I Mean...How Do You Define Safety?: Arielle Tonkin, Coral Cohen, And Hannah Aliza Goldman

"For any of us who hold hybrid identity and specifically us three, who hold categorically 'impossible' identity, in air quotes, in order for us to breathe and be whole, we have to melt down these false boundaries, because literally we can't exist if they're there."

-Arielle Tonkin

As part of our ongoing series on the contemporary art exhibit A Fence Around The Torah, we’re joined by three artists who were part of a four-person group multimedia installation for the exhibit titled “I mean…how do you define safety?”

Here’s what they said about the installation in their artist statement.  

“I mean…how do you define safety?”  is a multimedia exhibit of oral history, visual art, and nourishment. It explores 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. This piece explores the questions, longing, and desires of the women who are descendants of those who left. Although much was lost, stolen, and erased – remnants of our food, language, and other anchors connect us to our ancestors.”  

Arielle Tonkin (they/she) is a queer mixed ashkesephardimizrahi artist living on Ohlone land in the so-called San Francisco Bay Area. Arielle works to dismantle white supremacy through art practice, arts and culture organizing, and Jewish and interfaith education work. The Muslim-Jewish Arts Fellowship, Arts Jam for Social Change, Tzedek Lab, SVARA, and Atiq: Jewish Maker Institute are among their networks of accountability, collective power, creative collaboration and care.

Coral Cohen (she/her) is a director, writer, and performance deviser born and raised in Los Angeles and currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work spans multiple forms, media, and subjects, but is largely defined by an emphasis on creative collaboration and deep engagement with the people and subjects she approaches. Coral has written and directed a short film, Wresting Place, which is slated to premiere in 2022.

Hannah Aliza Goldman (she/her) is a performer, writer, producer, and voiceover artist based in Brooklyn. As a writer, Hannah has contributed to Alma and The Forward. She is an active member of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) and produced their inaugural Mimouna event celebrating Mizrahi culture.

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.

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 I’m joined by three artists who were part of a four-person group multimedia installation for A Fence Around the Torah titled “I Mean…How Do You Define Safety?”

Here’s what they said about the installation in their artist statement. Quote:

“I mean… how do you define safety? is a multimedia exhibit of oral history, visual art, and nourishment. It explores 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. This piece explores the questions, longing, and desires of the women who are descendants of those who left. Although much was lost, stolen, and erased – remnants of our food, language, and other anchors connect us to our ancestors.” End quote.

I’m very happy to be joined by three of the four artists who made this installation happen.

Arielle Tonkin is a queer mixed ashkesephardimizrahi artist, living on Ohlone land in the so-called San Francisco Bay Area. Arielle works to dismantle white supremacy through art practice, arts and culture organizing, and Jewish and interfaith education work. The Muslim Jewish, Arts Fellowship, Arts Jam for Social Change, Tzedek Labs, SVARA, and Atiq: Jewish Maker Institute are among their networks of accountability, collective power, creative collaboration, and care. Arielle Tonkin, thanks for joining us.

Arielle Tonkin: It's great to be here.

Mark Gunnery: I'm also joined by Hannah Aliza Goldman. She's a performer, writer, producer, and voiceover artist based in Brooklyn. Her audio play In The Kitchen is featured in the dialogue section of A Fence Around The Torah. As a writer, Hannah has contributed to Alma and The Forward. She's an active member of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, JFREJ, and producer of the inaugural Mimouna event celebrating Mizrahi culture. Hannah Aliza Goldman, thank you for joining us.

Hannah Aliza Goldman: Hello, thank you for having me.

Mark Gunnery: And I'm also joined by Coral Cohen. Coral Cohen is a director, writer, and performance advisor born and raised in Los Angeles, and currently based in Brooklyn, New York, her work interrogates cultural history through personal storytelling and emphasizes creative collaboration and deep engagement with the people and subjects she approaches. Coral has written and directed a short film, Wresting Place, which is slated to premiere this year. Coral collaborated with Hannah for the audio play In The Kitchen. Coral Cohen, thanks for joining us.

Coral Cohen: Thanks for having me.

Mark Gunnery: In just a note, I've already spoken with Coral Cohen and Hannah Aliza Goldman about their audio play In The Kitchen. Coral did an interview with ceramic artist, ritualist, and propagandist, Val Schlosberg, and Hannah did one with video artist, Danielle Durchslag and Jewish Museum of Maryland curator-in-residence, Liora Ostroff. So we're not going to go so deep into In The Kitchen this episode, but I strongly encourage listeners to check out those other episodes to hear about it because it's really an amazing project.

