Modern Orthodox world steeped in text study, and although she doesn't label her art "Jewish," the parallels are unmistakable. She and I explore how puppetry resembles Torah in its basic structure: nothing comes alive unless the community brings its imagination to it. Meaning isn't delivered; it's co-created. The act of witnessing becomes the act of animating. That connective, interpretive, breath-driven space is where Ora locates her spirituality, and it's where she feels most present and most herself. We also talk about her family, which turns out to be a full ecosystem of artists—writers, musicians, rabbis, makers. Ora shares the new collaborative project she's building with her siblings: Boy of the Sea, based on her sister's invented Jewish folktales, a set of stories that feel both ancient and entirely original. She describes the early stages of translating these tales into puppet theater and how she's thinking about ancestry, Shabbat tables layered across time, and the echoes of past generations that move through the work. Finally, we explore another show she's developing with a collaborator in Portland, You're Doing It Wrong, a family performance about animals and natural creatures who are inexplicably terrible at what they're "supposed" to be good at. The piece, like much of Ora's work, uses humor and lightness as a way into more serious questions—how we handle discouragement, how we show up for each other, and how we stay human in difficult times. Throughout the episode, I found myself struck by how naturally Ora weaves craft, spirituality, and community into a single practice. It's a conversation about puppetry, yes, but also about presence, lineage, imagination, and the things that really make us come alive.   Links Art/Lab: artlabpdx.org Ora's Website: orafruchter.com The South Philadelphia Shtiebel (synagogue of Ora's sister Rabbanit Dasi Fruchter): southphiladelphiashtiebel.org Sandcatchers (Ora's Brother's Band): sandcatchers.bandcamp.com City of Laughter (Novel by Ora's sister) Book Review in NYT. Click Here. Ronnie Burkett: https://www.johnlambert.ca/ENGLISH/ronnie-burkett/   The Genesis is created, produced and edited by Rabbi Joshua Rose and is supported by Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music composed by Rabbi Joshua Rose

In this episode I sit down with illustrator Youki Iimori for a frank conversation about the realities of building an artistic life—creative identity, comparison, intention, and the pressure to make work that "sells."  Youki was part of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture's third cohort.  Youki talks openly about early talent, hitting a wall of self-comparison, an ADHD diagnosis that arrived much later, and the long aftermath of trying to make art while fighting a loud inner critic. We get into how animation, manga/anime, and gaming shaped Youki's visual instincts, and why intent—not medium, not market—determines whether something is art. That takes us through Duchamp's urinal, bananas duct-taped to gallery walls, the economics of contemporary art, and why a game like Undertale can carry more artistic coherence than many prestige museum pieces. We also talk about Youki's Jewish upbringing,  the Jewish ideas that sit under the surface for Youki—not as symbols or motifs but as conceptual frameworks—and how those Jewish concepts might surface more clearly in long-form work like comics or animation. And throughout the conversation, we keep returning to a central question: what happens to an artist's work when they stop comparing themselves to everyone around them and start making the things they actually enjoy? You'll hear about the challenge of finding one's voice, the pull between pure creativity and professional expectations, and the choice to relieve financial pressure so art can breathe again. Show Notes:  Art/Lab: artlabpdx.org Youki Imori (Ee-mori): yiillus.com  "Why Undertale is a Timeless Masterpiece" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o79TiRMgLmw (note: this is not a recomendation from Youki) Museum of Modern Art page on Barnett Newman (painter) https://www.moma.org/artists/4285-barnett-newman The podcast is a production of Rabbi Josh Rose with support of Art/Lab.  Theme music created by Rabbi Josh Rose

