We Would Come Home But You’ve Locked The Door: Daniel Toretsky & Melissa Martens Yaverbaum

"What Jewish life feels like today, as humans, is not reflected by most of our Jewish institutions...I think we all feel that there is a different Jewish experience in the 21st century than what we can even understand from the 20th century. And it's heading in a direction that is like nothing our museums are accustomed to. Jewish life is going to look and feel and present so differently in fifty years it's going to be astonishing."

-Melissa Martens Yaverbaum

We continue our series on the exhibit A Fence Around The Torah with a conversation about the mixed-media installation We Would Come Home But You've Locked The Door, which deals with themes of inclusion and exclusion in Jewish communities.

Daniel Toretsky is an artist and architectural designer based in Brooklyn. He plays trombone in the Hungry March Band and Mrs. Toretsky’s Nightmare.

Melissa Martens Yaverbaum is the Executive Director of the Council of American Jewish Museums, and was on the curatorial panel for A Fence Around The Torah. She also used to work at the Jewish Museum of Maryland.

Transcript

Melissa Martens Yaverbaum: What Jewish life feels like today, as humans, is not reflected by most of our Jewish institutions. And so this exhibition really takes a step in that direction by asking right up front, like who is included, who is not, who is visible, who is not. And I think we all feel that there is a different Jewish experience in the 21st century than what we can even understand from the 20th century, and it's headed in a direction that is like nothing our museums are accustomed to. Jewish life is going to look and feel and present so differently in 50 years. It's going to be astonishing.

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, our latest contemporary art exhibit. It explores how Jewish communities navigate the concepts of safety and un-safety in traditional, contemporary, and futuristic ways.

Mark Gunnery: 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 what you're hearing under me is a recording of a nigun. A nigun is a form of Jewish vocal music with roots in the Hasidic movement. This one is called Kol Bayaar, which is Hebrew for a voice in the forest. It was recorded in the courtyard of The Jewish Museum of Maryland in November 2021 as part of a mixed media installation in A Fence Around The Torah titled, We Would Come Home But You've Locked The Door, by Daniel Toretsky. And today I'm speaking with Daniel Toretsky.

Mark Gunnery: Daniel Toretsky is an artist and architectural designer based in Brooklyn. He also plays trombone in the Hungry March Band and in Mrs. Toretsky's nightmare. Daniel Tortesky, thank you so much for joining us.

Daniel Toretsky: Thanks for having me here, Mark.

Mark Gunnery: I'm also joined by Melissa Martens Yaverbaum. She is the executive director of The Council of American Jewish Museums, and was on the curatorial panel for A Fence Around The Torah. She also used to work here at the Jewish museum of Maryland from 1997 to 2007. Melissa Martens Yaverbaum, welcome to Disloyal.

Melissa Martens Yaverbaum: Hi, it's great to be back with you all.

Mark Gunnery: Daniel Toretsky, I want to start with you. Can you give our listeners a sense of your installation, We Would Come Home But You've Locked The Door, both the installation itself, and the community process for putting it together?

Daniel Toretsky: Sure. So the installation is in the courtyard of The Jewish Museum Of Maryland. It's a really beautiful brick courtyard with these trees on one side that, while there's only two trees, I think about it kind of like a forest, and there's a big metal gate to get into the museum. The installation itself is kind of an altar, and it's cloaked in black mesh. And when you go around the altar it's kind of mysterious from the outside, but you go around and there's some steps up to a little platform and you look through this window, back at the gate.

Daniel Toretsky: And when you're looking through the window, there are all of these yellow window panes that have been collaged in black vinyl by the community around The Jewish Museum Of Maryland. And what they're collaged with, is based on a prompt. And the prompt was to draw something in the background that is a place where you feel at odds with your Jewishness, and draw something in the foreground, or a few things in the foreground, that show ways that you have reconnected or ways that you feel closer to your Jewishness.

Daniel Toretsky: And this perspective that we're setting up with the horizon in these images is based on a story from Joshua, Chapter 22, where this tribe leaves Israel and goes across the Jordan and sets up an altar there, and the tribes that are back in Israel are really P.O'd about this and so they say, "You're not allowed to set up an altar outside the land of Israel." And the tribes that had crossed the Jordan answer back, "Well, we set up this altar not to make heretical sacrifices, but to remind our descendants that they are The Children of Israel or Jewish, when your descendants will inevitably deny that from them." So the perspective set up through this window is of looking back towards a place that is somehow in conflict with our identity as Jews.

