Jewish Bodies, Jewish Stories: Rosabel Rosalind And Liora Ostroff

"I enjoy the idea of recontextualizing Christian iconography and Christian symbology in order to replace it with a Jewish perspective that is missing. And I am basically inserting myself and inserting the Jewish perspective into an art historical canon that erased Jewish bodies and Jewish stories."

-Rosabel Rosalind

Visual artist Rosabel Rosalind discusses the work she contributed to the Jewish Museum of Maryland's exhibit A Fence Around The Torah. It's a series of drawings featuring both historical and ahistorical figures like Queen Isabella I of Castile, King Ferdinand II of Aragon, and Holofernes from the deuterocanonical Book of Judith. They are depicted with Hebrew text covering their faces and bodies, watched over by a bird that is present in each drawing. The bird has a human nose, and a stereotypically "Jewish" one, instead of a beak.

We discuss the use of antisemitic tropes and symbols in Jewish art, depictions of Jewish bodies in Christian art, Rosalind's upcoming comic project, and Barbara Streisand.

Rosabel Rosalind is an artist based in Pittsburgh who received her BFA in printmaking, painting, and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University. She’s been included in group exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hyde Park Art Center, and Sullivan Gallery in Chicago, and solo exhibitions at Vienna's Museums Quartier and Improper Walls Gallery.

Liora Ostroff is Curator-In-Residence here at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, where she curated A Fence Around The Torah. She is a painter whose work explores themes like queerness, Jewishness, violence, and the idiosyncrasies of life in Baltimore.

Transcript

(Please note that this transcript may contain errors.)

Mark Gunnery: Disloyal is a podcast committed to a broad representation of thought, ideas and creative imaginings. The opinions expressed by guests on this podcast do not necessarily represent the opinions of the staff, management, board or volunteers of the Jewish Museum of Maryland.

Rosabel Rosalind: I think in the same way that I just mentioned, that recycling the Jewish nose and recontextualizing this symbol that many people would associate with the Jewish body, I enjoy the idea of recontextualizing Christian iconography and Christian symbology in order to replace it with a Jewish perspective that is missing. And I'm basically inserting myself and inserting a Jewish perspective into an art historical canon that erased Jewish bodies in Jewish stories.

Mark Gunnery:  Welcome to Disloyal, a podcast from the Jewish Museum of Maryland. I'm your host, Mark Gunnery. Today on the show, we're continuing our series on 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. I'm speaking with the artists and curators who made the exhibit possible. You can experience the art from this exhibit at afencearoundthetorah.com.

And today we have a fascinating conversation that ranges from the use of antisemitic tropes and symbols in Jewish art to Barbara Streisand and the so-called Jewish nose. I'm joined by Rosabel Rosalind. Rosabel Rosalind is an artist based in Pittsburgh who received her BFA in printmaking, painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And she's currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University. She's been included in group exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hyde Park Art Center and Sullivan Gallery in Chicago and solo exhibitions at Vienna's MuseumsQuartier and Improper Walls Gallery. Rosabel Rosalind, thank you so much for joining us.

Rosabel Rosalind: Thanks for having me.

Mark Gunnery: And I'm also joined by Liora Ostroff. Liora Ostroff is Curator-in-Residence here at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, where she curated A Fence around the Torah. She's a painter whose work explores themes like queerness, Jewishness, violence, and the idiosyncrasies of life in Baltimore. Liora Ostroff, thanks for joining us.

Liora Ostroff: Thank you for having me.

Mark Gunnery: Rosabel Rosalind, I want to start with you. Before we talk about the specific pieces you contributed to A Fence around the Torah, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your art?

Rosabel Rosalind: Yeah. So, well I'm currently a student, so I'm pursuing my graduate degree in Pittsburgh, and my work is really shifting. Currently I'm actually... Right now I'm working on a book about my Zayde, my grandfather, who was an Orthodox rabbi, and I'm painting the manuscript in beet juice because he loves Borscht, and I think just the material and compositional specificity of that, I think, captures his essence in a way that will make the book very individual to him and to our relationship. And it's a book about us and it's autobiographical as well. I would consider it an auto-ethnography because, while I tell the story of him and our relationship, it's also a story about me and my Jewishness.

