Dangerous Opinions In The Kitchen: Hannah Aliza Goldman, Danielle Durchslag, And Liora Ostroff

In this episode of Disloyal we discuss two pieces of art in the Jewish Museum of Maryland's A Fence Around The Torah exhibit.

One, In The Kitchen, is an audio play and piece of communal oral history made by and for Jewish women with heritage in Arab lands. As artist Hannah Aliza Goldman puts it, "it explores themes of home, of culinary heritage, of womanhood, of family, and collective memory."

The other, Dangerous Opinions, is a video collage that takes footage from the 1988 film, Dangerous Liaisons, and uses it as a jumping off point to discuss, as artist Danielle Durchslag puts it, "the political and psychological complexities of American Jewish wealth" and "the phenomenon of WASP drag, in which rich Jewish clans copy the rituals, aesthetics, and rules of the Christian aristocracy in the hopes that a subtle kind of passing as American royalty will equate long-term security."

Hannah Aliza Goldman is a performer, writer, producer, and voiceover artist based in Brooklyn. Her audio play, In the Kitchen, is featured in A Fence Around The Torah as part of a group multimedia installation with Coral Cohen, Arielle Tonkin, and Annabel Rabiyah titled I mean… how do you define safety?

Danielle Durchslag is an artist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn. She's shown her work around the world, and is a New Jewish Culture fellow.

Liora Ostroff is Curator-in-Residence 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.

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.

Hannah Aliza Goldman: What is really exciting about my generation is that there is this resurgence and this growing interest in Judeo-Arabic, and valuing it and honoring it. I think that there is this attitude of like, wow, a lot was lost. And if we don't preserve it, no one will, and it will be gone to the ashes of history. And there's a real commitment and passion. And many people in my generation, to not only say Arabic exists in our families, but not only did it exist, it does exist. And it's a beautiful language. And it carries within it so much history and memory and beauty and sensory experience. And it's valued. And so, I think that there's a really exciting cultural resurgence happening right now among Mizrahi communities and the Arab language.

Mark Gunnery: Welcome to Disloyal, a podcast from the Jewish Museum of Maryland. I'm your host, Mark Gunnery. Today on the show, we're continuing our series on A Fence Around The Torah, the Jewish Museum of Maryland's latest contemporary art exhibit. It explores how Jewish communities navigate the concepts of safety and unsafety in traditional contemporary and futuristic ways. I'm speaking with the artists and curators who made the exhibit possible. You can experience the art from this exhibit at afencearoundthetorah.com.

And today I'm 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 part of a group multimedia installation with Coral Cohen, Arielle Tonkin, and Annabel Rabiyah, called, I Mean…How Do You Define Safety?

Here's how Goldman, Cohen, Tonkin, and Rabiyah describe their installation. 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.

Hannah Aliza Goldman, thank you for joining us.

Hannah Aliza Goldman: Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. This is my first podcast. It has been a dream of mine to be on a podcast. So yeah, this is great.

Mark Gunnery:
Well, I'm so glad that you can join us. I'm also joined by Danielle Durchslag. Danielle Durchslag is an artist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn. She's shown her work around the world, and is a New Jewish Culture fellow. Her contribution to A Fence Around The Torah is titled, Dangerous Opinions. It's a video collage that takes footage from the 1988 film, Dangerous Liaisons, and uses it as a jumping off point to discuss, as Durchslag puts it, quote, the political and psychological complexities of American Jewish wealth, end quote.

It's from a series called Bounty, which Durchslag says, quote, explores the phenomenon of WASP drag, in which rich Jewish clans copy the rituals, aesthetics, and rules of the Christian aristocracy, in the hopes that a subtle kind of passing as American royalty will equate with long-term security, end quote.

Danielle Durchslag, thank you so much for joining us.

Danielle Durchslag: Thank you so much for having me.

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

Liora Ostroff: Thank you for having me.

Mark Gunnery: Hannah Aliza Goldman, I want to start with you. You contributed an original theater project to this exhibit titled, In the Kitchen, along with your collaborator, Coral Cohen. Can you tell us about In the Kitchen?