Mark Gunnery: So Daniel, you've said that your artwork, quote, "Embraces Jewish cultural and religious rituals, while interrogating structures of power within the Jewish diaspora," end quote. Can you speak a bit more about that effort and where this particular piece of art fits into it?

Daniel Toretsky: Sure. I mean, I guess that's the aspiration, is to do that. Ever since I went to architecture school, there was a point where I had gone to Rome and I studied really so much spatial theory, but from a very Christian perspective. And when I came back, I read this article about celebrating Tisha B'Av in Rome, and it sort of hit me that I had spent this whole semester in a really loaded place, Jewishly, but never really considered what the theories or the politics behind Jewish space were. And so that really started me on this quest of mining Jewish liturgy and Jewish history and Jewish folk narratives for architectural clues for what could be considered Jewish architecture. And so a lot of those things tend to be rituals, like an eruv or a Sukkah or a Chuppah. I mean, those are kind of literal, but also really phenomenal examples of these portable Jewish architectural rituals.

Daniel Toretsky: And I think that those things have a history of subverting the power structures that they are built in. They're often built in societies where there's a different power structure that is at odds with Jewishness or with Jewish spirituality in some way, and these things kind of make Jewish space in the space of others. And they do so in, I think, subversive, but also very non-permanent and non-violent means. And so I'm really interested in how these traditions of Jewish space-making can be mechanisms to make the kinds of Jewish spaces that I want to see, which are non-violent and non-colonizing and non-permanent, but still have a lot of meaning and bring the community together. So that's, I think, what I'm getting at with this.

Mark Gunnery: So Melissa Martens Yaverbaum, I want to turn to you. You wrote the curatorial statement for this piece where you called it, quote, "An act of acceptance and defiance, simultaneously," end quote. That idea, simultaneous acceptance and defiance, is really fascinating to me. Can you speak more about that? Both in terms of Daniel Toretsky's piece and how it relates to this exhibit more generally?

Melissa Martens Yaverbaum: Yeah. I was really excited to think about this piece more deeply and the place that it occupies on so many levels. As Daniel was talking about, I think one of the tensions within Judaism and within Jewish life is, to what extent are we recognizing what's come before? To what extent are we accepting and being accepted? And to what extent are we defying the past and saying, "You know what, we're going to use our antenna, we're going to use our cultural navigation here, and we're going to try something different." And the very narrative that this piece conveys really looks at the consequences of trying to do Judaism and perform Judaism in a different way. And so I love that the piece in its physical presentation, echoes traditional elements. It looks like an arc. It looks like it could be a Sukkah or an outdoor Jewish structure.

Melissa Martens Yaverbaum: It reminds me of the Torah Arcs inside the Lloyd Street Synagogue that's just to the north of the museum and where the piece is located. It reminds me of the gorgeous Torah Arc Wall inside B’nai Israel Congregation, which is just to the south of the museum. So it's traditional in its initial impression, but as you start looking at the piece, you really realize the instances of rebellion, and as Daniel was talking about, the different expressions and contribution of the community members that interacted with the piece that talk about that insiderness and the push, at the same time.

Mark Gunnery: Like Daniel said, this piece is displayed in the outdoor courtyard of The Jewish Museum of Maryland. Can you talk about how you see this piece as a physical introduction to the museum and the exhibit as a whole? And how does it welcome people while also addressing one of the exhibits main themes, which is dissent?

Melissa Martens Yaverbaum: I love the location of this piece. I've known the museum campus since that courtyard was built in the 1990s, and I don't remember too many creative uses of it. And so the idea that this piece is the welcoming piece to not only the exhibit, but to the museum, is super interesting. I mean, it's putting out something that's very approachable, very physically and visually enticing, but at the same time, it's announcing literally on the museum's doorstep, that we're going to challenge some of your traditional ideas. And this is a big step for the museum, for the field of Jewish museums. It being there on the front, it's inviting, it invites participation, but it also sets up the way in which the exhibit wants to tackle difficult issues and difficult questions. So I think its location is fantastic. I think the fact that it's participatory is great.