Today's conversation is with artists historian and Jewish educator, Leila Wice, someone whose life pretty much explodes the idea that Judaism has to be either religious or secular, or traditional or creative. In fact, it can be all those things. Leila is an art lab alum but started out as a historian of 19th century Japan, so she's journeyed quite away. She was obsessed with the idea that objects or texts as she talks about, and she'll actually share an object with us,, which you can see in video. It exemplifies how an object can become a text and also exemplifies how reinvention and creativity lie at the core of her vision of what it means to be Jewish Over time and with a big push from Art La, her sensibility moved from the archive and her academic life into the studio and into her Jewish life. Leila talks also about the Jewish Studio Project and the impact that that had on her. And if you listen to last week's episode, you will have heard from the co-creator of the Jewish Studio Project, Rabbi Adina Allen, and you can go back and hear that episode if you want to  understand the underpinnings of that.  Leila and I discuss all of that and we cover a lot of other ground. We talk about the erased world of Yiddish modernist culture and how it's been reclaimed by feminists and queer artists. We talk about Refrom Judaism not as a watered down tradition, but as a bold engine of invention. And really at the heart of our conversation and underlying all of this, is a discussion about whether creativity itself is the real through line of Judaism after the destruction of the temple. So she brings her own experience of Jewish creativity from what she's learned. And from her own creative impulses and brings it all together in this vision that she has of what it means to live a Jewish life. Leila brings it all down to ground level with her work on mikvah, on ritual immersion, that is as a tool for transition, and on transforming broken glass from anti-Semitic vandalism into shimmering ritual art, which kind of encapsulates what she does. We also wrestle with fear and safety, armed guards or community peacekeepers, hiding damage or making art out of it, and what it all means to stay Jewishly rooted if you don't think of yourself as religious at all. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Leila Wice. Art/Lab: www.artlapdx.org Jewish Studio Project: https://www.jewishstudioproject.org   SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva: https://svara.org   Yiddish Book Center: https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org   The Way We Think: A Collection of Essays from the Yiddish (2 vols., 1969) Joseph Leftwich (ed.),   Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/15900/persepolis-by-marjane-satrapi   Monsters Are Afraid of the Dark,  Marjane Satrapi

Reminder: Stephen Arnoff will be in Portland tomorrow evening - that is Thursday, November 13th - for the Art/Lab event, The Jew-ish Spiritual Wisdom of Bob Dylan | An Evening of Music and Conversation with Dr. Stephen Arnoff (w/special guest Alicia Jo Rabins on violin). If you haven't heard my conversation with Stephen, go back and listen to episode 16 from this season. Such an interesting guy with big ideas and insights into Dylan and more. Go to artlabpdx.org to register. Again Thursday November 13th at 8pm at he Eastide Jewish commons. ------- 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 - or something. Rabbi Adina Allen is the co-founder and creative director of the Jewish Studio Project. The work of this influential and growing organization is based on Jewish Studio Process, a unique methodology that unlocks creativity through the fusion of art and Jewish learning that has been embraced by thousands of organizational and community leaders, educators, artists, and clergy across the United States. I recently read her book The Place of All Possibility: Cultivating Creativity Through Ancient Jewish Wisdom. I thought it was going to be a book that just encouraged a creative approach to Jewish learning. It is much much more than that. As you'll hear today, it's something like a theology of making that is grounded in Jewish learning. Her work is profound and inspiring. In this conversation we talk about creativity as spiritual technology: a disciplined path to encounter the divine and build a community that is grounded in individual expression. We go into some depth about the Jewish Studio Process so you'll why this work is something original and powerful. We also discuss how this work has been used not only to help individuals deepen their connection to and understanding of Jewish sources but also how it is working its way through schools, synagogues and other organizations. I think you'll really like hearing about this meeting point between creativity, religious experience, and Jewish learning. Finally, RabbiAllen will be here in Portland on December 4th at 7:30 pm, for a book talk sponsored by Art/Lab and co-sponsored by the Eastside Jewish Commons, The Portland Jewish Federation, and the Jewish Studio Project. More information at artlabpdx.org Enjoy my conversation with Rabbi Adina Allen.   Links: Art/Lab: www.artlabpdx.org Jewish Studio Project: www.jewishstudioproject.org Rabbi Allen's Personal Website: www.adina-allen.com Pat Allen (Rabbi Adina's Mom): www.patballen.com Ayin Press (where you can find Rabbi Adina's book and many other wonderful Jewish titles): www.ayinpress.org  