So in that regard, I make books, I tell stories, but I'm also a painter. I like to draw. I like to make comics. So the book that I just mentioned is actually going to be a book of comics. I basically just, when somebody asked me what I do, I tell them that I like to make images, and those images typically tell stories.

Mark Gunnery: You contributed three pieces to A Fence around the Torah that were inspired by research you did in the Jewish Museum Vienna's Schlaff Collection of antisemitic objects and art and postcards. Can you tell us a little bit about this series and the research that it came out of?

Rosabel Rosalind: Yeah. Absolutely. So the project was inspired by the Jewish Museum Vienna's Schlaff Collection of antisemitic postcards, which is very... It's a very unique archive. Most Jewish museums, most museums in general would not at all be interested in collecting such controversial material, but it was a really interesting research project for me because I embarked on this journey in a region still very much so contending with antisemitism and the history of antisemitism that it doesn't necessarily want to contend with in a contemporary sense. So to be working on this and with this collection at this time, amidst the Pittsburgh shooting, so I started this project in 2018, just a month before the shooting in Pittsburgh happened.

I think the project came about at a very critical moment in both American politics and also Austrian politics. But the work that I was looking at, which I struggle to even call art... I wouldn't call it art. The postcards and the objects were essentially just caricatures of the Jewish body in a variety of different ways. So objectifying the Jewish face, the Jewish body, creating grotesque caricatures and exaggerating facial features and feminizing male Jews and masculinizing female Jews. And just completely abstracting and pulling apart every ounce of humanity of the Jewish body.

So essentially at the beginning of this project, I was recycling a lot of the symbols and stereotypes that I was coming across, drawing using my face and self-portraiture to digest the stereotypes and digest the imagery that I was looking through. And the work that is in A Fence around the Torah, that's the work that I made at the end of my nine months, working with the same imagery over and over and over again. And I think the work does a really good job of condensing the Jewish pride and the survivalist sensibility of the Jewish spirit that I had found in myself and through the research that I was doing, and capturing it through three vignettes, two historical and one ahistorical.

So the ahistorical vignette is of Judith Slaying Holofernes. It's actually traditionally a Catholic story. It's a part of the Catholic canon, but it's a story of a Jewish heroine who murders and beheads Holofernes, who is a general in the Assyrian army in order to save her people and her town, Bethulia.

I inscribed on Holofernes' face the mourner's Kaddish. So there's this othering that I'm doing. When facing this image, you see, or this drawing, you see Judith and her accomplice beheading this character that is inherently visually implicated in its own violent legacy in a Jewish oppressive history. The other historical piece, one of them is God full of compassion. It's a depiction of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, who were responsible for thousands and thousands of deaths during the Spanish Inquisition, not only of Jewish bodies, but Muslim bodies as well, and inscribed on their faces is Kel Maleh Rachamim, which is translated as God full of compassion. And it is another prayer of mourning and remembrance.

And the other drawing is called Merciful Father. And this is a drawing in response to the Crusades. So in this one, all of the characters have the same inscription of Harahamim which is called Merciful Father. It is a memorial prayer that was specifically written in response to the First Crusade. And some of the characters on there are Pope Urban II and Count Emicho and other figures that played large roles in the persecution of Jewish people during this time.

And also one thing that I will add too is every drawing in the series has this dove figure character that is present and makes itself known through an aura through this radiance. And the dove has, instead of a beak, if you look closely, it has this very stereotypical nose, a Jewish nose that I say in quotation marks, because I was using a lot of nose imagery during this project in a way that's critical, but also celebratory, kind of twisting it in a way that I think maybe one might assume I'm doing it to reduce the Jewish body to a big nose, is seemingly reductive or seemingly stereotypical, but I find power in recontextualizing it and celebrating the history of Jewish oppression through the lens of Jewish survival.

Mark Gunnery: Speaking of recontextualizing, your work puts Jewish symbolism and prayers into classically Christian art, like the images of the 11th century Crusaders or the Catholic Spanish monarchs. Why did you want to have these Jewish and Christian elements together in the same works? And did you come away from this project with any different insights on either Jewish or Christian artistic traditions?