Melissa Martens Yaverbaum: I think it really speaks to a lot of the themes in the exhibition, and it serves as an intro to the museum. The piece itself is an altar, but it also makes me think of the museum as an altar in the urban forest that is Baltimore, that what are Jewish museums and museums, if they're not altars to the past filled with objects and the artifacts that people hold up? I remember there was a great art piece at the Jewish Museum of Prague a few decades ago by Melissa Schiff, and it was like an arc, and it was an arc with projections of the museum's collection on the outside, and this piece reminds me a lot of that. That was an internationally-acclaimed piece and it really kind of held up the idea of what will be held by the community and what will be put forward. And we as Jewish museums are the arcs that are going to carry those objects into the future. So Daniel's piece is perfectly in dialogue with what a museum can do.

Daniel Toretsky: I appreciate that, Melissa. Thank you.

Mark Gunnery: Coming back to this idea of dissent, Daniel, I am wondering what dissent means for you, and specifically how it relates to your art and the work of other Jewish artists, including the ones featured in A Fence Around The Torah?

Daniel Toretsky: Dissent is a really tricky thing in the Jewish community because... Well, I think it depends what we're being dissenting of. But I think a lot of the works in this exhibit that Liora put together, understand dissent through the lens of that which is at odds with the conservative mainstream. And I often see that through the funding structure of what gets funded. And it's sort of... This is less put together for me because I'm still trying to figure out what this means, but I think the main thing is how much support we give to Zionism or Palestinian liberation efforts. And when I think about dissent, I think about opening up space for a conversation that is critical of Zionism, and that's something that is often blacklisted or shut out of mainstream Jewish spaces.

Daniel Toretsky: So what I'm also, I think, would like to be in dissent of, and I think this exhibit is, is not simply in dissent of some of these nationalist principles, but dissenting the, or rejecting the notion that those people who are challenging those principles are in some way not Jewish, or in some way disloyal or bad Jews. And that is, I think, what enrages me more than anything, is that people would like that conversation to not even be within a Jewish space. So I would like to think that I'm helping a movement of dissent around excommunicating Jews who challenge conservative Jewish values.

Daniel Toretsky: But I think that there are other pieces to that, of dissenting conservative values that exclude voices and POC voices, especially when those voices are interested in demilitarizing or depolicifying Jewish spaces that have oftentimes sought out relations to police power or civic power when it is detrimental to certain people in those communities.

Melissa Martens Yaverbaum: Right on. I'm just going to jump in. I love what you're saying and I think that one of the things that Jewish museums are so wrestling with is, in a way, they are a reflection of mainstream Jewish institutional culture. They rely on a lot of the same philanthropic support. Now, some of them were born from Federation. Some of them are born from synagogues. And all of that is also a desirable relationship because I feel like museums are alternative voices in partnership with a lot of those organizations and a lot of them enjoy a looser affiliation with formal Jewish community and sometimes no formal affiliation, but they are institutions and as institutions to where are Jewish museums going to run new experiments in organized Jewish culture? And as you were talking, Daniel, I was so excited. I mean, imagining and remembering so many moments where I could go to holiday services with family and the experience was so buttoned up.

Melissa Martens Yaverbaum: Even if the rabbi I was really dynamic and somebody that I really respected, but then the conversations around the dinner table afterwards were the real conversations, right? And we can't, or I can't expect at this point a synagogue experience to be a container for that cacophony just yet because the systems aren't set up necessarily to allow that, but Jewish museums can do something really different. Right? And part of what you've done with your piece is allow the recording and the musical component, allow the participatory moment. And so it's museums and your artwork are kind of straddling what is the frame we expect, what is the container, and where is the conversation going to go on its own? And I think so much of what you're saying is that there is a real hunger for, we know that Jewish life is changing.

Melissa Martens Yaverbaum: But it doesn't seem to be presented, right? I even think about Brooklyn where you live and I think about the wide range of Jewish experience in Brooklyn, and yet there's no museum, library, JCC, et cetera, that reflects the richness of the Jewish experience of Brooklyn as I experienced it, living in your neighborhood. And I think it's such a shame. It's one of the most dynamic, exciting Jewish communities that I've ever lived in, and where is that dynamism presented? Nowhere. Not in the Jewish museums in Manhattan, not at the JCCs. I mean, it trickles in-

Daniel Toretsky: What about the Brooklyn children's museum, the Brooklyn Jewish children's museum? That's a joke. That's a joke.