Hannah Aliza Goldman: Sure. In the Kitchen started as a theater piece, and then in the pandemic, turned into an audio play. In 2020, we mailed out recipe boxes that went along with the audio play. So the audio play, I instructed folks how to bake a biscuit from the ingredients in the recipe box. And then I got this call for submissions for the Jewish Museum of Maryland, and so I selected some clips from the audio play. And those excerpts are being presented in the museum. So, that's about the form.

Thematically, In the Kitchen is a communal piece of oral history by and for Jewish women with heritage in Arab lands. And it explores themes of home, of culinary heritage, of womanhood, of family, and collective memory.

Mark Gunnery: In the Kitchen is part of a larger group multimedia installation titled, I Mean…How Do You Define Safety? Can you tell us about that, and why you all wanted to do a group submission instead of individual ones?

Hannah Aliza Goldman:
In the Kitchen started out as a theater piece, and then became an audio play. And the nature of that piece is inherently collaborative. And I knew that if I wanted to submit, that I would want to do it with a group of artists to really make a multimedia sensory experience. So I contacted Annabel Rabiyah, who is the chef of Awafi Kitchen. It's an Iraqi Jewish popup. And she had done the recipe box in the 2020 version of In the Kitchen.

And then I contacted a friend of mine, Arielle Tonkin, who I actually had never collaborated with before. They are a Moroccan Jewish visual artist and textile artist. And yeah, I wanted us to submit as a group, because I wanted us to create not just a piece, but a full experience, so that when people walked into our space, that they were stimulated visually, orally, that it was a visceral experience, and not just something that was one dimensional.

Mark Gunnery: In the play, you say, quote, recipes hold a complicated space for me. On the one hand they're blueprints, maps, ways to trace family lineage. On the other hand, they are an indication of absence, a blank space, end quote. Can you speak more on that, and about the complicated space that recipes hold for you, and the space that recipes hold in I Mean, How Do You Define Safety?

Hannah Aliza Goldman: Yeah, I think family recipes are kind of this liminal space. Often there's some instruction and some ingredients, but not all of it. There's some sensory instinct that you're expected to have. And sometimes you do, and sometimes you don't. And for me in particular, I don't have any Moroccan family recipes. They weren't passed down to me. And so a lot of the constructing of my Mizrahi identity has been me constructing recipes, and kind of doing it like a scavenger, going on the internet, finding recipes that I'm like, "This is similar to what I think my grandmother cooked."

Sometimes I type it in Hebrew, and then I Google translate it. And then I have to translate the Google translate, because Google translate is so wonky. Sometimes it's calling up other Moroccan friends of mine, and being like, "How does your aunt cook this?" And testing it out in the kitchen, and crafting it until I make something that tastes like home, that tastes like family.

And I think that people have varying levels of access to their culture. In the audio play, Annabel talks about her family recipes. And I think for a lot of Mizrahi women, it was an oral tradition. They weren't written down. And so in her family, when her grandmother was dying in the hospital, the aunts and uncles made an attempt to interview her, and write the family recipes down.

And they're somewhat legible, and they're written in Arabic and English. And so again, even though she might have more access than me, it's also this other liminal space, where she's figuring it out on her own. And those recipe cards, including the ones that are the family heirlooms that I just mentioned, are on view in the exhibit. There are photocopies of those recipe cards with the food stains in the exhibit.

There's also, and this is maybe my favorite part of our exhibit, there is a take home recipe card of a recipe that Annabel created. It's very simple, it's very accessible. It's not a traditional, extremely labor intensive recipe, but it's something that Annabel makes often, that is inspired by her culinary heritage.

And so folks got to take that home and make that recipe, and I've made it, and it's so yummy. And it really evokes, even that simple recipe, just the sense and the spices evoke so much. So I think recipes, it's like a map that you kind of have to draw in by hand, and sometimes you get a map that's already filled in a little bit, and sometimes you have to construct it almost from scratch, until you draw something that looks like the place you remembered. Yeah, that's a little bit about the complicated space that recipes occupy.

Mark Gunnery: I want to turn it over to Liora. Liora, like I said, you are the curator of this exhibit, A Fence Around The Torah. You divided the exhibit up into five sections, including the one that this artist featured in the Dialogue section. Can you tell us about the questions you were trying to spark in the Dialogue section?

Liora Ostroff: One of the bigger questions of the exhibit is, how do excluded voices make space for themselves? And I think of this as a hopeful question, because once we recognize that some members of our community haven't had the chance to tell their full stories or experience the full breadth of their identities in Jewish spaces, we can start to imagine how to amend that.

