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

In this episode, I speak with painter Dana Nehdaran about art, memory, and the complexity of Jewish-Iranian identity. Dana resists being reduced to a label and prefers to think of himself simply as a painter, but our conversation shows how deeply history and identity can still inform an artist's work without confining it. We discuss his upbringing in Iran in a traditional but not especially religious Jewish family, the Jewish community of his hometown, and the way he came to create Esther's Children, his series based on archival photographs of Iranian Jewish life. Dana describes how those images allowed him to explore both his own connection to Jewish history and a broader claim: that Jewish history in Iran is inseparable from Iranian history itself.

We also turn to Dana's more recent self-portrait work, especially his "Interrogation Room" series, in which he repeatedly paints himself under stark light as a way of asking, again and again, "Who are you?" That opens into a rich conversation about painting as self-examination, the tension between talent and technique, and the painter's way of seeing color, shadow, and form. Throughout, Dana emerges as both fiercely individual and deeply rooted: an Iranian-born Jewish artist who is wary of identity categories, yet whose work preserves, reimagines, and complicates Jewish-Iranian memory in striking ways.

The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose.

Links:

Art/Lab: artlabpdx.org

Dana's website where you can also encounter the work of his brother Darius Nehdaran: https://www.nehdaran.com/

Dana's Instagram (@dananehdaran_studio): https://www.instagram.com/dananehdaran_studio/

Dana's Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@dananehdaran1030

Esther's Children catalogue on Dana's site: https://www.nehdaran.com/assets/pdf/dana-nehdaran-esther%27s-children-dubai-exhibition-catalogue.pdf

Esther's Children (the Book): https://www.facebook.com/houman.sarshar

We're starting something new here at the podcast. Periodically, we're going to Jewish invite artists to share their work directly with you.

So today we bring you Daniela Naomi Molnar reading three of her poems. Daniela is an Art/Lab alum. I interviewed her for this podcast, so you might be familiar with her work. I interviewed her back in season number one and last season she and I hosted a conversation at Annie Bloom Books.

You may also know Daniella from her published work. Daniella's debut book Chorus won the 2024 Oregon Book Award for poetry and her work Protocols: An Erasure, which is an extended erasure poem was published in 2025. That extended work is composed from the foundational antisemitic forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion, along with prose meditations on the subject. It is a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. In addition, Daniella's work has been published and shown widely in public and in private collections here and internationally as well.

In this episode, Daniela reads three poems from her forthcoming Memory of a Larger Mind (Link is below): "The World is Full # 145," "Memory of a Larger Mind #2," and "Kaddish #3." It will be published in October 2026 from Omnidawn.

Thank you to Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry for allowing us to use the audio (here) and video (on our Youtube channel, @thegenesisjewishpodcast) from Daniela's appearance with them. Yetzirah's original video, which includes other artists as well, can be found here: https://vimeo.com/1140200036?fl=pl&fe=sh

The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose.

Links

Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture: artlabpdx.org

Daniela Naomi Molnar: danielamolnar.com

Daniela's Memory of a Larger Mind: https://www.danielamolnar.com/memoryofalargermind

Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry: yetzirahpoets.org

In this conversation with playwright Andrea Stolowitz, I found myself moving back and forth with her between cities, art forms, and identities. We begin with the contrast between New York and Portland—how New York's sheer density of artistic life (and vastly stronger funding) can make theater feel culturally central, while Portland as a City has to keep stretching to match the artistic talent here. We talk about what it means to make live theater now, when audiences are trained toward screens and when nonprofit theaters are financially squeezed into taking fewer risks. Andrea describes theater as an "artisanal bread" enterprise—inefficient, expensive, and irreplaceably real—especially in an age when people are increasingly unsure what's authentic.

We talk about The Berlin Diaries, where she uses her great-grandfather's 1939 diary and a journey to Berlin to ask a blunt, painful question: how much of her family's dysfunction is Holocaust inheritance, and how much is ordinary human messiness. What emerges is not just trauma, but the power of omission—the knowledge that never got passed down, the silences that shape identity as much as the facts that are spoken.

We end in the present: the constraints and anxieties around representation, the way scarcity turns "radical hospitality" into competition, and how post–Oct. 7 realities have pushed Andrea to put Jewishness closer to the center of her work—and to confront the fact that sometimes, making art means you can't just compile voices; you have to own an argument. Enjoy the conversation.

The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose.

Links:

Art/Lab: artlabpdx.org

Andrea's website: https://andreastolowitz.com/

Berlin Diaries Audio Drama: https://vimeo.com/1164043554?fl=pl&fe=sh

Abbey Theatre: https://www.abbeytheatre.ie

Sabbath Queen:https://www.sabbathqueen.com

Numbered Be Our Days: https://www.cyclonerep.com/numbered-be-our-days

My guest this week is Steve Marcus, a New York–based artist who's on our radar because he's currently on exhibit at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. His work is visually striking—sometimes funny, always interesting—and it's a genuinely profound engagement with Jewish ideas and identity through the language of pop culture.

