A Rose Among Thorns: Judith Joseph And Liora Ostroff

Visual artist Judith Joseph discusses the work she contributed to the Jewish Museum of Maryland's exhibit A Fence Around The Torah; a series of hand-pulled woodblock prints about Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza was a 17th century Jewish Dutch philosopher who was excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam for his ideas about God, nature, and philosophy, which were viewed at the time as heretical. Joseph also discusses traditional Jewish arts like illuminated manuscripts, calligraphy, and ketubot, handmade wedding contracts.

Judith Joseph is a Chicago-based visual artist who works across multiple media, including printmaking, painting, calligraphy, and installation. She has exhibited her work around the world and her work is in hundreds of public and private collections. She has participated in fellowships from Spertus Institute and the Amen Institute Visual Arts Project, and is a two-time Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Awardee.

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.

Judith Joseph: I think it's really important for us to remember to have the courage of our convictions, even when they're not popular. And I also think that it's terribly important for us... It's such a cliche to think outside the box, but to welcome ideas that at first may seem threatening or frightening. We should open our minds to consider other points of view. And I think in today's world, which is really the idea of the moment is pluralism, diversity, embracing others who are not exactly like us. I think that this is a great paragon of open-mindedness, and also we should be reminded of the destructive qualities to our own community when we don't embrace people who think differently than us.

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.

Mark Gunnery: And today I'm joined by Judith Joseph. Judith Joseph is a Chicago based visual artist who works across multiple media, including printmaking, painting, calligraphy and installation. She's exhibited her work around the world and her work is in hundreds of public and private collections. She's participated in fellowships from Spertus Institute and the Amen Institute Visual Arts Project, and is a two time Illinois Arts Council fellowship awardee. Judith Joseph's contributions to A Fence Around The Torah are a series of hand pulled woodblock prints about the 17th century Jewish Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Judith Joseph, thank you so much for joining us.

Judith Joseph: It's my pleasure. It's great to be here with you.

Mark Gunnery: We're also joined by Liora Ostroff. Liora Ostroff is a curator and resident 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, thank you so much for joining us too.

Liora Ostroff: Thank you for having me.

Mark Gunnery: So Judith, first can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your art?

Judith Joseph: Yes. I would say that my work is idea driven, but it also is taken up with mark making. I am a calligrapher and I've been doing calligraphy for many years. So calligraphy has a discipline aspect, but it also has an aspect of freedom. So there is a thoughtfulness and carefulness to all of my work in terms of really developing the idea to the furthest point that I can take it. But then the freedom and the expressiveness comes with the mark making, whether I'm carving into a wood cut or I'm using a brush and making a mark.

Mark Gunnery: The series of woodblock prints that you're showing in this exhibit focus on the 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Can you give us a brief overview on who Baruch Spinoza was and why you chose him as a subject for your prints?

Judith Joseph: Yes. Spinoza, he came from a family of Jews from Portugal who came to Amsterdam fleeing the Inquisition. So he was born in Amsterdam in 1632 and very quickly his teachers at his Jewish school discovered that he was a prodigy. So he was raised in of course a traditional Jewish environment, because that's all that there was at the time, but he started asking questions as a very young child which his teachers couldn't answer. And they tried to sort of keep him within the canon of Jewish beliefs as they were described at the time, but he was a genius and he really couldn't be limited by that. So eventually as an adult he was writing about his ideas and he was excommunicated because he refused to disavow things that were challenging to the status quo. So he lived his life as a religious Jew completely separated from his community. He was not allowed to marry. Jewish people were not allowed to even sell goods to him. But the secular world discovered him because he was so significant in his ideas.

Mark Gunnery: So like I said, Liora, you're the curator of this exhibit A Fence Around The Torah. You divided the exhibit up into five sections, including the one that this art is featured in, Dissent. Can you tell us about the Dissent section and what questions you were trying to spark with it?

Liora Ostroff: I think Dissent is about changing the narrative of how we think about Jewish life. The three artists in this section each deal with this topic in a different way. So I wanted to put Judith's work on Spinoza in conversation with pieces that deal with contemporary Jewish inter communal conversations. Danielle Durschlag's video Dangerous Opinions frames and critiques American Jewish political discourse and the extent to which discourse is censored. It doesn't matter what her character Diane Siegel actually says about Israel, in this world criticality of any kind is contemptible. The other artist in the section, Daniel Toretsky, created a site specific installation which asks us to consider who feels safe participating, questioning, and creating community. And how do we navigate a culture that is built on both tradition and dissonance? I think that we can draw comparisons between Spinoza's theological and philosophical dissent, which has now become so important, with current political dissent.

Mark Gunnery: So Liora, one more question for you about this. You've said that the subtitle for this whole exhibit, for all of A Fence Around The Torah, could have been Dissent. What did you mean by that?