Today I am speaking with artist Jessica Rehfield, whose work lives at the intersection of art, Jewish identity and resistance. Jessica was in our first art lab cohort and her big, bold paintings at the first exhibition. I can still remember. Jessica is not a wallflower in their work or their life, and is a self-described big old queer Jew. And that Jewish and Queer self understanding isn't just decorative. It's the backbone of their practice paintings, their community projects, writings push back against what they call the state of Miseducation about both queer and Jewish histories.  In this conversation, Jessica describes how their work evolved from solitary charcoal drawings during graduate school into collaborative community centered projects, art as a form of collective response to fascism. Jessica insists that art. And politics cannot be separated when your very existence is politicized and is an advocate for linking the inherent politics of Jewishness as they see it with the experience of marginalization of Jews and of queer people. We talk about how Jewish and queer communities are each under pressure, and how shared language history and courage might help us rehumanize one another in this fractured moment. We also dig into Jessica's rediscovery of Yiddish during the pandemic, A language that they call the body of the Jewish Spirit out of their focus. On that came a self illustrated Yiddish primer as they'll describe new large scale paintings in a renewed understanding. That they had of language as both inheritance and resistance. Now, if you have not heard yet, my discussion with Lou Cove way back in season two, that can help frame an understanding for this part of the conversation (Episode 20) about how Yiddish culture's breadth and unifying Jewish diversity contrasts with our fractured Jewish world today. Thank you for listening. And hey, if Jewish ideas, Jewish identity, and Jewish creativity are important to you, please tell one person about this podcast. Word of mouth is how people hear about new, cool things, and it's how podcasts grow. Plus, this is a really, really important moment for us to put strength, creativity, and Jewish pride right out there, front and center. Thanks for listening. Enjoy my conversation with Jessica Rehfield.    Links relevant to the conversation:  www.artlabpdx.org www.instagram.com/alenereh/ www.jessicarehfield.com www.yiddishbookcenter.org

 One of the unexpected pleasures of hosting these conversations with Jewish artists is noticing the recurring themes that emerge without my planning them. Again and again, I see points of convergence between important Jewish religious questions and the experience of artists in their creative work. I continue to hear resonances between between artistic vision and spiritual yearning, between creative community and Jewish religious community in these convresations with Art/Lab's cohort of Jewish artists. It's become clear to me that this isn't a coincidence, but a profound area of inquiry: where do art and religion meet, and why do so many artists find themselves, consciously or not, engaging religious or spiritual questions through their work? This theme is especially present in my conversation today with painter Justin Jude Carroll, a member of Art/Lab's inaugural artist cohort. Justin is a classically trained artist whose vivid, abstract paintings have been shown throughout Portland and are now beginning to receive national attention. His creative journey is inseparable from his personal journey, particularly his recovery from a traumatic brain injury—a pivotal experience that reoriented his life and ultimately led him toward painting with a new sense of urgency and authenticity. What fascinates me about Justin's story is how it illuminates a deeper connection between art and spirituality: both can become vehicles for healing, for transformation, and for the search for authenticity. At the heart of both traditions lies a fundamental Jewish religious question: Who am I, and what am I called to bring into the world? Artists, like seekers in religious communities, often struggle to navigate the tension between external expectations and inner truth. As Justin and I discuss, that tension is not simply psychological—it is, in many ways, theological. We also touch on the role of community—how both Jewish religious and artistic communities can serve as containers for growth, vulnerability, and accountability, and how essential that network is for an artist trying to push the boundaries of their own voice.  This is a rich and wide-ranging conversation: we explore art as a mystical and spiritual practice, Justin's current work and expanding national presence, and the ways in which creativity itself can become a path of meaning-making. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Justin Jude Carroll. 

One of the enduring questions of Jewish life is this: How do we hold on to individual expression while remaining rooted in inherited tradition? Another is equally urgent: What is the role of art in a world in crisis? My guest today lives at the heart of these tensions and turns them into music. Aaron Kahn is a trumpet soloist, educator, and creative force—described recently as a "Portland-based trumpet virtuoso"—who uses music as a vehicle for healing, social engagement, and for spiritual connection. In our conversation, we explore the power of sound, not simply as entertainment, but as a transformative force that can respond to the brokenness of our time.  Aaron speaks candidly about his emergence as an experimental artist working within—and pushing against—the boundaries of classical tradition. Together, we draw parallels between Jewish liturgy and classical composition: both deeply structured forms that still make space—sometimes limited space—for individual voice and meaning. What does creative freedom look like inside structure? Where is the line between preservation and reinvention? This season on the podcast, we've been asking what social responsibility artists carry in the 21st century. Aaron insists on relevance and engagement. He calls for music that confronts our reality head-on, music that is spiritually grounded and socially awake, including in the post–October 7th landscape where questions of identity, community, and responsibility are sharper than ever. Aaron was a member of the second Art/Lab cohort and is widely recognized across Portland's creative community. He studied Music and Cognitive Psychology at McGill University, earned his BFA from CalArts, and completed his Master of Music at the University of Oregon, where he served as Graduate Teaching Fellow under the renowned Brian McWhorter. His performance career includes collaborations with Grammy-winning artists such as Teddy Abrams, Michael Gordon, Mason Bates, David Rozenblatt, and the band Chicago. Here in Portland, audiences have heard him premier an arrangement of Handel's Judas Maccabaeus at Congregation Beth Israel, and perform at the Opening Ceremony of the Oregon House of Representatives this legislative session. This is a conversation not just about music, but about what it means to be a human being—and a Jew—making art in a time that demands both courage and imagination. Enjoy my conversation with Aaron Kahn. Links from the Episode Art/Lab www.artlabpdx.org Aaron Kahn https://aaronkahncreator.com/ Ernest Bloch – Sacred Service https://www.ernestbloch.org/ Rising Song Institute (Hadar) https://www.hadar.org/torah-tefillah/rising-song Oregon Jewish Museum & Center for Holocaust Education https://www.ojmche.org/