And just so you know, the fourth artist who was part of this installation, Annabel Rabiyah, couldn’t make it, but will join us on another episode coming out in a few weeks, so stay tuned.

So Arielle Tonkin, I want to start with you. First, can you give us an overview of this group installation? I mean, how do you define safety and what you contributed to it?

Arielle Tonkin: Absolutely. So for folks following along from home, imagine that you've just arrived in Baltimore, Maryland, and you're approaching a warm red brick facade entering through a raw iron gate, and you find your way through this old historical society of a Jewish museum and you pass in through a lobby space and into what looks like a pretty classical meteorological display with like mid tone gray walls, and you'll find my work together with Hannah Aliza Goldman's, Coral Cohens, and Annabel Rabiyah's kind of in the heart, in the center of what sort of becomes a spiral like shape through this museum gallery. I wanted to walk you through and all the way into the room, because a few folks who came to the opening reflected back to us, this is the first time we've seen a group of Mizrahi Jewish artists, physically and spatially centered in a contemporary Jewish art exhibition. And we're so moved, gratified, honored, and want to give deep bows to Liora Ostroff for that choice. So welcome to the gallery, and here we are.

Mark Gunnery: I want to talk to you about one of the pieces that you contributed to A Fence Around The Torah hybrid ritual object, which you call in your artist statement, "an outgrowth of almost two decades of Muslim-Jewish organizing and relational practice." Can you tell us about this piece and the context for creating it?

Arielle Tonkin: Absolutely. For me, the beginning of this sculpture started in high school. I grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York, and I was in eighth grade when 911 happened. And together with a Muslim classmate of mine, who had been born in Jordan and was raised in Poughkeepsie like me, we started an after school Muslim-Jewish dialogue project, and creative writing and art practice was a big part of what we did then. And that work has followed me through my adulthood and I've been doing it for half of my life. In the same way that social practice art and work with people has informed all of the paintings and sculptures I make, the artwork I make has also helped me move through dialogue work. So I'm part of a group now here in the San Francisco Bay Area called the Muslim-Jewish Arts Fellowship. And this sculpture is an outgrowth of partnership with a Qur’anic scholar, my dear collaborator, Dr. Leyla Ozgur Alhassen. And this specific object was waiting to be born for a while.

Leyla and I sometimes will pray side by side, a couple of times, handful of times, over our years of working together. And I had long been kind of curious just from a formal art perspective of around what's the difference between the rectangle of cloth that I wrap around myself and call a tallit or a tallis or a prayer shawl and the square rectangle of fabric that my dear colleague Layla praises on, on the ground, a sajjāda or a Muslim prayer rug. So I started this investigation just with the question of what makes a prayer rug, a prayer rug, and a prayer shawl, a prayer shawl. And if I begin to simplify each of these objects and bring them down to their bare essentials, could this one square rectangle tip or flip or queer and possibly be used for one or the other of these ritual purposes across our religions of Judaism and Islam?

And that question had been verbally in my belly for a few years. And then around the time of Standing Rock in the fall of 2016, a lot of my comrades in Chicago, where I was living at the time, were going to be part of interfaith coalition alongside the water protectors at Standing Rock, and came back with a lot of stories of interfaith ritual. So I had these stories in mind and on through the election in the fall of 2016, the inauguration, the Women's March, and in the wintertime of 2017 with the announcement of the Muslim travel ban, I felt very clear that I wanted to make an art piece that would take a strong stand against Islamophobia. And not just as an outsider, but as an Arab Jewish person who I felt myself deeply implicated myself and all of my family and all of my peers deeply implicated with a lot of callbacks to 911 and growing up, and just felt a very, very strong call to be standing in public as an Arab-Jewish artist alongside dear Muslim siblings.

So I decided to carry this weaving practice that I'd been doing since the fall of 2016, and try my hand at really digging into this question of how this cloth rectangle could flip between a rug and a shawl. And I started playing around the streets of Chicago with like Looney Tunes holes, and imagining portals for escape through the streets of the city, and thinking about the question of how could I design an interfaith solidarity ritual object that could defy a Muslim travel ban? And how could I create something that would in its fiber be portable architect texture and a portable house of prayer that could slip through airport security? And I went to a bunch of airport chapels, first in the U.S. and then around Europe, performing with burlap versions of my hybrid ritual object in airport chapels, sort of these interfaith impossible houses of worship right next to airport security. And that's how I began this investigation. And eventually in Chicago, throughout this time, I also completed weaving the sculptural object that hangs in Baltimore today.