Melissa Martens Yaverbaum: No, but I think one of the things that's totally at odds is that what Jewish life feels like today, as humans, is not reflected by most of our Jewish institutions. And so this exhibition really takes a step in that direction by asking right up front, who is included, who is not, who is visible, who is not. And I think we all feel that there is a different Jewish experience in the 21st century than what we can even understand from the 20th century, and it's headed in a direction that it's like nothing our museums are accustomed to. Jewish life is going to look and feel and present so differently in 50 years, it's going to be astonishing. And so are we ready and who will be the leaders and the voices? And I think artists are some of those leaders for us and I think Jewish museums can be some of the leaders as well.

Daniel Toretsky: Yeah. Especially in partnership. I think the amazing thing about this being an art exhibition at a Jewish museum is that the messaging doesn't have to be as clear. What I've sort of seen, or at least gathered from the curators since this exhibit opened, is that some of the ambiguity within the pieces has allowed conversations to happen that wouldn't have if this message of dissent was expressed in a more literal way. And I think it's allowed people who aren't necessarily familiar with issues of queerness, or racial justice, or national politics. It's a lot of people who don't have as much familiarity or comfort talking about those things to realize that there is a vibrant and well intentioned and essential community of Jews, and mostly young Jews but not all, talking about these things. And I get the sense that it's really opened up some channels of communication that we didn't even know it would with Baltimore's Jewish community, which I think is really magical.

Melissa Martens Yaverbaum: And I'm going to give a shout out to the middle age Jews, because I know them. They're my crowd. And I think, I certainly can't speak for everyone, but I think one of the things that kind of my age group of people working in Jewish culture that we see is we're not the youngest ones, and we're closer to the older ones, but yet a lot of us, we're the employed ones, right? We're the ones sitting in the decision making seats. And I think we're between the generations, and so I think the work has to come from multiple directions. We need those long invested in Jewish culture who might be older or long time stakeholders to understand that the language and the fluency around Jewish culture is changing into a different language.

Melissa Martens Yaverbaum: The people that are new to Jewish culture are younger. We want to amplify their voices, but also have them understand how the systems work so we can all find the right seats for the table, not just get the voice on the table, but build the architecture of the table anew, and that's where people like you come in as architects and artists also. And to think about systems design, to think about the flow of Jewish arts and culture. And we don't have to do things the same way we've always done them, and we don't have to throw them out either. I could say, as a middle aged person, I perfectly respect and understand some of the beauty of what has come before. Hey, we wouldn't be in museums if we didn't honor it and love it on some level. Right? And we wouldn't employ in our artworks the Jewish past and the nigun. Right? And the stories from text, if there wasn't something there that was so beautiful, but we're all going to have to work together to bridge these divides.

Daniel Toretsky: Yeah. I think that's seen in so many ways in this exhibit, is people really having a reverence and enthusiasm, not just a reverence, but an absolute love for tradition, and at the same time, really using those traditions to challenge tradition. I mean, the arc, you mentioned looks like the B’nai Israel synagogue, not the arc, the altar in my piece. You mentioned it looks like the B’nai Israel synagogue, and that's no coincidence because the curvature and the proportioning was literally just taken from that Bema. And I think that in that way, but also with the nigun and like you mentioned, in other ways, there's an interesting enthusiasm, but also trying to show a dedication to what has come before in a really tangible way.

Melissa Martens Yaverbaum: Yep. What I see so many of the artists in this exhibit expressing is sometimes pain, but also an urgent cry out for, "Take my enthusiasm. I'm a generative soul in this community and take my enthusiasm, take my talent, take my voice. Let's do something with this." Right? And so I think that dynamism and that potential is so exciting. And so now, we need to shape and we need to create new spaces and we need to create new containers. And I love that reference to the B’nai Israel synagogue, that Torah ark wall is stunning. I mean, in the cannon of American synagogue buildings, that wall, I mean I think of Norfolk Street Synagogue on the Lower East Side, which has become a rental space. It's stunning, it's gorgeous. It's similar in it's architectural vintage and it's internal motifery. But that surviving Torah ark wall in Bene Israel is stunning and I don't know how many people in Baltimore have seen it. Right?

