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
• OPB, Oregon Art Beat: "Fred Harwin Hand-Paints Windows To The Soul" (2017). This is the mini-documentary you mention in the episode. It shows how he molds, carves, paints, and polishes a prosthetic eye, work that takes around eight hours over four visits with the patient. The Kid Should See This
• Article: https://www.opb.org/television/programs/oregon-art-beat/article/eye-paint-prosthetic-fred-harwin-ocularist-portland/
• Video: https://www.opb.org/video/2017/09/23/ocularist-fred-harwin/
• Manual of Cardiac Surgery (Harlan, Starr, Harwin; Springer-Verlag). It was originally published in 1980–1981 as a two-volume set, then revised into a single volume with new full-color illustrations. AbeBooks
• Volume 1 (1st ed.): https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4684-0076-2
• 2nd edition: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4612-2474-7
• Illustrated Handbook of Cardiac Surgery, adapted from the second edition for a broader audience: https://books.google.com/books/about/Illustrated_Handbook_of_Cardiac_Surgery.html?id=-Mm5BgAAQBAJ Springer
• Fred Harwin Collection, OHSU Historical Collections & Archives. This is the archive Fred mentions at the end. It consists mostly of his original illustrations, including work from both editions of the manual, and is open to the public. Some images have been digitized in OHSU Digital Collections. Archives WestArchives West
• Finding aid: https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv756660
• Digital Collections (search "Harwin"): https://digitalcollections.ohsu.edu
• OHSU exhibit, "Illustrating Medicine: The Visionary Work of Fred Harwin." It is listed among OHSU HC&A's exhibits, but I couldn't confirm whether it's currently on view: https://www.ohsu.edu/historical-collections-archives/exhibits OHSU
• OHSU Oral History Program. Harwin is listed as an interview subject, and most transcripts are available online through OHSU Digital Collections. https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv684447 Archives West
• Sara Harwin, Illuminated Letters: Threads of Connection (Fred's recommendation). The project draws on illuminated manuscripts and sacred geometry, using large panels and hanging mobiles. https://www.illuminatedletters.net Illuminatedletters

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

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

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Links & Show Notes

Art/Lab: artlabpdx.org

Rebecca's website: https://www.rebecca-clarren.com/

Indian Land Tenure Foundation: https://iltf.org/

Peter Beinart's Being Jewish Adrer the Destruction of Gaza: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/775348/being-jewish-after-the-destruction-of-gaza-by-peter-beinart/

This is a re-release of S3E28, originally titled "Can We Find Truth Amidst Competing Narratives?"

A Reflection by Rabbi Josh

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

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.

Dalal has received numerous Israeli awards in recognition of both his music and his contribution to Israeli culture. In 2021, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Israeli Ministry of Culture. He has also been honored by other organizations for his dedication to the oud and for his role in bringing its musical traditions to audiences in Israel and abroad. He was also nominated for a Grammy.

He has made a profound impact on Israeli music, Israeli culture, and what we now call world music. I think you are really going to enjoy this conversation with Yair Dalal. And you do not want to miss him—or the other musicians performing at the Portland Jewish Music Festival, which is co-sponsored by Art/Lab along with a host of Portland Jewish organizations.

Enjoy my conversation with the remarkable Yair Dalal.

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 & Culture: www.artlabpdx.org

Yair Dalal: https://www.yairdalal.com

Portland Jewish Music Festival: https://ejcpdx.org/pjmf26

Documentary About Yair, "Ain't Got no Jeep and My Camel Died": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AOSmzIPG7g

Documentary about Iraqi-Israeli music and musicians (recommended by Yair): https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=baghdad+bandstand

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

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 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

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.

Links from the Show

• Art/Lab website — artlabpdx.org

• CANVAS — bycanvas.org

• Jerusalem Biennale — jerusalembiennale.org

• Oregon Jewish Museum & Center for Holocaust Education — ojmche.org

• Eastside Jewish Commons — ejcpdx.org

• Guerrilla Girls at the Getty — "How to Be a Guerrilla Girl" (Getty Research Institute) — getty.edu

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 identity, individual and collective. America feels like it's walking into a forgetting plague of its own making — asked to forget the norms of democracy, and asked to forget the harder parts of our past.

Memory and forgetting have been on my mind. Jews are commanded to remember, but being Jewish has also always meant forgetting — every generation, ours included, has had to let go of some of what came before in order to recreate itself. I wanted to talk through all of this, so I sat down with Rachel Atias — a wonderful writer with a fertile mind — on day one of her Art Lab alumnihood. (This cohort of Art Lab artists just completed the program; she's the first to be interviewed, with more voices to come.) Rachel recently taught a workshop on forgetting and on writing the pieces of our forgotten selves, at The Shuk, the Jewish Day of Learning sponsored by Art/Lab along with the Jewish Federation here in Portland. Forgetting came up a lot in our conversation — but so did hope, and whether hope is warranted.

I think you'll enjoy this one, and enjoy getting to know Rachel's writing. Links in the show notes as usual. Enjoy the conversation.

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: artlabpdx.org/

Rachel's Website: rachelattias.com

Gefilte Fish — Portland Review: portlandreview.org/gefilte-fish-by-rachel-attias/

Pond Scum — Does It Have Pockets: www.doesithavepockets.com/fiction/rachel-attias

A Fish in the Bathtub: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fish_in_the_Bathtub