Mark Gunnery: You're also showing a painting called Transitional Object that is not a word I was familiar with before I saw your painting. Can you tell us about this painting and what a transitional object is?

Arielle Tonkin: Sure. That phrase comes to me first from the theorist and practitioner D. W. Winnicott, and it's come to me through accelerated emotional dynamic psychotherapy, a modality that I practiced through my chaplaincy work, and I've also used in my own healing practice. And the phrase "transitional object" refers to early childhood attachment and early childhood development. And you all at home might be familiar just from your own growing up or watching the kiddos in your home or your nibbling or kids in the neighborhood that when it comes time to separate from a parent or a caretaker, a young one will often have a small object. It could be like a soft silk lovey or a stuffed animal who replaces the caregiver in those early, early moments. There's a phrase that when Winnicott talks about called good enough parenting, and many, many, many human beings don't necessarily get that assurance from a caregiver in early childhood that when their caregiver leaves the room, that they will be safe and that person will come back.

And so it's been used in adulthood, both in play therapy and other healing modalities to use a really, really small object that can be sort of like a symbol that is physicalized of a heart connection between a person and another person. And it's a talisman that's touched and held and felt, that's a reminder that even when the beloved person or the dear friend leaves the room, there's still a felt connection through this object. And so I use it in healing work and in education work, but I also think it's really powerful to explore an artwork where we're mobilizing objects all the time. So Hannah and Coral are familiar with this from theater, from the use of props, and any religious practitioners who use ritual objects will be familiar that we use ritual objects to connect to either a notion of God or a more general concept of divinity or all beings.

So I'm making this painting and sharing it with everyone with a nod to all of this, that even when we've had dislocations or disruptions or ruptures in early childhood, we still can find our way back to wholeness and loving connection in our adulthood, and that objects and art can help us do that.

Mark Gunnery: So I want to ask you one more question before I turn to Coral and Hannah. You've said that your artwork and social practice "presences, queers, and formalizes, the belief that healing through relationship can shift the fabric of social space and eventually one braided thread at a time shift the structure of the physical world." Can you say a little bit more about that and what you mean by that?

Arielle Tonkin: Yes, here's what I mean by that now. Talking about transitional objects is actually kind of a great lead up because I believe that there's a huge aspect of myself and of my soul and of my purpose in the world exists in social space and in connection with other human beings. And I think for me, that's actually like my highest purpose is sitting across from another person and sharing a moment of deep connection and celebration of aliveness. It can be corny or cheesy to say that out loud, but it's just a very true and felt thing like the sacred time of deep connection in a moment with another person. And a lot of the artwork that I make is about using materials and space and experiences to unlock a viewer or a participant's senses, sight, taste, touch, smell, so they can come into their body and feel an experience hopefully possibly of resonance in their heart and in their mind through memories, but first through the body and through sensation that will evoke warm, deep, important, provocative, significant connection with other human beings.

And sometimes when connection is impossible, and we're talking now all the four of us through a Zoom screen and remediated by technology, when physical presence in space isn't possible, I've found it really powerful in my life to use objects as surrogates sometimes for connection and as portals to bring a person back to that felt sense of connection interconnectedness with one human being and also all of humanity. So that's a little bit of what I mean when I talk about that

Mark Gunnery: Coral Cohen, I want to ask you about this too, about this social and relational aspect of art. You've said your work emphasizes creative collaboration and deep engagement with the people and subjects you approach, how do those relationships shape your work both generally and in the creation of In The Kitchen?

Coral Cohen: I think Arielle put it into really beautiful words. I think I work in a similar way, but I come at it obviously from a different background. But yeah, I really see my role, especially in device theater, which is mostly what I work on, including for In The Kitchen, I really see my role as kind of being just like a presence to just let what is under the surface just bubble up. I really see myself as just bringing together different collaborators, or in the case of In The Kitchen, really working with Hannah one on one to investigate some of what is actually down in the body, like Arielle said, about some of these sort of more intellectualized concepts and actually investigate what they mean on a personal physical level. And I find that also through a lot of sensory work coming at stories from different angles, sort of through senses, through memory, through different kinds of prompts, we're able to find some really beautiful moments, and both in writing and in performance for In The Kitchen, it was mostly writing.