Portland residents take note: Today's guest, Stephen Arnoff, will be in Portland on Thursday November 13th at 8pm at the Eastside Jewish Commons as a guest of Art/Lab. Register for this night of Dylan's music and for reflection on Dylan's Jewish spiritual wisdom at artlabpdx.org I've been circling two questions for a long time on this show. First: how do traditions actually stay alive—who keeps the line between the core source material and the later commentary tight enough to matter, but loose enough to breathe? Second: what kind of community can nurture both a deep connection to the Jewish past and also support artistic creative freedom and independence? This was a fun conversation for me not only because I got to indulge my Bob Dylan brain with this Dylan maven but also because over the past few months, I've become a little obsessed with American roots music and country. And, I love and listen to a lot of contemporary music. So as an overthinking rabbi, I've wondered about how our traditions - American or Jewish - do or do not show up in contemporary culture. Stephen Arnoff had a lot to say on this topic because he lives every day at the intersection of tradition and contemporary expression. He is Chief Executive Officer of the Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center, a leading hub for Jewish learning and culture in Israel. He founded Zamru, Fuchsberg's flagship musical and cultural initiative, and he's spent more than two decades building real infrastructure for artists and seekers—at the 92nd Street Y, the 14th Street Y, Shalem College, and the JCC Association. He earned his doctorate in Midrash and Scriptural Interpretation at JTS as a Wexner Graduate Fellow, and his professional fellowships include the Mandel Jerusalem Fellowship and a Tikvah Fellowship at NYU School of Law. He helped launch LABA, which became a global network of cutting-edge artist residencies; chaired Jerusalem Culture Unlimited from 2017 to 2024, supporting more than 50 emerging cultural organizations; and serves as an Executive Mentor with CANVAS, North America's largest grant-maker for Jewish arts and culture. He's also the author of About Man and God and Law: The Spiritual Wisdom of Bob Dylan, based on his podcast od the same name. We talk about Dylan as a laboratory for empathy and interpretation, and about the practical, unsexy scaffolding—space, time, money, safety—that lets artists refresh a tradition rather than merely borrow its language. Enjoy!   Show Notes and Links Registration for Portland Nov 13 Event: artlabpdx.org Stephen Arnoff: https://www.stephendanielarnoff.com/ Fuchsberg Center: https://fuchsbergcenter.org/ Arnoff's Dylan Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bob-dylan-about-man-and-god-and-law/id1522223234?utm_source=chatgpt.com

