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PODCAST

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

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

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All Episodes

51:01

S4E11 Best of: Is Creativity a Path to Jewish...

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts... ·

2026/10/02

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

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50:13

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

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts... ·

2026/09/24

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

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01:00:28

S4E9 Best of: When the Stories We Tell Ourselves Stop...

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts... ·

2026/09/10

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

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44:47

S4E8 "Best of": How do We Face Competing Narratives...

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts... ·

2026/09/03

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

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08:14

S3E7 "Best of": Is Judaism Fundamentally an Artistic...

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts... ·

2026/08/27

A Reflection by Rabbi Josh

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44:01

S4E6 Why One Artist Is Turning to Tradition to Innovate

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts... ·

2026/08/20

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

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48:08

S4E5 Best-Of Episode: Israeli Master Musician Yair Dalal

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts... ·

2026/08/13

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

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52:44

S4E4 Can Dance Teach Jewish Ideas? (re-release of...

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts... ·

2026/08/07

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

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01:00:41

S4E3 When the Stories We Tell Ourselves Stop Working...

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts... ·

2026/07/29

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

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57:31

S4E2 Why a Jewish Arts & Culture Program Now?...

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts... ·

2026/07/23

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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50:08

S4E1 Forgetting and Jewish Creativity (with Rachel...

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts... ·

2026/07/19

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

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46:54

S3E53 Jewish Art & Memory in a Time of Change (with...

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts... ·

2026/07/02

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

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56:14

S3E52 Language, Music and Resistance: Yiddish Folk...

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts... ·

2026/06/24

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

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40:26

S3E51 What Questions Are Jewish Artists Asking in the...

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts... ·

2026/06/18

Jewish artists have always found themselves in relationship with the world around them. Sometimes that relationship is generative. Sometimes it is uneasy. Often it requires artists to negotiate Jewish identity alongside broader ideas of citizenship, Americanness, Western culture, inherited artistic forms, and the cultural languages in which they work. That tension has become a recurring theme of the Art/Lab Podcast. But it is not new. Jewish artists and Jewish culture have always been shaped by the

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44:21

S3E50 A Jewish Artist on Making Work that 'Disturbs'...

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts... ·

2026/06/10

Hi friends, and welcome to the Art Lab podcast. I'm Rabbi Josh. My guest this week is Brontë Grimm, an Art Lab alum and multimedia artist whose work wrestles with difficult Jewish and other themes, including disability, grief, pain, and suffering. In this conversation, Brontë and I talk about work that is visually striking and sometimes difficult to behold, but that also carries its own kind of tender beauty. We also discuss her experience as part of the Art/Lab cohort that began just after October

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39:17

S349 How Can Jewish Culture Meet the Challenges of...

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts... ·

2026/06/05

This is a Greatest Hits episode - a re-release of the second part of my conversation with Lou Cove, from Season 2 Episode 21 (the interview spanned episdoes 20 & 21). Lou Cove is the director of CANVAS, an organization that is very important to Art/Lab, in terms of funding, guidance, netwworking iwth other Jewish creative organizations, and inspiration. Art/ Lab is part of the CANVAS network. Lou heads up CANVAS, but his impact is far greater than that. He's an author, a speaker, and really a

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38:03

S3E48 Can Americana Music Be Jewish? (Mark Rubin)

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts... ·

2026/05/27

Welcome to The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture (previously The Genesis). Mark Rubin is a multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter, bassist, tuba player, bandleader, producer, and educator whose work sits at the crossroads of American roots music and Jewish culture. Mark has spent more than three decades moving across musical boundaries: bluegrass, country, western swing, Tex-Mex, polka, klezmer, Roma brass, Cajun music, punk, and old-time American string-band

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07:15

S3E47 Can Creativity Overcome Darkness? A Story for...

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts... ·

2026/05/21

Here's one of my favorite stories from the Talmud. I hope you find some inspiration in it. Please note that starting next week the podcast will have a new name: The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture. If you are a subscriber you don't need to change a thing. You will notice some changes in the artwork for the podcast (see below), but everything else will remain the same. But do make a note about the new name so you can tell other folks what to look for when they need

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53:05

S3E46 How Jewish Mysticism - and Pain - Inform One...

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts... ·

2026/05/14

We are re-releasing this episode recorded back in February because our guest is coming to Portland for a residency starting May 18th. But even if you're not here in the City of Roses the conversation is worth re-visiting. It's one of my favorites and Cara offers a lot to think about in her approach. ------------------ Original Introduction: In this episode I sit down with artist Cara Levine and we discuss how grief informs her work in tangible ways. Cara's work is on exhibit right now at the

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50:33

S3E45 How Jewish Music is Creating a Space for Unity...

The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts... ·

2026/05/08

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

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