So I feel that really collaborating, bringing together people, and just really letting them bring forth what is inside, and working together and using each other actually to open up more. I guess, material would be one word to say, or just a memory or anything it comes out, and then that can really turn into some really beautiful theatrical moments. So yeah, I really see relationships and collaboration as paramount to everything that I do. And for In The Kitchen, specifically, I think because we had been working on so many different iterations of the piece, we had a lot to build from, but also there was still so much to investigate from what had already been there. So I think it was very difficult because we were mostly over Zoom, we couldn't do so much of like the physical work that we would normally do, but it was really exciting and interesting to kind of try different experiments of how to kind of reach different moments and different levels. And I feel very proud of what we ended up making.

I mean, I think I would say 100%, it's coming from Hannah. I was just there to kind of pull it out and develop and maybe bring some structure to the writing process. And I feel really honored to have that role both for In The Kitchen. Everything that I do, I feel very lucky to be able to just be in a room with brilliant people and just kind of watch the brilliance happen or the magic happen as I often feel that it is when you're in a relationship and a collaboration and it just flows and it just happens and it feels like magic. And I feel really privileged and really lucky to be in that role and in that position because it's truly sublime.

Hannah Aliza Goldman: Coral, Coral, I miss working with you.

Coral Cohen: We will continue to work together, Hannah. You're my forever collaborator.

Hannah Aliza Goldman: You're my forever. But no, that's really as someone who has been an actor working with Coral as a director, that's completely what she does is she's just kind of a benign presence and a guide, and she really just lets what's in the room come alive, and it's just very cool. And not a lot of people have that kind of trust in others and in their vision. And Coral just has that trust for others, and so in return, we give her that trust, and that's what I think is so special about working with Coral is that there's an atmosphere of trust and relation. And when there's trust, people can be very vulnerable. And so I think that's really Coral's gift.

Mark Gunnery: Hannah, to speak a little bit more about collaboration, I mean, you've already done deep collaboration with Coral and others in the creation of In The Kitchen, and of course this group installation is a collaboration, can you talk about what it's been like for you to collaborate specifically with other Mizrahi artists, both in this exhibit and elsewhere in your work?

Hannah Aliza Goldman: Oh my gosh. I mean, it's been magical, it's been a gift, it's an honor. Yeah, I think working with Coral on this piece and other pieces, working with my friend, Liora, Elka Sellasie, who does Moroccan music, working with Sivan Battat and Tom Haviv in the early days, years ago, when we were just trying to investigate what is Mizrahi art making and how do we bring our traditions to the fore. Working with other Mizrahi artists has completely transformed my life. Artists have a very special role. I think we are cultural preservers and also cultural makers. And this has just kind of stuck in my head today, I went to this Zoom event with this singer, Neta Elkayam who does incredible Moroccan music rock in music, and she said that her husband and frequent collaborator,, Amit Hai Cohen said that tradition is not stagnant. It doesn't just live in the past. And as artists, it's our job to bring the tradition forward and change it and make it new and make new traditions.

And that to me is what's so exciting about being an artist. And I think specifically when we talk about Mizrahi culture and Mizrahi art, this is a culture that has historically been suppressed, erased, mocked, invisibilized, misunderstood, and it feels very exciting to take the power and say, this is our story, this is my story, this is how I relate to my ancestors and our culture from the past, and this is what I'm doing to bring it forward. And every time I collaborate with other Mizrahi artists, it feels like a very exciting potion that we're brewing. And there were many reasons why I wanted this exhibit to be a collaboration, but I think that was one of them of like what magic can happen when I bring all these collaborators together?

I worked with Coral many times in the past and I'd worked with Coral and Annabel on previous iterations of In The Kitchen. I'd never worked with Arielle, but I was like, I want this to be an ingredient in the potion, and I think we were able to create something really special and really cool. And I'm endlessly inspired by working with these folks.