You can find this and other episodes on the podcast's Youtube channel, @TheGenesisJewishPodcast I've been thinking lately about the tension between individual artistic expression and the weight of tradition and communal forms in Jewish life—and that's precisely why I was so eager to speak with Holly Goodman. Holly is a writer, teacher, and longtime contributor to The Oregonian. She is also an Art/Lab alum.  Her work has appeared in literary magazines, newspapers, and web journals over the course of three decades, beginning with early journalism in Columbus, Ohio.  She also participates in Tom Spanbauer's Dangerous Writing workshop as part of her ongoing development as a storyteller.  And she is, like me, a deadhead - something that is relevant to the theme of individual and collective expression, as you'll hear in our conversation. Holly and i discuss how the "vertical" and "horizontal" dimensions of writing—that is, the spiritual, essential core of a piece and the narrative structure that carries it—mirror the challenges of threading one's own voice through inherited communal frameworks. We get into the ways that craft and convention, which we might think of as constraints, become tools to open more space for expression. Holly's experience as a non-visual reader—a person who doesn't "see" scenes so much as feel the rhythm and music of language—has shaped both her teaching and her writing and we talk about the textual and the visual. In our dialogue, we move from the classroom to Jewish ritual, from reading Torah to listening for the "dissonant ideas" that push conversation forward, and ultimately end in the metaphor of the Grateful Dead: individuals improvising in relation to a collective. Enjoy my conversation with Holly Goodman. - Rabbi Josh    \Show Notes:---------------------------------- * Art/Lab: www.artlabpdx.org * Internet Arhive: https://archive.org * Some Great Dead Shows: https://blog.archive.org/2014/05/14/top-ten-grateful-dead-shows-on-the-internet-archive/ * Tom Spanbauer: https://tomspanbauer.com/

In this episode, Rabbi Josh speaks with writer Daniel Elder, whose deeply personal nonfiction grapples with intimacy, loneliness, and identity. Elder discusses his journey from playful fiction to raw self-revelation, and the ways his involvement with Corporeal Writing opened up a body-centered approach to storytelling. He reflects on the paradox of being an "exhibitionist" who still feels vulnerable, his exploration of queerness and family, and the influence of grief on his voice as a writer. The conversation also turns to Elder's evolving Jewish identity—shaped by loss, mentorship, and participation in Art/Lab—and the challenges of being a Jewish artist in a polarized moment. Together, they explore what it means to hold paradoxes, whether in art, faith, or politics, and how writing can serve as both a personal unveiling and a form of connection.   Show notes Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts & Culture – artlabpdx.org Daniel Elder's writing – danielelderwriter.com  Corporeal Writing – corporealwriting.com Lidia Yuknavitch (mentor, founder of Corporeal Writing) – lidiayuknavitch.net Jonathan Richman – Only Frozen Sky (new album Elder recommends) – Spotify link | Apple Music link Arcade Fire – "My Body Is a Cage" – YouTube  

Mariah Berlanga-Shevchuk is the Head of Public Engagement at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education—OJMCHE's first person in that role—where she's widening the museum's public programs and community partnerships.  Before Portland, she co-curated LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes' landmark exhibition "afroLAtinidad: mi casa, my city," a home-shaped journey through Afro-Latinx histories and contemporary life that used rooms—kitchen, living room, backyard—to surface issues like food deserts, media representation, and belonging. She's also been a cultural resources and exhibitions lead at Five Oaks Museum here in Oregon.  In this episode we cover a lot of ground.  We discuss Mariah's Mexican American–Ashkenazi–Ukrainian story and how her name carries that lineage, how that lineage informs her Jewish and professional worldview, talk about how a Jewish Museum and the OJMCHE in particular to capture the complex, rich and changing world of Jewish life and culture. And Finally, we map Portland's grassroots Jewish energy—from Rosh Ḥodesh circles to DIY minyanim and creative pop-ups—and ask how institutions can meet that vitality with openness rather than gatekeeping. Notes: Here are links to epople/places/things mentioned in the episode:  Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture artlabpdx.org Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education (OJM&CHE) — homepage. ojmche.org OPB feature quoting Mariah on Alice Lok Cahana's art. https://www.opb.org/article/2025/05/08/ashes-into-rainbows-the-art-of-alice-lok-cahana/  afroLAtinidad: mi casa, my city — exhibition page at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes. https://lapca.org/exhibition/afrolatinidad-mi-casa-my-city/ TischPDX  tischpdx.org  

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 people who make up these nations do not share an overarching narrative that binds them. Our stories seem broken, and disfunctional.   This week's guest, Tom Haviv, thinks about narratives, how they work and what it means when they break - when they stop working. Tom is the co-founder and Executive Director of Ayin Press, an independent publishing platform and interdisciplinary creative studio rooted in Jewish culture. He is also an artist and a poet in his own right. With Ayin Press Tom and his co-founder Eden Perlstein have created an outlet and inspiration for superb Jewish work, and work that reaches beyond the Jewish world as well. Ayin published Daniela Molnar's Protocols: An Erasure, which you've heard about on this podcast and a visit to their website ayinpress.org will reveal an impressive range of new works, from philosophy, to mysticism, to a Jewish tarot deck and more. But Tom's own life story and his poetic work digs deep into myth and narrative, and what they mean for our lives and our world.  He was the perfect partner for an exploration of this topic which is perhaps more relevant now than it has been in at least a generation.   Enjoy the conversation with Tom Haviv. Links----- www.tomhaviv.com www.ayinpress.org 

Rabbi Josh talks about his own path from religious to cultural Jew.