Daniel Toretsky: Yeah.

Melissa Martens Yaverbaum: And there's the those synagogues, and the Lloyd Street synagogue is the third oldest surviving synagogue in the country. That's phenomenal. And we could go in it and you could use it and we can use that space. We could bring it to life.

Mark Gunnery: Melissa, I want to ask you something. You invited the people experiencing Daniel's piece to think about this question. How do we navigate a culture that is built on both tradition and dissonance? This is something that I think has been coming up a lot when we've been putting on the fence exhibit, is this tension and I think that it plays out a little bit in some of these age dynamics too that you're naming, especially with people who may have for many years expected a Jewish museum to do one thing and then seeing it do something different. And I think that tension between tradition and dissonance is something we were really playing with here in the Jewish Museum of Maryland in this exhibit. So I wanted to see if you could talk about that tension and how you think Daniel's work responds to it.

Melissa Martens Yaverbaum: Yeah. I mean, we've talked about it a lot here in this conversation, but one of the things I see happening and it's playing out very publicly is the great fight for who will tell our stories. Right? I mean, I think about the 1619 project in the New York times and how it reenters the American narrative around slavery from the very beginning. The public reshaping of the narrative is what's at stake here and for artists and Jewish museums and Jewish culture. And in a way, we became very comfortable with the 20th century narrative of, okay, and this reflects a lot of culturally specific identity museums of like, okay, things weren't great in the Homeland or before. And then we came, we blended in, we retained some of our traditions, and we contributed back to society. And that meta narrative has kind of echoed throughout identity specific museums for many, many decades.

Melissa Martens Yaverbaum: And I think what's at stake here is to what extent are we going to disrupt that narrative? On the one hand, there's a lot we missed in the 20th century. A lot. And as I mentioned, the 21st century is going to not resemble the 21st century. At the same time, accommodating dissonance is really tricky. And I also sometimes see the push coming very hard. And I also think that sometimes there's retaliation in dissonance. And I think we have to be a little bit careful with each other that there's a lot to reconstruct here and to reassemble, but it's a way of taking the best of what's come before and incorporating the best and the unknown about the present, because there's things we're just not going to understand yet and we're just figuring it out as we go. And so I think it really needs to be a two-way flow because if we just pull apart what's come before, I think there's going to be a lot lost.

Mark Gunnery: Daniel, I wonder if you have anything to say about that because I think that your work really deals a lot in tradition, but tries to respond to the current political moment that we're in. Like for example, the music that is part of this installation, that's broadcast over a radio, that is something that we recorded together in the courtyard. Can you talk about those kind of traditional elements like the nigun and some of the musical traditions that you're part of and, yeah, your relationship to that kind of tradition?

Daniel Toretsky: Well, I think one big point of Jewish influence for me is just growing up Reconstructionist with this ethos that tradition has a vote, but not a veto. But I think my real connection to tradition comes from getting to grow up in the Klezmer world and the world of the Yiddish revival. And I've been going to these different KlezKamp, KlezKanada since I was maybe five, not every year, but this has really been a community for me. And it's where I started to understand both the spiritually transcendent, but also the kind of politically active role of the nigunim, of these melodies that are sometimes wordless and sometimes have words and really come out of the early Hasidic tradition. And so the nigun is sung in the courtyard is this one called Kol Bayar, which I learned from Rabbi Sruli Dresdner at KlezKanada.

Daniel Toretsky: And it has these really interesting lyrics where this rabbi is wandering through, or the rebbe, the Baal Shem Tov, is wandering through a forest and hears this cry through the trees and it's of this father who metaphorically resembles God, represents God. And the father says, "Children, children, why won't you come home? Please come home. You've forsaken me, do you forget me? I'm in pain without you." This goes on for a few versus in Yiddish and Hebrew and Russian. And then the rebbe answers back, "We would come home, but a guard stands at the door." The more I learn about Jewish history, the more I understand that there has always been a struggle with authority. There has always been a schisming and oftentimes the real growth, spirituality or politics, comes from that tension between what is preexisting and what people would like to turn that into.