Coral Cohen: Yeah. I just want to add that similar to our previous conversation about collaboration, I think that In The Kitchen and, I mean, how do you define safety is also in itself about finding each other and about connection between Mizrahi people. I mean, Hannah can speak more to this, but she began this project because she needed to connect to other Mizrahi women. And it was through this need for connection that she was able to bring forth so much more. So I think a really big theme of In The Kitchen that we were working with was that finding community, finding others that you can relate to in that way is honestly life saving and life affirming and can do so much for you. So I think it's something that's really important to us and it's really important to the piece as well.

Hannah Aliza Goldman: Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. I started In The Kitchen from a place of profound loneliness and I wanted to meet and connect with other Mizrahi women and specifically Jewish women from Arab lands. And through the interviews that I did with other women, I was really able to establish amazing connections. And Annabel, who is the chef in our project, I met her on a phone interview. That was the first time I'd talked to her, and I interviewed her about her story and her life, and then when I actually met her in person a year later, she said, "Hi," and she's like, "Hi, my name's Annabel Robbie, but I'm in the process of changing it to Rabiyah." And I was like, "I know, I remember because Rabiyah means spring and in Iraqi Arabic, and you're trying to go back." It was just like, I met so many people from a very deep and we interacted on a very deep plane. Those connections were really special.

Mark Gunnery: So I'm going to ask Arielle first, but anyone else can jump in on this because I'm curious what you all think. I'm curious what it's like to bring Mizrahi culture into spaces that are much more rooted in Ashkenazi culture, like, well, the Jewish Museum of Maryland? I wonder what's that like for you all.

Arielle Tonkin: It feels like a given in America. In the same way that there's a national conversation, international conversation happening around like ubiquity of white space, it feels like a given in America that institutional Jewish space is Ashkenormative, as we say is culturally normatively Ashkenazi. And so it doesn't feel remarkable to be invited or to present work in a context that isn't Mizrahi centric. I didn't grow up in Amella or like surrounded by that part of my family's home culture, so I've been formed in a context where Moroccan culture would be threads to pull out and search for and find and give loud voice to. And that's part of the thrill of getting to spend quality time with Coral and with Hannah and with Annabel from a distance, is all of a sudden, in the space of the four of us, there's this electric charge and force field of like, oh, we have our own social space.

So to bring it back to that social space versus object space, the more of us there are, and among the four of us, there's just a very strong electricity we all of a sudden bring a world with us. And it's been indescribable beyond bigger than what we could have imagined or what I could have imagined gift to have a huge room to fill our work with and to fill our sound with, that we could then inhabit and vivify and breathe life into. I think we knew it would be cool to try this, but this is a never before experienced situation to get to really fill a room with the audio of our stories and our voices and with my life scale five foot paintings and weavings.

So I guess it's my hope and my prayer that ongoingly in America, and we all of us are buoyed up and moving from the momentum of the movement for black lives, which we're now almost nearing 10 years after the nascent beginnings of that movement in Turtle Island in our country. But a lot of Mizrahi Jews were not just politicized, but there was different attention and resource given to us to organize in America, both given to us in that we galvanized ourselves and called for ourselves. And it's my hope that in another 10 year, the question will be less relevant. We're seeing just this huge upwell of momentum around Mizrahi culture making, and it's a hope that yeah, the needle will really, really, really shift. And we just have so much gratitude to Liora the curator, to you, Mark, and to everyone, the Jewish Museum of Maryland for giving us a lot of space to stretch out in and making a public statement on a national scale that this work, our work can be at the heart of a Jewish museum.

Mark Gunnery: Hannah, Coral, do you have any thoughts?

Hannah Aliza Goldman: Yeah, I'll start by saying that this piece is FUBU, For Us By Us. I made it for Mizrahi community, and so that is my target audience. That's my primary audience, like my primary concern is how that audience experiences and relates to the work. I also think it's vital that this work is shown and presented in Jewish institutions and most of them happen to our Ashkenazi. I think there's a really exciting opportunity for us to tell our own stories and for Ashkenazi to listen to our voices and view our artwork that we present on our own terms, that feels really powerful. And I also know that that's only one side of the coin, the other side of the coin is how they internalize it and how they perceive it. And that's something I have no control over. And sometimes they'll get it and sometimes my work is going to be misunderstood. And that's just the reality of making art. And those experiences of being misunderstood are also painful and can be triggering and really hard.