Rencently Rabbi Josh and Oregon Book Award winner and Art/Lab Alum Daniela Naomi Molnar sat down for a public conversation at Annie Bloom's Books. They discussed Molnar's recent book (Ayin Press) Protocols: An Erasure.  This beautiful and important work reworks, reimagines, and reflects upon the deeply anti-semitic work The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This episode is a recording of that conversation.  Show Notes:  Ayin Press: https://www.ayinpress.org Daniela Monar: https://www.danielamolnar.com Annie Blooms Books (Portland): https://annieblooms.com

***** The deadline for applications for the next Art/Lab Cohort is midnight this coming Saturday August 30th…. If you are a Jewish artist or know someone who is, now's the time! Artists consistently tell us what a powerful experience their time in Art/Lab was. Don't miss out.  Go to artlabpdx.org for the application.  ***** Today  I'm joined by Shir Ly Grisanti, an artist, curator, and cultural leader whose work lives right at the intersection of art, ecology, and Jewish values. Shir has spent over a decade building projects that bring people together through creativity and conversation. In 2012, she founded c3:initiative in Portland, a nonprofit designed not just to display art but to steward resources and solidarity with artists and partner organizations working on some of the hardest social questions of our time. At the same time, Shir and their husband Laurence are the stewards of Camp Colton, an 85-acre woodland in rural Oregon. Together they've turned this former camp into a place of rewilding and restoration, planting thousands of trees and nurturing a fragile ecosystem back to health, while also hosting gatherings, retreats, and cultural programs And on top of all of this - or undergirding it? - Shir is herself an artist. She was part of the Second Art/Lab Shir's work is guided by a "dual–nondual" vision: a sense that everything is interconnected, that we are always in relationship—with ancestors, with traditions, with the land, and with each other.  Enjoy my conversation with Shir Grisanti. Show Notes: artlabpdx.org Shir's website:  shirgrisanti.com Stelo – steloarts.org c3:initiative – c3initiative.org Camp Colton – campcolton.com Andrea Gibson – andreagibson.org Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass – Milkweed Editions Sonia Sanford's Cookbook Braids (for the challah recipe!) – soniasanford.com/cookbook  

Rabbi Josh's reflection: What if Judaism is not a religious tradition, but an artistic one?

 ​  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.  Relevant to the Conversation:    https://merridawnduckler.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Levinas 

Rabbi Josh: Springsteen and Dylan on Art and Politics

Hello, listeners. Yesterday's podcast conversation contained  some editing errors, including the DEADLINE FOR THE ART/LAB FELLOWSHIP.  The deadline is AUGUST 30TH. This has been correected in this version of the conversation. ______  In the 21st century it feels that the seams of our world have come undone. American citizenry is profoundly fractured. Old political allignments have broken apart; norms of decency and public trust are in pieces. The same thing seems to be happening within Israel.  The American Jewish community is more fragmented now than I've ever seen it. The divisions are not just ideological but social. We have an increasing number of micro-communities, but less Jewish unity.  That question — how we create those kinds of connections, and what they make possible — was one I wanted to explore with my guest today, Rabbi April Villareal. Rabbi Vlilareal is an educator and teacher who brings real insight into this topic. She's the Senior Coach and Program Associate with Hadar's Pedagogy of Partnership. In our conversation, we talk about: Why shared texts experiences can make space for intimacy that pure dialogue sometimes can't. How to hold people accountable to a tradition while making room for their unique voice. What it takes to build relationships across deep differences, without erasing them. How art and creativity can be relational tools in community and classroom. Links:  Art/Lab - artlabpdx.org Rabbi April Villarreal – Hadar.org PoemHunter – Fancies (Emma Lazrus) Sefaria        