Rosabel Rosalind: Yeah. Well, I was working in Vienna and I was surrounded by the most beautiful churches ever. In Europe there are so few temples still standing, Jewish synagogues. In museums, any museum that you go to in Europe, you see, you're surrounded by very Christian iconography, paintings illustrating Christian biblical scenes. I think in the same way that I just mentioned that recycling the Jewish nose and recontextualizing this symbol that many people would associate with the Jewish body, I enjoy the idea of recontextualizing Christian iconography and Christian symbology in order to replace it with a Jewish perspective that is missing. And I'm basically inserting myself and inserting a Jewish perspective into an art historical canon that erased Jewish bodies in Jewish stories.

Mark Gunnery: Liora Ostroff, I want to turn to you. You put Rosabel Rosalind's work in the narrative section of A Fence around the Torah. First, can you remind us of what the questions were that you were putting forward with the narrative section?

Liora Ostroff: Yeah. I paired this section with the questions, when do you feel safe? And how do we imagine Jewish futures, safety and solidarity? And I think that one question that I should also use to frame this is, what is the relevance of history and myth to Jewish life today and to the Jewish future? And I think that drawing us back to historical narratives of antisemitism and to violent expulsion is a means to direct our attention in certain ways towards the future. And like a lot of the other artists in the show, namely Naomi Weintraub and Arielle Tonkin, I think that Rosabel posits that ritual is a source of strength and also a means of reckoning. And I think that the narratives that Rosabel points to in her work are specific, but the question of Jewish safety and when and how we make safety for ourselves is very broad. And so another thing that I just found powerful about her work was the pairing of prayers and ritual with these historical and mythological narratives.

Mark Gunnery: Yeah. Rosabel, do you have any thoughts about that, about the use of ritual and prayer in your art and why you're drawn to using them in this context?

Rosabel Rosalind: In this context, I actually hadn't in the whole, the series of work that I produced when I was in Vienna, I hardly ever used Hebrew text and writing in my drawings. So this was new to me. In the show that these drawings were initially installed in, my exhibition in Vienna which was called 70% Chutzpah, I brought the community together on the opening night and performed a Havdalah ritual with a community of people who had never experienced anything like it. It was totally secular, like maybe no Jews at all around me and I made booklets. I had... Actually, no. I did have my friends there, some friends from the synagogue that I was attending, and I had a little bit of help and I found somebody to play guitar. And it was a really beautiful ceremony and performance and community gathering and cultural exchange that I feel very grateful I was able to contribute something to my community at that time.

So in that way, ritual very directly contributed to my experience in Vienna. I became a lot more religious, a lot more Jewish. I feel I became a lot more connected to Judaism through this work that I did in Vienna, and also through practices like that, where I had no other choice but to approach my Judaism with pride, because I was one of the very few people in Vienna who was out as a Jewish person.

Mark Gunnery: So why did you want to include your work in this particular show and where do you see your work fitting into the main themes of A Fence around the Torah, like safety and unsafety and inclusion and exclusion?

Rosabel Rosalind: Well, I think my Judaism, I've said this a few times and my friend and I, we both share this same sentiment where we feel like our Judaism is a Judaism of oppression. The story of being a Jewish person that I was raised with, is a constant reckoning with the history that preceded us and that still continues to implicate us. So when I think about Jewish safety and unsafety, I think that's just a description of being Jewish today, contemporary Jewishness, this feeling of safety in entering a synagogue and feeling at home, like the sounds and the people, the prayers are all familiar to you and at the same time maybe, just maybe, you're walking into a potentially dangerous situation.

I think so many Jewish people all around the world walk into a synagogue and have no other choice, just subconsciously become aware of like where the nearest exit is. So I think in that way, Jewish safety and unsafety are inseparable from the way that I think about myself as a Jewish person. And that was really all that I was thinking about when I was in Vienna doing this research at the Jewish Museum.

Mark Gunnery: The piece that we were talking about earlier, Kaddish, or Judith Slaying Holofernes, Liora, I'm curious, what stood out about that to you in particular?

Liora Ostroff: One thing that really draws me to this piece, I think, is how at first pass, there's kind of this enigmatic connection between the narrative and the image and the prayer that's inscribed onto it, and I keep coming back to it and thinking about how those two things are connected and why they're put together. But also as a personal thing, I just, I love tracing the Judith story through art history and similar femme fatale characters, and the Walter's Art Museum here in Baltimore has a painting by Trophime Bigot dated to the late 1500s titled Judith Decapitating Holofernes, which depicts the character of Judith and her handmaiden decapitating the Assyrian conqueror Holofernes. And so I kind of like that connection because it is such a striking image that when you walk into the Walters and you walk into that particular space, it's kind of the first thing you see.