And I just want to say also, that I called the section Dialogues because all of the featured artists are in some kind of intergenerational dialogue, piecing together parts of their own identities and stories, and making something new out of it. And there's also an exciting dialogue between media, and between senses in this section, this grouping evokes so many senses at once. Sight and sound and touch and taste.

Mark Gunnery: Okay. Speaking of dialogues, Hannah, in the play, you reflect on conversations that you've had with family members about the Arabic language. Can you talk about your family's relationship with the Arabic language, and if you see this as part of any kind of larger trends within Mizrahi families?

Hannah Aliza Goldman: Yes. I think for many Mizrahi families who come from Arab lands, the Arabic language is a really complicated thing. In the audio piece, Annabel speaks about it from her perspective. Her family moved from Iraq to America, and the way that Arabic is perceived in America as a threat, post-9/11 and all that.

From my dad's family, my Moroccan family immigrated from Morocco to Israel, and so have had that very specific Mizrahi experience in Israel. And especially for folks who migrated in the fifties, like my grandparents, that was around the time of nation building for Israel, and defining what the country was, and defining that the language was Hebrew, and defining it in opposition to the Arab neighbors and the expelled Palestinians. And there were many decades of shame around the Arabic language. And not even just the language, the accent, and getting rid of the guttural hut and ein.

And there are changes within each generation. In my grandparents' generation, I think people either really assimilated or really didn't. And I look to Mustafa Isha as an example of someone who did not assimilate, who continued to speak Moroccan-Arabic phrases, and her accent was extremely thick. And even though she wasn't a quote unquote activist, to me, that is such a strong example of resistance to assimilation, is living her life as a strong Moroccan woman.

And I think folks in my dad's generation, a lot of them were pressured to assimilate. And a lot of them did lose their accent. I think, again, my dad was an example of someone who chose to keep his Moroccan accent. And that was a very strong example for me. And then, folks in my brother's generation, the accent is gone. And I think for the generation of me and my siblings, the notion that our family was Arab, or spoke Arabic, was so foreign and threatening that it was almost inconceivable.

And so, in the audio play, I talk about a conversation I had with my brother, where he said, "Arabic is a dirty language. It's ugly." And I was like, "Oh, I think it's a pretty language." But we didn't realize we were talking about the language of our grandparents. And it wasn't until I went to Morocco with my dad, and he was speaking in Moroccan-Arabic with people on the street, that I was like, "Oh, wow, this is a language that is in my family." And it's still alive, because my dad knew Moroccan-Arabic from speaking with his grandparents. So the generation previous, they never learned Hebrew. And so he had to communicate with them in Moroccan.

So there are all these generational changes, but I think what is really exciting about my generation, is that there is this resurgence and this growing interest in Judeo-Arabic, and valuing it and honoring it. You see this in music and culture, with the music of A-WA and Netta Iyam. You see this in the Oxford School of Jewish Languages, they're resurrecting all of these languages, including Judeo-Arabic and Ladino.

And even my friends and I will say Mabrouk, Inshallah, using those little Arabic phrases. I think that there is this attitude of like, wow, a lot was lost. And if we don't preserve it, no one will, and it will be gone to the ashes of history. And there's a real commitment and passion. And many people in my generation, to not only say Arabic exists in our families, but not only did it exist, it does exist. And it's a beautiful language, and it carries within it so much history and memory and beauty and sensory experience, and it's valued. And so I think that there's a really exciting cultural resurgence happening right now among Mizrahi communities and the Arab language.

Mark Gunnery: So this speaks to something that Liora, you wrote in your curatorial statement for I Mean, How Do You Define Safety? You wrote, quote, these four artists describe cultural loss and reclamation, investigating the complexity of how trauma, politics and safety shape cultural expression, end quote. Can you talk about the ways that you see these four artists, Hannah Aliza Goldman, Coral Cohen, Annabel Rabiyah, and Arielle Tonkin doing that?

Liora Ostroff: I think Hannah and Coral Cohen's audio play is quite literally the description of these losses. Recorded interviews and musings about the safety of cultural expression and the difficulties of reclaiming culture, and about how politics and trauma have erased parts of Mizrahi culture and identity. I think that Annabel Rabiyah does so through food, both recording and adapting Iraqi recipes, and calling them heirlooms.