Rabbi Josh offers a reflection about art, ideology, art for art's sake, and the current state of affairs for Jewish artists.  Referred to in this episode:  Seamus Heaney's "The Flight Path" https://fawbie.info/the-spirit-level/the-flight-path/ Shostakovich, Lament for a Dead Infant, https://music.apple.com/us/album/from-jewish-folk-poetry-op-79-i-lament-for-a-dead-infant/1452151175?i=1452152698

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 guest this week has been navigating these challenges on a national and global stage. Seth Pinsky is the CEO of the 92nd Street Y, a 150-year-old cultural and community center in New York. It's a leading institution for Jewish and universal arts, education, and civic dialogue—offering rich intellectual and artistic programming, a religious community, and a global platform through its digital reach. Seth has guided the Y through a time of renewed growth and relevance, even amid profound communal tensions. Previously, he served as president of the NYC Economic Development Corporation under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and he brings deep experience to questions of leadership and identity. In this conversation, he challenges some of my own assumptions and offers insight into what it means to engage with Jewish culture today. In this Episode:  https://www.92ny.org https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2023/october/an-open-letter-on-the-situation-in-palestine          

Documentary Filmmaker Michael Turner and Rabbi Josh Discuss the relationsship between the past, the present and storytelling.  

This is a conversation Rabbi Josh had months ago with Zac Banik, Art/Lab alumnus and habitual Jewish learner and explorer.  Enjoy. 

Daniela Molnar is an award winning poet and visual artist. She and and Rabbi Josh will be together on August 25th at 7pm at Annie Blooms Books in Portland to discuss her stunning new  work Protocols: An Erasure.  This episode is a rebroadcast of Rabbi Josh's conversation with Molnar from Season One of this podcast.  This week and next, and then periodically thereafter we'll be sharing snippets and full episodes that look back on highlights and moments that helped shape the direction of the Genesis.  Thank you for being a listener, and enjoy the conversation with Daniela Molnar. 

 To explore how music shapes Jewish cultural meaning, this week Rabbi Josh welcomes Eric Stein — mandolinist, bassist, and artistic director of Toronto's Ashkenaz Festival, one of the world's largest celebrations of Jewish music and culture. (And yes, it might be a little confusing — last week's guest was Eric Stern, another multitalented Jewish musician.) Eric Stein has spent more than 25 years redefining the sound of Jewish music through projects like Beyond the Pale and Tio Chorinho. In this wide-ranging conversation, he and Rabbi Josh talk about Jewish cultural identity, spiritual honesty, and the surprising affinities between klezmer music and the Grateful Dead. Eric shares his journey from secular musician to a leader in the global Jewish music revival, reflects on what it means to seek meaning in a world that often feels devoid of it, and offers a compelling defense of art as a form of cultural resistance.

Josh (Host): Eric Stern builds Jewish community and is a curator of Jewish culture. He's a very interesting, multi-layered renaissance man who is the irector of Programming at Portland's Eastside Jewish Commons, an important player in the emergent Jewish scene here in Portland Oregon.    Eric is also musician, vocalist, accordionist, pianist, composer, arranger, he trained as a classical singer and went on to found the eclectic, genre-bending band Vagabond Opera, which toured nationally, appeared on NPR and at the Kennedy Center, and mixed opera, jazz, cabaret, Klezmer and Balkan influences.  Rabbi Josh and Eric explore his EP and its roots in Greek Rebetiko, trace the parallels between marginalized musical traditions like Klezmer and blues, discuss Stern's transformation from performer to facilitator, talk about whether religious experience and music-making are connected, and whether Jewish art on its own can sustain community in the absence of synagogue life.

Part two of Rabbi Josh's conversation with Lou Cove, CEO of CANVAS, an organization seeding "The 21st Cultural Renaissance in Jewish Life". 

In this episode, Rabbi welcomes Lou Cove—writer, cultural strategist, and longtime champion of Jewish arts and storytelling—for a rich and personal conversation about Jewish cultural identity, memory, and the power of creative revival. Lou shares the story of how a casual visit to the Yiddish Book Center unexpectedly transformed his life and career. Raised with little connection to Jewish communal life, Lou recalls how this moment set him on a path to reclaim a cultural legacy he didn't even know he had. Rabbi Josh and Lou discuss the emotional and intellectual journey of reconnecting with Jewish culture through literature, storytelling, and memory. They also explore whether this  revival in Jewish life can be seen essential not just for preservation, but for ongoing meaning-making in Jewish life.  (Part 2 will be released next week).