Liora Ostroff: So much of the artwork in this exhibit is made in response to mainstream narratives about safety, community, and what Jewish life should be. Even though the artwork in the exhibit is grouped into several different categories, all of the categories overlap each other very elegantly. For instance, the artists in Dissent speak directly to the artists in the subsection called Security who invite us to recognize and name the connection between explicit white supremacist violence, white supremacy embedded in security systems, and historical anti-Semitic violence. RAYJ Collective and Marisa Baggett challenge us to reconsider the way that we frame the discourse around safety, security, and belonging. And that discourse is where we find dissent.

Mark Gunnery: So Judith Joseph, how do you see your prints of Baruch Spinoza fitting into this theme of dissent and into the larger framework of A Fence Around The Torah?

Judith Joseph:

I feel that Spinoza is the poster boy for Jewish dissent. He was so independent that even after he gained fame in the secular world and he was actually offered a post at the University of Heidelberg, he declined it because he wanted to remain independent. He didn't want to have to report to anybody with his ideas. And he really lived in poverty, so this would've made a huge difference for him. His ideas came and he didn't resist them and he felt that they were paramount, and he would not allow any societal pressure to really inhibit his free flowing ideas.

Mark Gunnery: Are there any lessons for today that you think that we could learn from the story of Baruch Spinoza and the Jewish community's response to him in 17th century Amsterdam?

Judith Joseph:

I think it's really important for us to remember to have the courage of our convictions, even when they're not popular. And I also think that it's terribly important for us... It's such a cliche to think outside the box, but to welcome ideas that at first may seem threatening or frightening, we should open our minds to consider other points of view. And I think in today's world, which is really the idea of the moment is pluralism, diversity, embracing others who are not exactly like us. I think that this is a great paragon of open-mindedness, and also we should be reminded of the destructive qualities to our own community when we don't embrace people who think differently than us.

Mark Gunnery: In your artist statement you wrote that your piece Spinoza And Van Leeuwenhoek is about crossing a line which divided Jews from non-Jews intellectually and culturally. Can you tell us what you meant by that and how that shows up in Jewish and non-Jewish life today?

Judith Joseph: In Spinoza's day, it was much more significant when Jews and non-Jews interacted. It was much more radical. Of course, we live in a secular world and we do that all the time. But I think that for myself as an artist I am close with other artists who are Jewish, and I gain a lot from their cultural insights and their intellectual creative insights. So we don't want to kind of enclose ourselves or close off influences, but I do understand the idea of the rabbis creating a fence around the Torah, because if you lose all self definition then you have no identity. So I think of the fence around the Torah as a basket instead of a concrete wall, it's got openings and things can come in and maybe a new strand can get woven into it. And by the same token, our ideas can flow out into the world. And they do.

Mark Gunnery: I wonder Liora, do you have any thoughts on that? I mean this idea of a fence around the Torah that this whole exhibit is about. I mean do you have any kind of thoughts about what Judith is saying and what you were trying to convey by this idea of a fence around the Torah?

Liora Ostroff: Judith, I really liked what you said about holding onto the courage of our convictions and welcoming ideas that might seem threatening or frightening. I think that this exhibit demonstrates that there's a wide swath of different Jewish identities that we might not see in our own communities, but that exist and deserve to be part of the greater Jewish community.

Mark Gunnery: So before we wrap up, Judith, I want to ask about some of the other art that you do. Can you tell us about how you got interested in traditional Jewish art forms like calligraphy and ketubah or wedding contracts?

Judith Joseph: Sure. I would say that my upbringing sort of existed between the polls of art and Judaism. Those were the things that my parents were interested in. My father is really an armchair historian. So I was really immersed in all of that. My mother studied art history, so she took these art history classes and would come home with her textbooks and show me everything that she had learned about. So I saw illuminated manuscripts about I would say the age of 12 and I fell in love with them. I was an uber nerd as a kid. I knew about flying buttresses of cathedrals and things.

So really I'm a detailed person, I've always loved intense detail in my artwork, so border design really made sense. And I learned calligraphy in high school. I really wasn't interested in it, but it was part of a general course I had to take to take art classes. And I found that it was useful because if I wrote a text and illuminated it, somebody would pay me for it. So I started making ketubot when I was 17 years old, and I really grew into it and I grew up with it and I came to embrace the discipline of calligraphy and to love it. It's not naturally easy for me, I have to work very hard at it, which has been good for character building. So I had this sort of Judaic foundation, but of course I live in the world and I enjoy all kinds of work from other cultures.

Mark Gunnery: How do you personally approach Jewish folk arts that have such deep traditional roots in a contemporary way?

Judith Joseph: I am in love with story, all kinds of stories, and I love mythology. And I don't feel personally bound by the strictures of ritual. I think it's like a rubber band for me. It's something that I can enjoy, but I'm not bound by orthodoxy really in my own life. So I am open in the way I practice things and I'm also open in the way that I explore stories. And of course all the stories in Judaism have parallels in other cultures, and I like finding those connections. I learned a word recently, syncretism, which is sort of finding the common denominator among different cultural backgrounds. And I definitely throw that all into my artwork too. It's not only Jewish.