And Arielle Tonkin says of their textiles, both created and repurposed, that they aim to reconnect parts of their lineage that weren't transmitted. They make real, what they call impossible hybrids, merging Jewish and Moroccan, or Jewish and Islamic ritual objects. I see these as complex creations and complex expressions of identity.

Mark Gunnery: I want to turn it over to Danielle Durchslag, who I introduced earlier, but I'll just say again, Danielle's an artist and a filmmaker based in Brooklyn. Danielle, the piece that you contributed to A Fence Around The Torah is a video collage titled, Dangerous Opinions. Can you tell us about that piece?

Danielle Durchslag: Sure. By video collage, what I mean by that is, in my practice, I am always looking for classic cinematic depictions of family wealth from across cinema. And then I take depictions that I think have something that connects to the Jewish experience of wealth. And I take that original film and I recut it, I add narration and animation, and all kinds of tricks, to sort of reconfigure these films as brief short video pieces that tell the story of the Jewish 1%.

Dangerous Opinions takes footage from Dangerous Liaisons, a film about French aristocracy, having nothing to do with Jews whatsoever, and it recreates it as a short story about a woman who is this heiress to a meat fortune, a Jewish woman, who is really publicly shamed when it is discovered that she has spoken critically about Israel. So I've taken a film that's frankly, about sexual intrigue, and I've reconfigured it as a more contemporary story using editing and sound design, about how we punish any kind of negative description of Israel in contemporary Jewish discourse.

Mark Gunnery: Dangerous Opinions is part of a larger series called The Bounty Series. Can you tell us about The Bounty Series?

Danielle Durchslag: Yeah. All of my work really has to do currently, or has for some years, with the political and psychological complexities of American Jewish wealth. That is what The Bounty Series is. And I chose the word bounty, as you might imagine, because it really has a lot of meanings and a lot of implications. Obviously the clear one is about abundance, which wealth is all about, but bounty can also be a threat. To put a bounty on someone. There's potential violence in that word.

So for this series, it's a mixture of video collages. I have live action film work in the series, a little bit of sculpture. All of it is really about these complexities of, what does it mean to be both victims and identity that we as Jews come by really honestly, historically, and in contemporary life? What does it mean to be victims as well as very powerful and very affluent? That's the experience I come from. My great-grandfather Nathan started the Sarah Lee Company, like the cake, so I grew up in this family that strongly identified with victimhood, and strongly lived power. The complications of that, and how it relates to antisemitic conspiracy theories around Jews and money, really is what inspired The Bounty Series that I'm still working on today.

Mark Gunnery: Yeah. In your artist statement, you talk about this. You wrote, despite their attained affluence and power, I have found that for most wealthy American Jews, a feeling of being in danger pervades. This results in an obsessive anxious focus on continuity, censorship around the Israeli Palestinian conflict, and other unpleasant, quote unquote, unpleasant topics, and a commitment to focusing on and identifying with Jewish victimhood above all else, end quote. Can you speak more on that? Can you speak about how you see that playing out, and why you wanted to respond to it with your art?

Danielle Durchslag: Yeah. I think as humans in general, we have a really hard time holding and living through with clarity, contradiction. And so, as I said earlier, this idea of, I'm a victim and I'm also affluent, is very hard to square, especially when affluence for Jews is at the core of the narrative of the people who hate us the most. When you think antisemitism, you think about myths about Jews and money.

So instead of owning the complicated power and privileges that come with wealth, quite understandably, Jews, I think predominantly in the 1%, from what I saw growing up in the 1%, have chosen to more focus on the victim identity. Now it's not that victim identity is totally false. We come by it honestly, but in my experience, it's used as the primary, if not the exclusive identity that we sit in and hold forth publicly, because frankly, identifying as being powerful is much more complicated and comes with obligations.

If you acknowledge privilege and own privilege, then inherently, you have to think about, is it appropriate that I have this privilege? What does it mean that others don't? What are my obligations to rectify that? But if you identify strongly and almost exclusively through victimhood, it's frankly, an easier narrative. And I also think for Jews and families like mine, it's hard, as I said, to hold both cogently. So for all those reasons, victimhood wins out.