So I think there's always a risk when Mizrahi artists put their work in an Ashkenazi institution because there is going to be experiences of being misunderstood at best and demeaned at worst or rejected, right? And I think in the short time that we were there at the museum and saw people interacting with our work, we experienced the whole spectrum. The other thing I will say is I think it was amazing that we had that room in the center of the museum, and also we were put under the heading of how do diverse Jewish voices to make space for themselves, and given that label diverse, right? Like an automatic othering, which is true, right? That's what we are all exploring in our work is how it feels to be othered. There is also a sting of being put under that label of like, we're a diverse part of the exhibit.

So I'm just naming a lot of different things, like there are a lot of feelings about it. I think overall, it's a net positive and I'm overjoyed that our work was selected. I think not only is it Mizrahi, it's multidisciplinary, it's question zionism, and it's not easily digested or understood, especially for a traditional museum artist for a museum audience. And I'm so grateful that we were given the opportunity to be shown in that way. And I think as always, there are lots of complicated feelings about it. The last thing I'll say is that one thing that I am struggling with a little bit, a little bit in my work is, the piece is called In The Kitchen and it's a lot of it is about food, and I have noticed in the past few decades, there has been a trend in Jewish institutions to tokenize and exotify these Mizrahi food as a way to show that, oh, look, we're being progressive, but it never goes beyond the food.

And I really want my work to have food as a starting place, a jumping off point into deeper and more difficult conversations. And so I do worry that may be one of the ways that the work is being misunderstood, that people are like, "Oh wow, I love spices. Isn't this great?" And not really delving deeper.

Arielle Tonkin: I'm getting so much life from hearing you say this, and I'm also realizing like, it's talk about Mizrahi normative space, like just getting to be in a Zoom room with you, with you all gives me strength and courage. First of all, broadens my lens so much and takes my own Mizrahi identity from those threads and little bits of evidence to then vivify with artist's imagination into something huge. It turns it in. There's just so much more inputs and felt sense and a live relationship and not just a grasping towards the past. Plus one to everything you said and want to underline and highlight for folks listening at home that it's not just a feeling of potentially a lack of Mizrahi spaces to exhibit or platforms to share artwork, but all of us are politically progressive and left wing, and all of us deeply uplift Palestinian rights through our work and all Arab lives through our work, and there's a lot of complexity.

Each of us on this call are mixed and each of us on this call are also growing up in diaspora with complex connections to the S.W.A.N.A region, and it's hugely life giving to not only work with a group of women and queer artists, but also to feel safe, politically safe and ideologically and core values wise felt and understood. And no part of ourselves needs to be checked at the door to make our work and co-create our work and share our work.

Coral Cohen: Just like I want to add one little thing. I really agree so much with what Arielle and Hannah both said. Yeah, I'm just so grateful for the opportunity and the space in the museum. I'm also very aware and I became very viscerally aware when I was in the museum about how putting my work out there and also standing by my work physically made me have to sort of be a representative for this community in a way that I think I know that so many other marginalized artists and voices have spoken about much more eloquently than I can, but I think really having that visceral experience of being the one or being the representative or having to sort of explain an entire culture or an entire group of people, a very vast, diverse, multi experienced group of people, there's a lot of pressure there, and there's a lot of kind of mixed feelings about that.

I just want to reiterate how powerful it was to be with Arielle and Hannah physically in space and with Annabel also with us in spirit in the museum and also in this exhibit, just to have that strength in numbers, to have that connection, and to have that comfort of home. And honestly, I just want to say when Arielle and I met, it was like a long lost sibling. It really was so powerful, and to have that is so, so important, especially when your body is on the line, literally in this space. And it was really, I have to say the first time I felt that so viscerally because so much of the time spent making this work In The Kitchen was spent during a pandemic where I wasn't physically in space out with my work and having to kind of defend and speak on it in that way is a very new experience for me, one that I'm sure I will continue to have, but one that I welcome in some way, because I think that it's so important to have our work out there and in these normative spaces.

And again, I really want to highlight how the Jewish Museum of Maryland really took care and sensitivity with our work and putting it in the center of the room, giving us so much space. I really applaud that. But it's a mixed bag for sure, as what Hannah said. So, yeah, I just wanted to add that in as well.

Mark Gunnery: So I'm going to throw this to Arielle. Like Hannah mentioned earlier, the pieces in your group installation deal with Zionism in both explicit and subtle ways, and especially in how it relates to Arab and Jewish identities, I'm curious what you were interested in saying about Zionism here, especially at a Jewish institution, like the Jewish Museum of Maryland.