A lot of his aesthetic is rooted in the comic-book, counterculture world of artists like Robert Crumb and others who rose to prominence in the '60s and '70s, but Steve puts a distinctly Jewish twist on it. And if you're watching this on YouTube (as opposed to just listening on the podcast), you'll actually get to see some of the work—we throw images up on screen as we talk.

In our conversation we get into Jewish pop, "kosher pop art," and Jewish futurity—what it means to make Jewish art and culture feel alive, contemporary, and relatable, especially for people who maybe didn't grow up with it but are open to it now.

Steve is also deeply rooted in the Jewish tradition, and that comes through most clearly when we talk about learning. He does a lot of daily study. We talk about Daf Yomi—daily Talmud study—and he has a really interesting take on the very aspects of Talmud that some people find off-putting: the minutiae, the details, the endless specificity. He loves the discipline of doing it every day, and he's found real beauty in the details. We also talk about teshuvah—what it looks like for people who haven't been connected to Jewish tradition to return to it—and how his work is an expression of that process for him. If you haven't seen his show at the museum, I really encourage you to go.

And one more reminder: the Portland Jewish Film Festival is happening right now. Head to the Oregon Jewish Museum's website—our partner in so much of this work—to see what's playing around town and what you can stream online. Enjoy my conversation with Steve Marcus, and thanks so much for listening.

The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose.

Links:

Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture: www.artlabpdx.org

Oregon Jewish Museum Exhibit: www.ojmche.org/events/psychedelicatessen-a-powerful-dose-of-art-by-steve-marcus/

Artist's Website: www.smarcus.com 

In this episode, I speak with filmmaker and journalist Toby Perl Freilich about why some subjects demand the documentary form. Freilich contrasts writing's breadth with film's "shallow medium that packs a punch," arguing that moving images—especially archival footage—can create an unusually immediate kind of understanding.

Our discussion centers on Freilich's feature documentary Maintenance Artist, centered on Mierle Laderman Ukeles—best known as the long-time artist-in-residence for the New York City Department of Sanitation. That movie, along with several others, are featured as part of the Portland Jewish Film Festival later this month.

We explore the subject of the film and her radical insistence that "maintenance labor" is both essential and worthy of dignity. Freilich and I also discuss Ukeles's institutional critiques (including her famous "mummy/vitrine" intervention at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art), her reframing of "invisible" work, and the film's Jewish ethical undercurrent (tzelem Elohim and a values-based Jewish imagination rather than "ritual-object" Judaism). Finally, my guest offers a rare window into craft: the years-long fundraising, the editorial architecture shaped with her editor Anne Alvergue, and the deliberate design choices that keep the film visually "clean" while dealing with the aesthetics and politics of waste.

Enjoy my conversation with Toby Perl Freilich.

The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose.

Links

Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture: https://artlabpdx.org

Maintanance Artist, film website: https://www.maintenanceartist.com

Portland Jewish Film Festival (at OJMCHE): https://www.ojmche.org/events/portland-jewish-film-festival/sting

Mierle Laderman Ukeles and the Art of Work - at the New Yorker Magazine.

In this second part of my conversation with Dana Lynn Lewis, she reflects on how art can be "political" even when it isn't issuing explicit slogans: in a culture that underfunds artists and treats art as decor, simply insisting that creative work matters is political. We get into the difference between message-forward political art and art that opens a capacious vessel—inviting people to express through their shared humanity without hammering them with ideology.

A centerpiece is Dana's participatory project "Clearing"—hundreds of tiny anonymous envelopes people filled out with whatever they wanted to "clear," sent from around the world, then ritually burned unopened.

We also talk about "witchy" earth-based spirituality: daily contemplative walks, attention to river/trees/wind, and the moment a tree became her realtor (!)

We connect that to creativity, to the feeling of being small in the face of the gorge and the river's deep time, and to the trickster energy of making community in public. Dana Lynn Lewis is truly a one-of-a-kind - enjoy part two of our conversation.

The Genesis 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

Links

Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture - www.artlabpdx.org/

Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education - www.ojmche.org/

Dana Lynn Louis: CLEARING" (2014) —www.lclark.edu/live/news/26500-dana-lynn-louis-clearing

My guest this week is Dana Lynn Lewis, a Portland artist whose work is fabulous but does not stay politely inside the gallery by any means. Dana is the founder of Gather:Make:Shelter, a long running collaborative project that brings professional artists together with people experiencing houselessness and poverty making work side by side, sharing meals.

Paying participants for their time and then bringing those stories and objects into public view in a way that refuses the kind of usual us and them bifurcation that so many cities dealing with homelessness confront. She really breaks that down with her incredibly beautiful work approach.

In this conversation, we go back to the moment that this work really ignited Dana's time in Senegal during the 2016 election. She discusses the kinda strange clarity that came from being far away looking in on the United States, people around her with every reason to be cynical, insisting that something important was happening and something good would come out of this.

And she embraced that idea. She talks about her return to Portland in a very important human moment under the steel bridge that became the seed of an idea. It quickly became gather, make shelter through the beautiful work that she does. We also talk about connection and the central role that plays in her life and work.

