"What Jewish life feels like today, as humans, is not reflected by most of our Jewish institutions...I think we all feel that there is a different Jewish experience in the 21st century than what we can even understand from the 20th century. And it's heading in a direction that is like nothing our museums are accustomed to. Jewish life is going to look and feel and present so differently in fifty years it's going to be astonishing."

-Melissa Martens Yaverbaum

We continue our series on the exhibit A Fence Around The Torah with a conversation about the mixed-media installation We Would Come Home But You've Locked The Door, which deals with themes of inclusion and exclusion in Jewish communities.

Daniel Toretsky is an artist and architectural designer based in Brooklyn. He plays trombone in the Hungry March Band and Mrs. Toretsky’s Nightmare.

Melissa Martens Yaverbaum is the Executive Director of the Council of American Jewish Museums, and was on the curatorial panel for A Fence Around The Torah. She also used to work at the Jewish Museum of Maryland.

"G-d for me was of my first model of an out and proud queer person, and a queer person who insisted that the entire community, really the entire world, change themselves to deal with G-d on G-d's own terms. And that's really the core of what became my approach to trans theology."

-Joy Ladin

We discuss poetry and trans theology with one of the artists featured in A Fence Around The Torah, poet Joy Ladin.

Joy Ladin is the author of many books, including her memoir of gender transition, National Jewish Book Award finalist Through the Door of Life, and the Lambda Literary and Triangle Award finalist The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective. Her most recent book is Shekhinah Speaks from selva oscura press.

Liora Ostroff is a painter and curator-in-residence at the Jewish Museum of Maryland.

We talk about reclaiming Jewish ritual, Jewish antifascism, and creating safety without police in Jewish communal spaces with two members of the RAYJ (Rebellious Anarchist Young Jews) Collective.

Naomi Weintraub, artist, educator, Artist-in-Residence at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, production assistant for Disloyal

Ami Weintraub, teacher, organizer, writer, rabbinical student in the Aleph Ordination Program, founder of Ratzon: Center For Healing And Resistance, and creator of podcast art for Disloyal

We talk about physical and emotional safety in Jewish spaces, experiences of Black Jews in predominantly white Jewish institutions, the nourishing power of Shabbat, and the creative possibilities of kosher cooking with an artist and a curator who contributed to A Fence Around The Torah.

Marisa Baggett, a multi-discipline creative who, as she puts it, combines contemporary sensibilities with beloved Jewish traditions via kosher food, paintings, and writing

Justin Fair, lay leader with the Jews of Color Mishpacha Project and curatorial panelist for A Fence Around the Torah

We hear from two artists whose work is featured in A Fence Around The Torah.

Val Schlosberg's contribution to the exhibit is a series of clay vessels called golems. Golems are creatures from Jewish mythology that are created using clay and magic in order to protect Jewish communities. Val considers "the golem not only as a vengeful fighter of fascism, but also as an enlivened piece of earth and as a metaphor for the human body."

Coral Cohen is part of a four-artist multimedia installation called I mean...how do you define safety? The installation explores, as the artists wrote in their statement, "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." Coral Cohen devised and directed an audio play along with writer and performer Hannah Aliza Goldman called In The Kitchen.

Val Schlosberg, writer, artist, and educator currently based in Zhigaagoong, also known as Chicago, and working towards ordination as a Hebrew Priestess at the Kohenet Institute

Coral Cohen, director, writer, and performance deviser born and raised in Los Angeles and currently based in Brooklyn, New York, whose short film Wresting Place will premiere this year

In our ongoing series on the art exhibit A Fence Around The Torah we talk about Katz Tepper's film Roasted Cockroach for Scale. Here’s how Katz describes the film in their artist statement:

“Roasted Cockroach for Scale expands an intergenerational experience of disability, epigenetic illness, and ableism into a social practice-turned-film project made with my Jewish-Polish-Ukrainian-Israeli-American father, Haim. Addressing the links between inheritance, illness, trauma, displacement, militarism, and ableism in the particular Jewish context of cyclical nation-state violence, my film seeks to reckon with the lasting impacts of our heritage, probing how trauma and the political systems that cause it have become internalized, in big and small ways.”

Katz Tepper, interdisciplinary artist based in Athens, Georgia

Maia Ipp, co-director of the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, contributing editor for Jewish Currents, and curatorial panelist for A Fence Around the Torah

In this first episode of Disloyal we talk about A Fence Around The Torah, the Jewish Museum of Maryland's latest contemporary art exhibit. It explores how Jewish communities navigate the concepts of safety and unsafety in traditional, contemporary, and futuristic ways. The fifteen featured artists tap into ancestral and historical Jewish narratives, while imagining what safety, solidarity, and mutual aid mean in today’s world. The exhibit focuses on how people who have been marginalized and excluded from Jewish institutional spaces experience physical and emotional harm and safety. It was on view in person at the Jewish Museum of Maryland this past winter, and lives on online at afencearoundthetorah.com.

Sol Davis, Executive Director of the Jewish Museum of Maryland

Liora Ostroff, Painter and Curator-in-Residence at the Jewish Museum of Maryland

Welcome to Disloyal, a new podcast from the Jewish Museum of Maryland. Disloyal is a weekly podcast about art, culture and history that uses the Jewish Museum of Maryland’s exhibits, programs, and collections as launchpads for talking about Jewish life today. Disloyal is a place to talk about the political, cultural, and spiritual trends shaping the world through a distinctively Jewish lens with artists, curators, musicians, historians, archivists, and more. It's hosted by Jewish Museum of Maryland Director of Communications and Content Mark Gunnery.

New episodes every Friday.