Mark Gunnery: Liora, you put Danielle Durchslag's work into the Dissent section of this exhibit. Can you remind us what questions you're posing in the Dissent section, and how this video collage responds to them?

Liora Ostroff: Similar to the Dialogue section, the Dissent section is also talking about conversations and how we have them. So the artists in this section deal with questions such as, what is safe to say and when, and how has our discourse been restrained? I love Danielle's video, and the punchline is so relatable, because we don't know what exactly the character Diane Siegel says about Israel, only that she makes a critical comment, which becomes an act of social self-destruction.

Danielle Durchslag: Can I respond to that a little bit? First of all, I want to say that I just think it bears stating that one of the ways that we get constrained as Jewish artists, contemporary Jewish artists with critical content, and I hope you're comfortable with me grouping you in there... I'm getting a thumbs up, so that's good. One of the ways we get constrained is that frankly, there are very few venues to show this kind of work in cultural Jewish life.

So I want to just highlight and thank Liora and Mark, and all the wonderful people who've been a part of this, because it's very unusual that a Jewish institution welcomes critical, nuanced, complicated, pointed discourse. And this is a great example. It's hard to show this piece for me, but I have the opportunity here. So I just wanted to highlight that and say thank you. Back to Liora.

Hannah Aliza Goldman: I agree. I'm so in awe of the company of artists that we're in, in this exhibit, and it's so wonderful and rare that we were allowed to present our work in a Jewish institution. And I also just want to say that Danielle's video is hilarious and brilliant, and I love it.

Danielle Durchslag: Thank you.

Hannah Aliza Goldman: It speaks volumes that even a two minute satirical video that actually doesn't make any specific point at all, is so contentious.

Danielle Durchslag: Correct.

Hannah Aliza Goldman: And therein lies the genius of that piece. So I loved it. My mom loved it too. My mom loves you, obviously.

Danielle Durchslag: Well, I love her.

Hannah Aliza Goldman: But she called me over and she was like, "Put on the headphones. You need to listen to this whole piece. Okay. No, no, this is... Hold on. Wait til it starts. Okay. Now it's starting." Calling me over. And I was like, "Oh my gosh." But no, it was great. It was great. And I think that there's a real power in satire. And I think that your piece really captured that really well in such a short amount of time.

Danielle Durchslag: Thank you. I really appreciate that.

Hannah Aliza Goldman: That's my two cents.

Liora Ostroff: I also just want to talk about how I think the two of you, your work is in conversation with each other. I think it's in conversation with each other in a variety of ways, you both use narrative and story as a mode, and also are both discussing what we consider to be taboo, how we deal with intergenerational trauma, and hold complicated identities. And of course, the relationship to the modern nation state of Israel.

Danielle Durchslag: I just want to say I love Hannah's piece, and I love the entire collective presentation in the show. I think it's really the center of the show, both geographically, but also in terms of how it holds these ideas. And Hannah, if it's okay, I wanted to ask you a question, because I want to say, the piece is so haunting and visceral. As I was listening to it yesterday, I got emotional. I have no Mizrahi identity or past at all, but I certainly related to the generational issues in the piece, and ideas of presentation of identity.

My question for you, as someone who also works with narrative, which not all artists do, but we do, was, I'm really curious about two things. One, calling it an audio play I think is such an interesting choice, because my associations with that are about being scripted. Which, maybe I'm totally wrong, but these sounded like such organic interviews to me that I was hearing pieces of, so I'm curious about that.

And the second thing is, I wanted to ask you about, there's beautiful sound design in these pieces, beyond just the beautiful speaking. And I heard water repeatedly while I was listening. Water lapping up against maybe, I don't know, a surface or a tide. And I just was wondering, if we have time, if you could maybe speak to those two choices a little bit, because I think they're really interesting and lovely choices.

Hannah Aliza Goldman: Sure. Thank you so much. The audio play, it is part scripted and part unscripted. There are interviews that are unscripted. So when you hear voices that aren't mine, it's all unscripted, just edited together. And some of my speeches are unscripted, but most of them are scripted. It's poems that I wrote, that I recorded. I called it an audio play, because it's a piece of theater to me. And there is theater. I am very inspired by docudrama, and that's a genre of theater where there's a script, but it's taken from interviews with people who are just talking. So I see it in line with that kind of genre of theater, of docudrama. And then the waves, the sound designer for the audio play is Carsen Joenk. She's incredible, and she introduced the theme of water and waves. And I think it's a brilliant motif, because it's meditative, and it's calming, and it kind of brings you in.