And so I think very tangibly, it has a connection to art in Baltimore. But another thing that I like about it is just that the Book of Judith is apocryphal and as Rosabel has noted, it's often used in Christian communities, but it also came into use in Jewish communities in the medieval period and is associated with Hanukkah and with the Hasmoneans, and the character herself is Jewish. So one thing that I think is interesting is that even if the source is not Jewish, it's kind of a narrative about Jewish strength from what was probably an outside perspective. And even in more straightforward depictions, like the one at the Walters, she's this powerful symbol of strength and of cunning.

And it did sort of become somewhat canonized in Jewish traditions as well. And I think that these mythological narratives, including Judith and also including the story of the golem, which is represented by Val Schlosberg, point towards how Jewish imagination kind of perceives external threats and how to overcome it. And we tend to use these myths as tools because they're a way to transmit our imagination from generation to generation. And so are the historical narratives, but I think of this artwork as an extension of that tool and as a reimagination of that imagination.

And I guess finally, what I really love about this piece is the pairing of the narrative and its associated themes with the Mourner's Kaddish, and Rosabel, I think you noted in one of your artist's statements that the Mourners' Kaddish doesn't mention death. It's really a praising of God for life. And so I just think there are all of these kind of powerful and enigmatic links between this narrative of Jewish and female triumph over foreign and masculine subjugation and cultural imperialism with prayer and ritual. And as I interpret it, this is my personal interpretation of it, Jewish tradition and ritual are the source of strength and triumph. And so I love how kind of powerfully Jewish it feels.

Rosabel Rosalind: Very well said. You talk about my work better than I do. At this point, I'm kind of... I've forgotten a lot of the initial impulses that brought me to make the work because the work was completed in 2019. So it feels like forever ago, to be honest.

Liora Ostroff: I think part of the reason that I like it is because I make Judith and Holofernes paintings. And I think my Judith and Holofernes paintings are a little bit different, because sometimes I imagine that the character is specifically Jewish in a Jewish ritual character kind of way, but also in a lot of my paintings, I imagine that this character is really just a stand-in for any woman or person who's being subjugated or out of control and trying to triumph in the face of something much greater than themselves. So yeah. I just, I like it because it's one of my favorite art historical themes.

Rosabel Rosalind: Yeah. And I've seen your depictions of the same story, and I think if only you could have curated yourself into this, because although I know that that's a bit taboo to do as a curator, I think your work is like... It so beautifully answers the same question that I raised too, and that the entire theme of A Fence raises.

Liora Ostroff: We should do a contemporary Judith show.

Rosabel Rosalind: Yes. Up next at the Jewish Museum, Maryland.

Mark Gunnery: Okay. Well, I have a question for both of you, because you both... Now that we're talking about Liora's art, you both use antisemitic imagery in your art. Liora, I'm thinking about the one that you did that was specifically in response to something that happened at the Jewish Museum of Maryland when somebody looked at the exhibit and said, "What about left wing antisemitism?" And you made a piece in response to that. And Rosabel, you're using these antisemitic tropes, as we talked about before, like the stereotypically Jewish nose on the bird. I'm wondering what it's like for both of you as artists and as Jews to spend time absorbing and remixing and thinking about these antisemitic tropes.

Liora Ostroff: I started painting swastikas into some of my paintings a few years ago, and it was sort of directly in response to Donald Trump and to the rise in white supremacy here. And I think that one of the things that I wanted to emphasize or communicate in those pieces was how embedded that symbol and white supremacy feels even in Jewish life. Like, I don't think that there is an American Judaism that isn't heavily informed by white supremacy and by antisemitism. And so at least in my own work, I felt like I was like beautifying and wrapping this symbol into depictions of Jewish life as a way to kind of just deal with that.

And that painting that you're referring to, I think was... I also wrapped swastikas into that one, but I think I was kind of thinking about it in a more indirect and complicated way, just in terms of what is informing what we think is our external threat, which ones feel like an external threat and which ones are maybe a false flag.

Rosabel Rosalind: Yeah.

Liora Ostroff: I'm using the word flag intentionally.