Arielle Tonkin: One thing to put out just even immediately as a person born in New York state as I was, and not born over there, categorically, Coral, Hannah, Annabel, and I are not supposed to exist according to a narrative that we inherited both in Jewish community and outside of Jewish community. And what I mean is all of us were raised in a context here in North America. Actually, no, we span the coasts and where we were raised, but there are Arabs and there are Jews and there's an Arab-Jewish conflict. And this is in the water from when we're really, really, really small. So take that truth and then put it next to the fact that our foods and our cultures and our songs and our stories and our histories, we're not surrounded with those in public space. We are a mixed group in terms of who had those inputs at home and who didn't, but to be a young person, finding our ways through that reality is to know that categorically, these parts of us aren't allowed or aren't even extent.

And so for me, I found my way, I think, through Muslim-Jewish organizing, as I described earlier, towards my own Arab identity. And I actually really do think that weaving a hybrid ritual object helped me see and realize that, that I could make something that could share a spine, but also never really collapse or be flipped or queered or become one. Like these are distinct bodies and zones, even if we share a neural network system. So why is this my way of answering the question about Zionism? Because a friend, Binya Kóatz, actually a dear arts and culture maker and trans leader here out in the Bay Area, recently was talking about how apartheid logic that is instated through nation state system and reinforced through militarized capitalism every day, trickles down from the state level and the institutional level and even on down to the nuclear family level. And each family in the time that we're growing up, it has to be like its own thiefdom, each nuclear family has to somehow sustain this small unit of people.

And it serves to just really cut us off from each other as communities and to become, I don't know, like these ossified units that have to struggle so much to bring in every aspect of resource to be self-contained and self-sufficient. And that feels so close to home that for any of us who hold hybrid identity and specifically us three, who hold categorically impossible identity, in air quotes, in order for us to breathe and behold, we have to melt down these false boundaries because literally we can't exist if they're there. So how does this relate to Zionism? I think I'll speak just for a couple more seconds about this. I'm a traditionally observant Jewish person, and for me, Zion exists in my cosmos in my theology, and just like my hybrid ritual object is hung like an asymptote in the gallery and a gesture towards a strong yearning, but never a full approach or a full completion.

For me, Tzion, or Zion is, in some ways an imaginable space to yearn towards. And there's tremendous complexity as someone with Moroccan heritage, and in terms of how Jews of Morocco where brought both Israel, Palestine, and brought other Morocco to other places, just even in my grandparents' lifetime. So not so long ago. I'll pause there. No, there's one more important thing to say. I was speaking with a comrade of ours, Michal David, the other day, and with every year that I do my work, I feel clear and clearer about my positions that I'm an anti-Zionist and I want my work and my life to follow that truth. I'm also an Arab Jewish person in America, and a lot of my family lives over there, and a lot of my family holds different politics than I do. And the partisan lines and the politics and the ideology that mostly white dudes have allocated and divided and set in place cannot separate me from my family. Literally the fault line is inside of our bodies.

It's very, very different than our white or Ashkenazi leftist comrades who don't necessarily have a felt connection or a family connection to Israel, either theologically or in terms of the state itself. It's very complex for us. And I feel very firmly and I take so much strength from this artwork and from my colleagues, from Carol and Hannah and Annabel that I refuse to be cornerized and I refuse to be subdivided further, and I demand a nuance and full support from the whole Jewish community to understand the complexity that I hold. I also want to give a call to action that every Jewish person in America should be orienting energy, maybe less to this question of like, how do you feel about Zionism and maybe more to a question of how do you feel about all of the Arabs in your life, Jews, non-Jews, everybody? How are you giving attention and resource learning about history and finding ways to really, really uplift us and incorporate us into your whole sense of what Jewish peoplehood is?

Mark Gunnery: That’s Arielle Tonkin, I’ve also been joined by Hannah Aliza Goldman and Coral Cohen. The three of them, along with Annabel Rabiyah, created the multimedia installation “I mean…how do you define safety?” for the Jewish Museum of Maryland’s exhibit A Fence Around The Torah. Thank you all so much for joining us on the Disloyal podcast.

Coral Cohen: Thank you, Mark.

Arielle Tonkin: So good to be together.

Hannah Aliza Goldman: Thank you.

Mark Gunnery: And 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 at jewishmuseummd, or on Instagram at 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