And also I think to me, water evokes distance, like the distance between continents, the distance between me and New York and Morocco, and the metaphorical distance between myself and family, myself and my history. And then to me, the lapping of the waves on the shore is like trying to reach over and touch whatever is on the other side. So I think it's a really brilliant motif. Carsen is awesome. And that's what it evokes for me. But if it evokes other things for you, great.

Liora Ostroff: I'm wondering from both of you, can you tell me how you got into your respective media or where you find inspiration?

Hannah Aliza Goldman: Danielle, you go first.

Danielle Durchslag: Sure. I am a cinema fanatic, and always have been. I was a cinema studies major in college, and then I went a totally different route, and made collage, a really intensive form of collage for years. And that was predominantly what I showed. When I realized I wanted to touch my own Jewish wealth, frankly, a topic I was not eager to engage with professionally or publicly at first, but when I got to the point where I did, I realized it had to be cinema for several reasons. First of all, I adore it and I'm obsessed with it, so I knew I had a good amount of knowledge to start from. But secondly, and I never get to talk about this in interviews, so I'm excited to get to talk about it now, is that cinema, as we understand it, as we've experienced it, is predominantly a Jewish-American invention.

The studio system, not so much the medium itself of film, but the studio system, is really a creation of politically conservative male Jewish immigrants, or children of immigrants, who created, basically, the imagination empire that is still running now. So it's a form that I love for how visceral it is. Everyone knows how to watch a movie. I love that about it.

Also, humor is a big part of my work, for people who haven't seen Dangerous Opinions who are listening. It's a dark joke in the piece, when she's overheard criticizing Israel, we see a whole opera full of fancy people booing her. There's kind of a macabre sense of humor in a lot of what I make. And cinema is just a great carrier for jokes. It works. So it's a combination of passion, Jewish history, and what the medium itself can do.

Hannah Aliza Goldman: Sure. So I've been doing theater almost my whole life, and I'm trained in theater. At some point, I had a friend who was doing voiceover. I wanted to get into voiceover. So I trained in commercial voiceover, got a demo, and then was recording auditions every once in a while from my closet, and never booking anything. But what that meant was, I had equipment for interviews and for doing my own voiceover work. So yeah, when I did the first baby beta version of In the Kitchen, it started by me just interviewing people, whether in person or calling them over the phone. This was before the Zoom era. So I had all those interviews. And in the theater piece, I was on stage chopping vegetables for salad and preparing tea, and then the interviews were playing over the loudspeakers. And that was the theater piece.

And then when the pandemic happened, it was terrifying, as it was for all artists, and I had this grant to do In the Kitchen as a theater piece. And theater was no longer viable, but I had this archive of audio footage. And so it seemed like an easy transition to turn it into an audio play. And it wasn't easy, but I think it worked really well.

And I, in the past year, have kind of thrown myself, separately, into voiceover work, and have done a few commercials and things like that. And as you can see, I have a beautiful studio in my closet now, which I didn't have when I recorded In the Kitchen. That was much more low tech. But that's how I kind of got into theater, and then into the medium of audio and voiceover.

Mark Gunnery: Does anyone have anything else that they want to say or ask each other, or share? Or anything that we didn't hit on?

Hannah Aliza Goldman: I have a question for you, Danielle. What have the reactions been from your community, from your family, and family friends, to you focusing so much of your work on exposing the contradictions and the humor of this very specific affluent Jewish community?

Danielle Durchslag: Well, thank you. That is a question that definitely comes up, as you can imagine, in my work. The really rock bottom honest answer is, I have been fairly self-selecting in who I've shared this work with in my family, in my community, and who I've spoken about it with. And believe it or not, because of my self selection, the response has been exclusively positive.

I chose people to share it with who wouldn't necessarily agree with me. I definitely had disagreement come up, but who wouldn't necessarily start from a place of hostile mistrust. Let's say that. I will say I get pushback on this work, for sure. Do you remember, Hannah, when we were at the museum the day after the opening, and we were chatting and hanging out, and there were some folks around who were going to potentially maybe, in a different non-COVID context, would've given tours of the exhibition, they were kind of learning the show?

