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

Joshua Rose
  • 5.0 (11)
  • Religion
  • Updated Weekly

We are right at the beginning of what some have called "The 21st Century Jewish Cultural Renaissance," and the Art/Lab podcast is watching it unfold, in real time and up close. Each week Rabbi Josh Rose has a conversation with a different Jewish artist or cultural figure to explore questions of artistic creativity, individual Jewish identity, Jewish expression and how Jewish arts are reshaping what it means to be Jewish. So, if you're interested in 21st century Jewish life, Jewish ideas, Jewish arts or just good conversation, you're in the right place. (This podcast was previously known as "The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture")

  1. 19h ago

    S4E6 Why One Artist Is Turning to Tradition to Innovate

    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 Mingus, and the influence of ethnographer S. An-sky, who saw preserving Jewish folk tradition as inseparable from creating something new with it. It's a conversation about grounding innovation in real fluency with a tradition, rather than skipping straight to reinvention. Enjoy my conversation with David Rosman.   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.    ------ Links *Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture: artlabpdx.org *David Rosman's Music on Bandcamp: dancedancejews.bandcamp.com/music *On S An-Sky's The Dybbuk: yiddishbookcenter.org/educational-programs/resources-teachers/resource-kits-teachers/yiddish-theater/dybbuk *YIVO Institute article on Walter Zev Feldman's Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory: yivo.org/Klezmer-Music-History-Memory *Publisher's page on the Pritzker version of the Zohar: sup.org/books/series/zohar-pritzker-edition

  2. Aug 13

    S4E5 Best-Of Episode: Israeli Master Musician Yair Dalal

    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 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

  3. Aug 7

    S4E4 Can Dance Teach Jewish Ideas? (re-release of S3E13 w/ Jen Gwirtz)

    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 a distinctly Jewish resonance, and how the body itself can be read as a kind of text. What emerges is a vision of Judaism not just as a religion of study and words, but as something enacted through voice, gesture, and choreography.   Links and Notes  www.artlabpdx.org www.jennifergwirtz.org www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/546694/on-tyranny-by-timothy-snyder www.annahalprin.org

  4. Jul 29

    S4E3 When the Stories We Tell Ourselves Stop Working (w/ Tom Haviv) (re-release)

    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

  5. Jul 23

    S4E2 Why a Jewish Arts & Culture Program Now? (Shoshana Gugenheim Kedem) (re-release)

    div]:bg-bg-000/50 [&_pre>div]:border-0.5 [&_pre>div]:border-border-400 [&_.ignore-pre-bg>div]:bg-transparent [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8"> _*]:min-w-0 gap-3 [&_>_*:last-child]:mb-0 print:block print:[&_>_*_+_*]:mt-3 standard-markdown"> 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.   ------ 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. 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.  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

  6. Jul 19

    S4E1 Forgetting and Jewish Creativity (with Rachel Attias)

    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 of its own making — asked to forget the norms of democracy, and asked to forget the harder parts of our past.  Memory and forgetting have been on my mind. Jews are commanded to remember, but being Jewish has also always meant forgetting — every generation, ours included, has had to let go of some of what came before in order to recreate itself. I wanted to talk through all of this, so I sat down with Rachel Atias — a wonderful writer with a fertile mind — on day one of her Art Lab alumnihood. (This cohort of Art Lab artists just completed the program; she's the first to be interviewed, with more voices to come.) Rachel recently taught a workshop on forgetting and on writing the pieces of our forgotten selves, at The Shuk, the Jewish Day of Learning sponsored by Art/Lab along with the Jewish Federation here in Portland. Forgetting came up a lot in our conversation — but so did hope, and whether hope is warranted. I think you'll enjoy this one, and enjoy getting to know Rachel's writing. Links in the show notes as usual. Enjoy the conversation. 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. Links Art/Lab: artlabpdx.org/ Rachel's Website: rachelattias.com Gefilte Fish — Portland Review: portlandreview.org/gefilte-fish-by-rachel-attias/ Pond Scum — Does It Have Pockets: www.doesithavepockets.com/fiction/rachel-attias A Fish in the Bathtub: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fish_in_the_Bathtub

  7. Jul 2

    S3E53 Jewish Art & Memory in a Time of Change (with Judy Margles)

    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 the Gaza rallies, and what that revealed about generational change. The conversation moves into the state of Jewish arts and culture right now — from the fight over the Israel Pavilion at the Venice Biennale to the movement of art across borders during wartime — and into bigger questions: what makes art endure, whether artists owe the Jewish community anything, and where Jewish culture actually comes from.  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. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose. Links Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture: artlabpdx.org Our podcast on Youtube: @theartlabpodcast Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education: https://www.ojmche.org/ Rothko Chapel, Houston: https://rothkochapel.org/ The Jewish Museum, New York — current exhibitions (including the Walter Benjamin photography show Judy references): https://thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/ Portland Art Museum: https://portlandartmuseum.org/

  8. Jun 24

    S3E52 Language, Music and Resistance: Yiddish Folk Music in the 21st Century (with the band Brivele)

    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 language. In doing so, they largely turned away from Yiddish, the vernacular of diaspora Jewish life. Hebrew was the language of return; Yiddish was the language of exile. But in recent decades, Yiddish itself has undergone its own reclamation — not as a language of exile, but of resistance. For many Jews outside or critical of the Zionist mainstream, Yiddish carries a different kind of Jewish identity: diasporic, radical, rooted in solidarity and working-class organizing. You may recall my conversation with Mark Rubin, who draws on some of that same tradition in his own protest music. Today's guests are very much in that spirit. Maia Brown and Stefanie Brendler of Brivele are a Seattle-based Jewish duo making Yiddish music rooted in anti-fascist, anarchist, and labor organizing. Their latest album draws from the Proletpen — radical Yiddish writers working in New York between the 1920s and 1950s — and the music is as urgent as anything being made today. We talk about what drew them to Yiddish, how punk shaped their sound, and what it means to perform this music in Jewish spaces right now, when the community is so fractured. It's a rich, sometimes challenging conversation. I'll say upfront: my guests hold strong views on what's happening in Gaza — views I don't entirely share, and said so during our conversation. I think that exchange is worth hearing, and I'll let you draw your own conclusions. Enjoy the episode. 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. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose Notes Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture: artlabpdx.org https://www.brivele.com/ YIVO Encyclopedia entry on Yiddish: encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/235 Information on Dora Teitleboim: hcongressforjewishculture.org/people/4097/Taytlboym-Dora

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We are right at the beginning of what some have called "The 21st Century Jewish Cultural Renaissance," and the Art/Lab podcast is watching it unfold, in real time and up close. Each week Rabbi Josh Rose has a conversation with a different Jewish artist or cultural figure to explore questions of artistic creativity, individual Jewish identity, Jewish expression and how Jewish arts are reshaping what it means to be Jewish. So, if you're interested in 21st century Jewish life, Jewish ideas, Jewish arts or just good conversation, you're in the right place. (This podcast was previously known as "The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture")

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