“The thing that I am fighting against is the same thing that I think that the impulse to found the Lesbian Herstory Archives in 1974 was. We are in a life struggle project, which is to stop erasure and build stronger coalitions with people that are battling a lot of repression. And I think that liberatory projects absolutely depend on intergenerational knowledge sharing.”

-Ariel Goldberg

Last year, the Jewish Museum of Maryland presented an exhibition titled Material/Inheritance: Contemporary Work by New Jewish Culture Fellows. Curated by Leora Fridman and presented in partnership with the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, this groundbreaking show featured 30 Jewish artists dealing with themes like chosen and biological family, queer and trans identities, embodiment and sexuality, diasporic homes, ritual reinventions, activist movements, political histories, and so much more.

One of the artists featured in Material/Inheritance, Ariel Goldberg, contributed to the exhibition by creating an episode of the Disloyal podcast with co-hosts Mark Gunnery and Naomi Rose Weintraub.

Ariel Goldberg is a writer, curator, and photographer based in New York City who curated a show titled Images on which to build, 1970s-1990s. That exhibition, which is on view at the Chicago Cultural Center through August 4, 2024, explores photographic documentation of activism, education, and media production within lesbian, trans, queer, and feminist grassroots organizing from the 1970s through the 1990s. It was commissioned by the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati as part of the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial, and was on view at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York City last year.

On this episode of Disloyal, Goldberg talks about their research into the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA) traveling slideshows, reading texts related to that project, and playing audio from interviews they did with the LHA’s Joan Nestle and Alexis Danzig. They also spoke to Disloyal hosts Mark Gunnery and Naomi Rose Weintraub about queer imaging practices, the importance of intergenerational knowledge sharing in queer communities, and ways that images and education fit into social movements.

Read Ariel Goldberg's curatorial statement here.

This episode features “Angry Atthis” by Maxine Feldman and “Prove it on Me,” a cover of a Ma Rainey song, by Bell’s Roar aka Sean Desiree. Thank you to Helen...

Disloyal is back with a live episode!

Mark Gunnery (he/him) and Naomi Rose Weintraub (they/them) hosted a live taping of Disloyal at the Jewish Museum of Maryland on June 1, 2023, to discuss the JMM's latest exhibit, Material/Inheritance: Contemporary Work by New Jewish Culture Fellows, with: 

• Leora Fridman (she/her), writer, educator, New Jewish Culture Fellow, JMM Curator-in-Residence, and curator of the exhibit;
• Adam Golfer (he/him) filmmaker, artist, and New Jewish Culture Fellow whose work was featured in the exhibit;
•  Rabbi and poet Mónica Gomery (she/her), who sat on the curatorial panel for the exhibit. 

They spoke in front of a live audience at the JMM about the exhibit, the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, the challenges and joys of presenting contemporary art in Jewish spaces, and much more. 

Material/Inheritance: Contemporary Work by New Jewish Culture Fellows is an exhibit of boundary-pushing, community-building contemporary Jewish art, and features 30 artists whose work has been supported by the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, a national arts fellowship that advances the work of groundbreaking Jewish artists.

To learn more about the exhibit, visit materialinheritance.com.

Disloyal is back! In this episode, co-hosts Mark Gunnery and Naomi Weintraub speak with Leora Fridman about the Jewish Museum of Maryland's newest exhibit, Material/Inheritance: Contemporary Work by New Jewish Culture Fellows. An exhibition of boundary-pushing, community-building contemporary Jewish art, Material/Inheritance features 30 artists whose work has been supported by the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, a national arts fellowship that advances the work of groundbreaking Jewish artists. The exhibit runs from March 26 through June 11, 2023.

Leora Fridman is a writer, educator, New Jewish Culture Fellow, and the JMM’s Curator-in-Residence. She curated Material/Inheritance.

Welcome back to Disloyal! We’ve been on a production break over the summer, and will be back in your feeds soon with a brand new series about the Jewish Museum of Maryland’s current exhibit Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare. 

But this week we have a special episode hosted by Naomi Weintraub (they/them), production assistant for Disloyal and Community Artist-in-Residence at the Jewish Museum of Maryland. Naomi speaks with Rebekah Erev about reclaiming Jewish magic, holidays, time, and rituals, and what the summer full moon festival of Tu B’Av can teach us about love in all its manifestations.

Rebekah Erev (they/them) is an artist, a teacher, and a kohenet, Hebrew priestexx. Rebekah is co-creator of the Queer Mikveh Project, a collaborator on the Olam HaBa: Dreaming The World To Come planner project, and creator of the Moon Angels/Malakh Halevanah Oracle Deck and the in progress Golden Oracle. 

"If you are able to cook the food you grew up with, you can recreate home wherever you go. "

-Annabel Rabiyah

In the final installment of our series on A Fence Around The Torah we're joined by two artists who were part of a four-person group multimedia installation for the exhibit titled “I mean…how do you define safety?”

Annabel Rabiyah and Arielle Tonkin discuss Jewish Iraqi food, recipes as family heirlooms, assimilation, the roles of food and ritual objects in pushing back against cultural erasure for Mizrahi Jews and more.

Here’s what the artists behind "I mean...how do you define safety" said about the installation in their artist statement.  

“I mean…how do you define safety?” is a multimedia exhibit of oral history, visual art, and nourishment. It explores what “safety” means for Jews from Arab lands, who after hundreds to thousands of years of relative safety in the region, were torn from their homes, customs, languages, and ancestral roots upon the establishment of the state of Israel. This piece explores the questions, longing, and desires of the women who are descendants of those who left. Although much was lost, stolen, and erased – remnants of our food, language, and other anchors connect us to our ancestors.”  