Rosabel Rosalind: I would second the fact that a history of Jewish oppression is implicated in American Jewishness and Jewish identity. It is impossible to fully assimilate without constantly reckoning with the history that, at least for me, my family is from Russia. I feel this constant pull backwards towards the shuttle. I feel like I'm always contending with this, a history of where did I come from, questions of where did I come from? Why are we here? Why is my name pronounced this way? And in doing this project that I mentioned before, about my Zayde, the book, I've been doing a lot of research too into where my family came from, like where they're actually... Where they fled from, from the pogroms. So that's been really interesting, but anyways, all that's to say antisemitism is inherent to the way that I think about being a Jewish person, probably because of the project that I did in Vienna, and because I had no other choice but to spend nine months with this material.

Well, what's interesting too is when I was in Vienna, I was drawing a lot of noses. I was drawing a lot of pre-Hitler history. I wasn't really able emotionally or probably physically. I knew that I would cross a line if I drew Hitler or even insinuated anything related to Hitler in Austria, but it wasn't until I came to America, and since I've been in grad school, I've been drawing a lot of Hitler mustaches on things and I've been really fascinated by cats that have little Hitler mustaches, and remembering that cars... When I was a kid, I learned about the Holocaust at a really young age, and I've felt very scarred by cars when they don't have a license plate, have a little blacked out license plate. Many of them look like they have little Hitler mustaches.

So cars that look like Hitler, cats that look like Hitler, flowers that look like Hitler, I just... The list goes on and on. So I've been drawing a lot of them. And I think it's serving a similar purpose to me as the nose, which is it's referencing a kind of like offensive, dark history through humor in a way that recontextualizes a more sinister past.

Mark Gunnery: Okay. I have one last question for you, Rosabel. Do you identify as a Funny Girl or a lifelong Barbara Streisand fan? I'm wondering why you like Barbara Streisand so much, and what kind of lessons you've learned from her over the years?

Rosabel Rosalind: When I was in third grade, we had a biography project, and I showed up to the library late on the day that we had to pick our people, our subjects to do our biographies on. And when everybody else had picked the book of the biography that they were going to read and the people they were going to do their biographies on, I showed up. And I think the last two books that were left were Barbara Streisand's biography and someone else, I have no idea. And I didn't know who either of them were. And the librarian says, "I think you should do Barbara Streisand." And I said, "Okay. I don't know." And of course, I went to a Jewish elementary school. So of course they had a Barbara Streisand book. And so I brought it home and I read about Barbara Streisand and I watched some Barbara Streisand movies.

I was eight. By the end, I had to dress up as Barbara Streisand and I got a little plastic award. And in front of everyone, in front of all of my peers and their parents, I got up and I looked at my award and I said, "Hello, Gorgeous," in my little eight year old voice. What I remember of Barbara Streisand, and something that I think is just everybody knows, it is the fact that she owned her nose. She owned her Jewishness. It was never even a question of whether or not she was going to change her features in order to look assimilated, in order to look less obviously Jewy, or less other. So that's something that I love about Barbara Streisand, but that's also the reason why yes. I love Yentl. Yes. I love Funny Girl, but I had no other choice but to do a biography on Barbara Streisand and that's why I love her.

Mark Gunnery: That's Rosabel Rosalind. Rosabel Rosalind is an artist based in Pittsburgh and is part of A Fence around the Torah. Rosabel Rosalind, thank you so much for joining us.

Rosabel Rosalind: Thank you for having me.

Mark Gunnery: And I've also been joined by Liora Ostroff, who is Curator-in-Residence here at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, where she curated A Fence around the Torah. Liora, thanks for joining us.

Liora Ostroff: Thank you for having me.

Mark Gunnery: Thank you so much for listening to Disloyal. We hope you enjoyed the podcast and we'd love to hear your feedback. Our email address is disloyal@jewishmuseummd.org. You can follow us on Twitter @jewishmuseummd or on Instagram @jewishmuseum_md. And if you're in Baltimore, come visit. Go to jewishmuseummd.org for more information and to become a member if you're interested in supporting content like this podcast. Visit afencearoundthetorah.com to check out our latest art exhibit. Disloyal is a production of the Jewish Museum of Maryland and it's produced and hosted by me, Mark Gunnery, with production assistance from Naomi Weintraub, the Jewish Museum of Maryland's Community Artist-in-Residence. Our executive director is Sol Davis. You can subscribe to Disloyal wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes each Friday. Until next time, take care.