Daniel Toretsky: And it's ambiguous as to what this song means. I mean, some people would say that the guard standing at the door is the really kind of restrictive Jewish laws of the Villa Nagone, right? That existed at that time. Or they might say that the guard of the door is the, I guess at this time, the Ottoman Empire that is controlling the land of Israel. But I think that the way I'd like to read it is that the guard standing at the door is the kind of gate keeping that exists around Jewish spirituality and that in order to come closer to Jewishness or keep being Jews you really have to leave that behind and then look at it from the outside, which is why the altar is outside the museum, outside the synagogue. But there's funny irony because it's still in the courtyard and it's still very much a part of that community, which I think is in a way, the reason it gets to start a conversation.

Mark Gunnery: So we got to wrap up here in a minute, but I want to ask each of you one more question. Melissa, are there any lessons from A Fence Around the Torah that you think others can learn from? And where do you see this exhibit fitting into the world of Jewish museums and the ecosystem of Jewish culture today?

Melissa Martens Yaverbaum: I'm really excited about the implications of this exhibition. It really took a different approach in its development that a lot of practitioners are talking about, but that not all of which have ripened yet across the field of Jewish museums. I loved that there was a committee process. Liora was brilliant in her curation of this show and really worked tightly with the vision of the museum in its direction, and also brought on a whole team of people to make decisions along the way with a really diverse panel of people looking at the art, talking about it. I could say that one of the most exciting Zoom meetings I had all year was talking with the group about these pieces. And I was surprised by that. I was delighted. I thought it would kind of be easy of like, "Oh, we like this one. We like that one. Great, great, great."

Melissa Martens Yaverbaum: But the conversations that it sparked were fascinating and have really stuck with me because I think when you get people thinking about the work and thinking about it together, you come to a very different outcome than you would if you were going solo. So I think the collaborative process was really fascinating. I think the fact that the labels were written by different authors really is fresh in its approach. I think that hopefully the voices and intentions of the artists come through and are given a lot of primacy and the overall exhibition narrative, the overarching theme is bold. The range of artists and viewpoints is broad. And so I really can't wait to see how this sparks other types of exhibits such as this across the field of Jewish museums. I think a lot of colleagues are watching this project and I think they're really eager to try some of these things.

Mark Gunnery: Daniel, same question to you. Are there any lessons you learned from working on A Fence Around the Torah that you think would be valuable to other artists, curators, and people involved in the arts or in Jewish cultural institutions?

Daniel Toretsky: I think a lesson would be that people are, especially people of different generations than me, people kind of across the generational... Maybe not just generations, people who have different Jewish experiences than me, when prompted, just as understanding and excited about the idea of forming community around dissent. And I guess the lesson there is to be open to that and that participatory art within a Jewish space can bring a lot of things to the surface that really are important. And in the workshop that we had where people were making these things, there were people who kind of represented exactly what I imagined and what I would've represented myself, but then a lot of things that I would never have expected, but really allowed them to engage in the overall goals of the work.

Daniel Toretsky: And the lesson is to sort of find a mechanism for creating that openness and engagement and not letting it be anything, right? But how do you give people just enough of a prompt and a start and a sense of a safe place to express themselves? How do you do that, but also not make it too prompted or like you're sort of looking for a very specific answer? And so I think in some ways the piece was successful, in other ways I probably could have... I don't know. I think the piece was surprisingly successful, actually, because I didn't necessarily know that it would spark so much dialogue.

Mark Gunnery: That's Daniel Toretsky. Daniel Toretsky is an artist and an architectural designer based in Brooklyn. His mixed media installation, We Would Come Home, but You've Locked The Door is featured in A Fence Around the Torah. Daniel Toretsky, thanks so much for joining us.

Daniel Toretsky: Thank you. It was really a pleasure.

Mark Gunnery: I've also been speaking to Melissa Martens Yaverbaum. She's the executive director of the council of American Jewish Museums, and is on the curatorial panel for A Fence Around the Torah. She also used to work here at the Jewish Museum of Maryland from 1997 to 2007. Thank you Melissa, for joining us today.

Melissa Martens Yaverbaum: Great to be here. Thanks, 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 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 is 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.