We venture into her background and her Jewish upbringing and the role that Jewish summer camp played in her work, and we also talk about the idea that there's Dana, the artist, and Dana, the activist. For her, it's all emergent out of this sense of connection. Finally, we do talk about her beautiful, beautiful, multimedia artistic work, and there are links for you to encounter her work up online, including the link to Gather:Make:Shelter.

This is a two-parter because we had so much to talk about. The second part of the conversation will be out next week. Enjoy my conversation with the one and only Dana Lynn Lewis

The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose.

Links:

Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture: www.artlabpdx.org

Gather:Make:Shelter www.gathermakeshelter.org/

Dana Lynn Louis: www.danalynnlouis.com/

Russo Lee Gallery: www.russoleegallery.com/exhibitions

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 Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. She lives in California now, but was a Portlander for a time. Her multi-media work is in a sweet spot between engaged in real world problems and ethereal other-worldliness. Cara is also influenced by mysticism, and is a student of it. So I was eager to sit down with her and learn more about her and the work she's brought into the world.

Cara describes Carve; The Mystic Is Nourished From This Sphere, a large-scale "bowl / hole" that doesn't just hold people's words, but amplifies them—turning the gallery itself into an instrument and a vessel for community care. That opens into a conversation about what happens when an artwork accidentally (and then intentionally) becomes a structure for collective ritual and shared vulnerability.

From there we go into pain. We cover the surprising role that migraines play in her creative thinking and what she learned about surrender. The conversation dips into the worldliness of her work as we touch on her piece This Is Not a Gun. And of course, we finish off with her sharing something she loves and her opinion on the best Jewish food.

Enjoy the conversation.

Links

Art/Lab: artlabpdx.org

Cara Levine caralevine.com

Oregon Jewish Museum & Center for Holocaust Education OJMCHE.org

Beit Kohenet —https://www.beitkohenet.org/

Rabbi Jill Hammer —https://jillhammer.net/

Bruce Nauman https://www.artdex.com/bruce-nauman-the-art-and-irony-of-revealing-mystic-truths/

Brian Eno's Apollo: https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Apollo:_Atmospheres_…

The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose.

This episode takes a different tack on one of this podcast's central themes; Jewish culture—how it's made, displayed, argued over, and lived. In this episode, I sit down with Rebekah Sobel, the Director of the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education (OJMCHE), for a conversation that treats museums not as neutral storehouses, but as active cultural engines: places where communities decide what gets remembered, how it gets framed, and who gets to speak.

Rebekah comes to this work through anthropology and archaeology. She says that objects don't "tell the truth" on their own—people interpret them. One of the through lines of our conversation is that Jewish culture is always being curated, whether it's in a gallery, a classroom, a feed, or a synagogue. And right now—especially post–October 7—the Jewish communal conversation is being curated by outrage and polarization more than by the tradition's own capacity for multi-vocal debate. Rebekah describes the museum's work in light of this moment: holding public trust while admitting that every exhibit is perspectival; creating spaces for people to be together again before they make declarations; and pushing access to Holocaust education statewide.

Finally we talk about what it looks like when Jewish culture is presented in real time to a real public—like OJMCHE's programming around Steve Marcus's "Psychedelicatessen," where religious symbolism collides with counterculture humor. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Rebekah Sobel.

Links:

Art/Lab www.artlabpdx.org

More on Rebekah Sobel here: www.linkedin.com/in/rebekah-sobel-5321b75/

Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education: www.ojmche.org/

Polin Museum (Warsaw) polin.pl/en/about-museum

The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose.

In this episode I sit down with writer, poet, and Alexander Technique teacher Eve Bernfeld to talk about what it means to sustain a creative life in the middle of parenting, teaching, and everyday obligations. We talk about discipline and devotion — daily writing practices, working through creative resistance, and what happens when you take yourself seriously as an artist even when time, energy, and certainty are in short supply.

Our conversation moves through Jewish prayer, fairy tales, and Jewish magic as living creative resources rather than abstract traditions. Eve reflects on discovering tkhines (vernacular women's prayers), writing contemporary poetic prayers that emerge directly from domestic life, and finding her way back to speculative and magical fiction rooted in Jewish sources. Along the way we talk about vulnerability, belonging, the body as part of artistic practice, and how creativity can be a way of reclaiming parts of ourselves we thought we had left behind.

Show Notes

Art/Lab (Portland) — https://artlabpdx.org/

Eve Bernfeld's Website: http://www.evebernfeld.com/

Tkhines (Yiddish women's prayers) — YIVO Encyclopedia — https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article.aspx/Tkhines

The Artist's Way (Morning Pages origin) — Julia Cameron — https://juliacameronlive.com/the-artists-way/

"Shitty first drafts" https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/10332/bird-by-bird-by-anne-lamott/

Alexander Technique (general overview) — AmSAT — https://www.amsatonline.org/alexander-technique/what-is-the-alexander-technique/

Omer: A Counting https://www.ccarpress.org/shopping_product_detail.asp?pid=50132

Grimm tale "The Jew in the Thorns https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm110.html

The Genesis 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