Annabel Rabiyah (she/they) is an urban farmer, chef, and cofounder of Awafi Kitchen, an Iraqi Jewish cultural food initiative based in Boston. Through sharing recipes and making meals, Awafi pays tribute to a lesser-known culinary heritage. In addition to their social media presence, Awafi Kitchen hosts pop-up restaurant events, virtual cooking demos and presentations on Iraqi-Jewish history. Awafi Kitchen is a platform centered on building community between members of the Iraqi diaspora, Jews with lesser-known histories, and anyone interested in the history and stories behind food.

Arielle Tonkin (they/she) is a queer mixed ashkesephardimizrahi artist living on Ohlone land in the so-called San Francisco Bay Area. Arielle works to dismantle white supremacy through art practice, arts and culture organizing, and Jewish and interfaith education work. The Muslim-Jewish Arts Fellowship, Arts Jam for Social Change, Tzedek Lab, SVARA, and Atiq: Jewish Maker Institute are among their networks of accountability, collective power, creative collaboration and care.

"I enjoy the idea of recontextualizing Christian iconography and Christian symbology in order to replace it with a Jewish perspective that is missing. And I am basically inserting myself and inserting the Jewish perspective into an art historical canon that erased Jewish bodies and Jewish stories."

-Rosabel Rosalind

Visual artist Rosabel Rosalind discusses the work she contributed to the Jewish Museum of Maryland's exhibit A Fence Around The Torah. It's a series of drawings featuring both historical and ahistorical figures like Queen Isabella I of Castile, King Ferdinand II of Aragon, and Holofernes from the deuterocanonical Book of Judith. They are depicted with Hebrew text covering their faces and bodies, watched over by a bird that is present in each drawing. The bird has a human nose, and a stereotypically "Jewish" one, instead of a beak.

We discuss the use of antisemitic tropes and symbols in Jewish art, depictions of Jewish bodies in Christian art, Rosalind's upcoming comic project, and Barbara Streisand.

Rosabel Rosalind is an artist based in Pittsburgh who received her BFA in printmaking, painting, and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University. She’s been included in group exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hyde Park Art Center, and Sullivan Gallery in Chicago, and solo exhibitions at Vienna's Museums Quartier and Improper Walls Gallery.

Liora Ostroff is Curator-In-Residence here at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, where she curated A Fence Around The Torah. She is a painter whose work explores themes like queerness, Jewishness, violence, and the idiosyncrasies of life in Baltimore.

Visual artist Judith Joseph discusses the work she contributed to the Jewish Museum of Maryland's exhibit A Fence Around The Torah; a series of hand-pulled woodblock prints about Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza was a 17th century Jewish Dutch philosopher who was excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam for his ideas about God, nature, and philosophy, which were viewed at the time as heretical. Joseph also discusses traditional Jewish arts like illuminated manuscripts, calligraphy, and ketubot, handmade wedding contracts.

Judith Joseph is a Chicago-based visual artist who works across multiple media, including printmaking, painting, calligraphy, and installation. She has exhibited her work around the world and her work is in hundreds of public and private collections. She has participated in fellowships from Spertus Institute and the Amen Institute Visual Arts Project, and is a two-time Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Awardee.

Liora Ostroff is Curator-In-Residence at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, where she curated A Fence Around The Torah. She is a painter whose work explores themes like queerness, Jewishness, violence, and the idiosyncrasies of life in Baltimore.

"For any of us who hold hybrid identity and specifically us three, who hold categorically 'impossible' identity, in air quotes, in order for us to breathe and be whole, we have to melt down these false boundaries, because literally we can't exist if they're there."

-Arielle Tonkin

As part of our ongoing series on the contemporary art exhibit A Fence Around The Torah, we’re joined by three artists who were part of a four-person group multimedia installation for the exhibit titled “I mean…how do you define safety?”

Here’s what they said about the installation in their artist statement.  

“I mean…how do you define safety?”  is a multimedia exhibit of oral history, visual art, and nourishment. It explores what “safety” means for Jews from Arab lands, who after hundreds to thousands of years of relative safety in the region, were torn from their homes, customs, languages, and ancestral roots upon the establishment of the state of Israel. This piece explores the questions, longing, and desires of the women who are descendants of those who left. Although much was lost, stolen, and erased – remnants of our food, language, and other anchors connect us to our ancestors.”  

Arielle Tonkin (they/she) is a queer mixed ashkesephardimizrahi artist living on Ohlone land in the so-called San Francisco Bay Area. Arielle works to dismantle white supremacy through art practice, arts and culture organizing, and Jewish and interfaith education work. The Muslim-Jewish Arts Fellowship, Arts Jam for Social Change, Tzedek Lab, SVARA, and Atiq: Jewish Maker Institute are among their networks of accountability, collective power, creative collaboration and care.

Coral Cohen (she/her) is a director, writer, and performance deviser born and raised in Los Angeles and currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work spans multiple forms, media, and subjects, but is largely defined by an emphasis on creative collaboration and deep engagement with the people and subjects she approaches. Coral has written and directed a short film, Wresting Place, which is slated to premiere in 2022.

Hannah Aliza Goldman (she/her) is a performer, writer, producer, and voiceover artist based in Brooklyn. As a writer, Hannah has contributed to Alma and The Forward. She is an active member of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) and produced their inaugural Mimouna event celebrating Mizrahi culture.