The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture – Details, episodes & analysis

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

Joshua Rose

Religion & Spirituality

Arts

Frequency: 1 episode/8d. Total Eps: 103

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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https://www.youtube.com/@TheGenesisJewishPodcast
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S4E11 Best of: Is Creativity a Path to Jewish Religious Experience? (with Rabbi Adina Allen)

Season 4 · Episode 11

Friday, October 2, 2026 • Duration 51:01

This is a re-release of Season 3, Episode 11

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.

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: 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

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S4E10 Are We All Works of Art? (w/ Fred Harwin)

Season 4 · Episode 10

Thursday, September 24, 2026 • Duration 50:13

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

My guest this week, Fred Harwin, has spent his life looking more closely than almost anyone. He has studied the textures of living tissue in the operating room at two in the morning, the flecks of color in a stranger's iris from a few inches away, and the shadow of Douglas firs moving across his garden. Fred is an ocularist, someone who makes prosthetic eyes. Before that, he was a medical illustrator who spent years standing behind Dr. Albert Starr in the OR to illustrate the Manual of Cardiac Surgery, a work that may be Fred's masterwork. Fred has a background in the fine arts, and he brought that skill and artistic vision to his work in the medical field.

We talk about why he insisted on drawing every procedure before a word of text was written, and how he created the illusion of a dilating pupil with nothing but paint and light. Fred also explains why making an eye for a self-conscious teenager became his work of tikkun olam, the repair of the world. Along the way, we explore the human body as a work of art and the Hebrew root that connects emunah, faith, with omanut, art. Coming just after Rosh Hashanah, this felt like the right conversation to have. I hope you enjoy this winding theological, medical, and artistic conversation with Fred Harwin. Thanks so much for listening.

Show notes / references

Fred Harwin's website (includes a media page collecting his press and video coverage): https://www.fredharwin.com/fred-harwin-movie-and-media.php

S4E9 Best of: When the Stories We Tell Ourselves Stop Working (w/ Tom Haviv)

Season 4 · Episode 9

Thursday, September 10, 2026 • Duration 01:00:28

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

S4E8 "Best of": How do We Face Competing Narratives of the Past? (w/ Rebecca Clarren)

Season 4 · Episode 8

Thursday, September 3, 2026 • Duration 44:47

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 Art/Lab Podcast 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

S4E7 "Best of": Is Judaism Fundamentally an Artistic Tradition?

Season 4 · Episode 7

Thursday, August 27, 2026 • Duration 08:14

A Reflection by Rabbi Josh

S4E6 Why One Artist Is Turning to Tradition to Innovate

Season 4 · Episode 6

Thursday, August 20, 2026 • Duration 44:01

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

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S4E5 Best-Of Episode: Israeli Master Musician Yair Dalal

Season 4 · Episode 5

Thursday, August 13, 2026 • Duration 48:08

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.

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

Season 4 · Episode 4

Friday, August 7, 2026 • Duration 52:44

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

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

Wednesday, July 29, 2026 • Duration 01:00:41

S3E11 Tom Haviv

Enjoy the conversation with Tom Haviv.

Links-----

www.tomhaviv.com

www.ayinpress.org

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

Thursday, July 23, 2026 • Duration 57:31

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

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

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture – Details, episodes & analysis

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The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture – Details, episodes & analysis

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