Mark Gunnery: So like you mentioned, you've been fascinated by illuminated manuscripts from a young age. Can you tell us about illuminated manuscripts in Jewish tradition and history and contemporary arts? I mean I know that you already mentioned ketubah, but I know that there's illuminated manuscripts throughout Jewish tradition. So could you tell us a little bit more about their role in Jewish tradition?

Judith Joseph: There's this prejudice and idea that Jews didn't make art, which we know is not true. And actually Jews even did figurative art much more than was understood. Jews revere books, as do I. I mean it's really a big part of who I am and how I was raised. Decorating a manuscript is such a natural form of expression for Jewish people. So doing marginal ornamentation around a text, what that does is it connects the illustration or the images with the ideas in the text. So I do illustration, but I also do art which is not illustration because illustration is about really expressing a text. Whereas art, pure art really, kind of goes beyond that. But you can be an artist, a fine artist, and still have textual inspiration. And I would say that's how I am.

Now you asked about contemporary work. The illuminated ketubah was reborn in the 1970s. There was an article published in The First Jewish Catalog, a how-to article about calligraphy, and people started making a handwritten ketubot again and decorating them. So it's been a Renaissance, and I was a teenager then and I was part of that Renaissance. So today we don't just do little floral things, I mean there's a huge range of expression in ketubot and in other scribble works. And I think too we looked to the Arab tradition where the letters themselves are the form of expression. And there was just a wonderful exhibit in Jerusalem which had Emiratis Muslim calligraphers exhibiting with Hebrew calligraphers, which was really groundbreaking.

Mark Gunnery: So I'm wondering, for you both, is there anything else that you would want to ask each other?

Liora Ostroff: Judith? Are there any artists that really inspire you?

Judith Joseph: I am very inspired by Anselm Kiefer. First of all, his work is spectacular. He has such a strong sense of narrative and history and ideas, but also the work is visually so compelling. So he is definitely one of my bright lights, maybe primary right now. So many. I'm inspired by Picasso, not so much in the style of his work, but his life even though I know he was not the nicest guy. He had an unbelievable work ethic. And truly a lot of what he made wasn't so wonderful, but he made a lot. So when you make a lot of work, you know that some of it is bound to be good. Maybe not as good as Picasso. But also he was unafraid to try all different media. So that has been an inspiration to me because I work across so many different ways. I'm getting into sculpture lately. I don't even know who I am. I never could do anything but 2D art until the last five years, and now everything I do has to reach out into space and it's fabulous. I'm really enjoying it.

Judith Joseph: Trying to think if I have a question for you, I have so many questions for you Liora. So you are obviously a very accomplished painter. I'm interested in how you came to curate this exhibit, and if you're interested in sort of combining curation with your art as you move forward in your art practice?

Liora Ostroff: A huge part of this exhibit and this project is just taking this particular museum in a different direction and trying to connect different audiences to the museum. And so my role in doing that is in curating an exhibit, and also prior to the exhibit we created a bunch of community conversations around the topics. And so I think I brought my sensibilities as an artist to this project, but I'm in no way trained as a curator. My other focus in school was on art history and criticism, which I love. I think that my first art history paper that I wrote in college was about Anselm Kiefer, so I share your passion for his work. But I think I was mostly taking this from the lens of both an artist and a Jewish educator, because the other work that I do is in Jewish education. And so trying to think about topics that are interesting to the people and the kids that I work with and ways of making topics more accessible or easy to view in a different way. I think that this is an important conversation for Jewish communities to be having, and art opens us up to having the conversation in a completely different frame.

Judith Joseph: I really appreciate the curatorial comments on the website. And I think I expressed this to you, Mark. You don't always see that. They're very insightful and well written, and I consider it such a perk for myself as an artist to have that paragraph about my work and I really appreciated that. And I also appreciated reading what you wrote about the other artists. And when you talk about community building, I have been reaching out to the artists in this exhibit and trying to kind of make contact because I really appreciate what they're doing and I think it's very fresh. I am older than most of the artists, so I was really delighted to be in a cohort of people who are coming up and doing really interesting work. So that was a real gift to me, and I just felt that opened my world up in a wonderful way. So thank you for that.

Liora Ostroff: Awesome.

Mark Gunnery: Well, I want to thank you both for doing this interview today. I've been talking to Judith Joseph. Judith Joseph is a Chicago based visual artist whose work is being shown in A Fence Around The Torah at the Jewish Museum of Maryland. And Judith Joseph, thanks for joining us.

Judith Joseph: It was my pleasure. Thank you.

Mark Gunnery: And I've also been talking to Liora Ostroff. Liora is the curator and resident here at the Jewish Museum of Maryland where she curated A Fence Around The Torah. She's also a painter. Liora, thanks so much.

Liora Ostroff: Thank you, Mark.

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 artists-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.