Re-working Risk

JMM Curator-in-Residence Leora Fridman

It is new for me to operate as a public Jew. Even that term–well, I am choosing it on purpose. I’ve published and spoken publicly for many years without focusing on my own Jewishness, despite my Hebrew first name, curly hair, etc. You have heard of the markers before. I’m not particularly hidden.

I became involved in the New Jewish Culture Fellowship (NJCF) when I began writing my first explicitly Jewish book, and sought out a community in which to talk about embodiment, sexuality, gender and pain–especially as it is lived out and spoken about in bodies labeled or spoken about as Jewish. I had begun writing this book thanks in large part to years I spent immersed in and surrounded by post-Occupy Black-led movements for liberation, anti-racist movements, movements for prison abolition, and movements against police violence. In these spaces we would often be asked to break out into “affinity groups” in order to give space for specific experiences of racism to be held in spaces where they could be shared by others who held those specific experiences–and for each of our groups to consider how we could best make use of our own inherited cultures and community institutions to mobilize and encourage change. 

I ended up in the Jewish groups. I ended up in the spaces where we talked about mobilizing synagogues and Jews who held closely and intimately the cultural memory of state violence. It did not feel cool, but it did feel useful, like there was material that was mine which I could use for public good without risking cultural appropriation. 

Soon I began writing about victimhood, activism, and art that took up these themes. I began writing about these through a Jewish lens because that was how I knew them, though I cited critical theorists, artists and writers who were not necessarily all Jews. I knew I was risking something as I did this, but I wanted to write from a Jewish body, not exclusively to it. 

I situate Material/Inheritance amidst this stance. The artists included here work with Jewishness as ground and foundation. Many of us are afraid to be on this ground (for reasons as varied as ineffable “coolness,” fear of communal rejection, and anti-semitic violence) but we do not refuse it. Material/Inheritance is a de-assimilationist project that invites a complex and ongoing consideration of ethnic, racial and cultural logics.

Even in the face of fear, this work is full of humor, beauty and joy. These artists are linked together through a network that has supported them financially and communally, provided them opportunities to feel connected to one another and the relationships between their practices, even across genre and form. The resulting collaborations featured in Material/Inheritance include Mariya Zilberman and Jay Eddy’s installation about home and heritage and Hadar Ahuvia and Tatyana Tenenbaum’s vocal weaving of ritual chants, diasporic Jewish song, and indigenous land acknowledgements. 

NJCF has allied us as artists in myriad ways. Many of us feel affiliated Jewishly for the first time through this network, because it is a space where we can interact with the material we have been offered by our ancestors but expansively re-work it – which perhaps is not an unusual thing to do Jewishly, at all.  Certainly there are risks in this reworking, including the risk inherent in a willingness to move away from or unfurl much-repeated stories about Jewish exceptionialism; in terms of assimilation and achievement and in terms of genocide and trauma.

The work of Material/Inheritance resists this consumable narrative, perhaps even resisting the idea that we can be consumed at all. There is little that is “clean” in Berlant’s sense in the work featured here  – there is certainly an awareness of Jewish trauma tropes, but also an awareness of how often these tropes fall short and what they do not include, perhaps even refuse to include for the sake of cultural continuity, racism, classism, or simply to avoid the pain of a non-cohesive narrative. In the exhibition, Shterna Goldbloom uses ancient scroll-forms to center queer Jews often excluded from observant Jewish communities. Adam Golfer’s films traffic in the fragment to remind us how often this is how we experience the world. Tyler Rai regenerates Ashkenazi ritual to engage with contemporary climate grief. Daniel Terna inherits his father’s life work and physically grapples with it. Julia Elsas sculpts musical objects described obliquely in Biblical text. Danielle Durschlag invites the Jewish victim narrative to laugh at itself. 

What this work does is purposefully keep us un-closed, flexible, open to reinterpretation. Interpretation by these artists, yes, but also by their viewers as they engage with the work. The cultural theorist Katherine McKittrick writes: “Indeed, the story cannot tell itself without our willingness to imagine what it cannot tell.” This line comes from her book Dear Science and Other Stories, a radically inter-genre book focused on Black diasporic studies and how liberation emerges from Black creative texts. Here I go again, pulling from a text that is not about Jews. I do this because I draw inspiration from a world that is not exclusively Jewish, and because my hope is specifically that the identity-based organizing of this fellowship and network does not focus us inward only on one another, but gives us energy and grounding to extend our work beyond the existing limits of our cultural communities.

This work resists closure, and invites “willingness to imagine,” as McKittrick phrases it. Nat Sufrin uses digital media to re-see poems about the Shoah, so difficult to re-see. Fancy Feast’s burlesque performances celebrate the fat Jewish body in ways normatively shunned. Naomi Safran-Hon’s paintings present spaces haunted by human inhabitants and colonial histories.

 I think of Fred Moten, another one of my favorite contemporary Black writers, who asks, in Black and Blur, “is a problem that can’t be solved still a problem?” Material/Inheritance questions whether problems must be lived as problems to be solved, and what it might look like to interact with them as possibilities. Ellie Lobovits’ photographs document in-vitro fertilization and immerse it in a lush natural landscape where it suddenly belongs. Both Ira Khonen Temple and Laura Elkeslassy’s musical performances richly engage with existing conversations about race, gender, and power, allowing them to be material. Liat Berdugo engages with the role of the camera in Palestine and Israel, asking how we make tools and containers and how these formulate our interactions with the world. 

What is the container and what is the world? In Material/Inheritance, this binary slips and switches. We inherit and we form, we are ancestors of a future, even as we can’t see around the corner to what that future involves. The artist’s names sit by the work in the gallery, and at the same time the work is endlessly citational and relational. We are afraid, we are celebrating, we are distracted, we are bored. We produce work and at the same time we are completely in process; as artists, as a collective, as Jews. An exhibition is only one moment, captured, contained. We hold, and we are held.