Hannah Aliza Goldman: Yes.

Danielle Durchslag: That was a slightly kind of crowd of a slightly older generation than some of the folks who I talked to at the opening. And just the amount of grimacing that I could see on people's faces is a good indicator. Because as artists, for better or worse, what do we do? We watch people engage with our work. It's unavoidable, we're checking it out. We're wondering what people are saying and thinking. For an older generation, this work can feel very unsafe. Even acknowledging that Jewish wealth exists as a category can feel almost treasonous to many members of the generations above me. I'm 40, so there is a big generational divide in how people respond.

I will say, meaningfully, to me, I'm more than happy to tell on myself. And I'm more than happy to tell on the dynamics of American Jewish wealth that I'm so familiar with, but I don't use the work specifically to tell on my family. It's never like, "Oh, can you believe cousin Miriam said X? That's going in a piece." That's not what I'm here for. I'm here to talk about these more broad dynamics. And I think that's helpful.

The last thing I'll say is, because of my privilege, I live off of a trust. I am of the 1%, which allows me to make artwork, which allows me to make a lot of choices artists don't have the good luck or the good fortune to get to make. Because of that, frankly, the work is about privilege. And my privilege is something of a shield, because I don't have to seek fundraising to make these pieces. If I was looking for Jewish funding for these pieces, I would not make these pieces. That funding does not exist.

It also protects me from a certain level of criticism that could be damaging to someone else who needs a more traditional financial career. So I'm also really aware of how my privilege, it's not only the content of the work, but in a funny way, it also is a kind of protective mechanism, because the stakes are different, because I know my rent is covered, if that makes sense.

Hannah Aliza Goldman: Yeah. It's so eerie and thematic that you said it makes people feel unsafe. Really, I think that is an accurate way of putting it. Telling stories in which there are contradictions about a community, people feel exposed and unsafe and vulnerable to threats from the outside. And yeah, I've experienced that with my work as well.

I think the piece is really good at presenting multiple truths. It's not one narrative, but it does question Zionism. And I think that there are a lot of folks who feel like that is sacrilege. And especially for Mizrahim, there's a lot of trauma in our history, in our recent history. And for many people, Israel was literally the only place that their families could go. And so it triggers this very visceral sense of unsafety, of danger. If we criticize this place that was a refuge for our grandparents in one sense, and another sense it wasn't... But listen to the piece for that.

Psychological safety versus physical safety, people get in their feelings about it. I think it does present multiple truths, but it also has a point of view. You have to have a point of view. And there were certain things that I cut out and certain things that I kept in, because that's the power of editing, and it does present a narrative that ultimately questions Zionism. And I haven't shown it to politically conservative members of my family, but they don't speak English anyway, so that's the gift. That's the gift of that work.

Danielle Durchslag: That's partly what makes this show for me personally so exciting. I've been showing work from Bounty for a while now, for some years, and this is the first time I've been in an exhibition where it is not only approaching, but delving to the heart of the thing you and I are talking about, which is how to have permission as contemporary Jewish artists to talk about our full experience, not just the positive elements of our Jewish experience, or the victimhood-oriented elements of our Jewish experience.

Something I think about a lot is, we're so focused as a community, Jews of all stripes, on antisemitism. And we predominantly, quite understandably, think that terminology, antisemitism, really just refers to people who hate us, or internalized ideas around ourselves that are based on people who hate us, their ideas. But I have to say, another version of antisemitism that I think we talk about less, or think about less, is the idea, which is true for me, that if we're only presenting ourselves publicly in cultural output as heroes or victims, that's antisemitic, because if Jews are fully human, and I strongly feel we are, then we're all of it. We're the good, the bad, the ugly, the complex, the confused, the brilliant.

For myself, I am missing the institutional support for that complexity a lot of the time in Jewish life. And that's probably what makes this opportunity and this exhibition really, truly exceptional, because if you want to make tough work about Jewishness, there aren't necessarily a lot of roads of support in our current structure. And I hope and believe this show is the start of that changing.

Hannah Aliza Goldman: Mic drop. Boom.

Liora Ostroff: Thank you, Danielle.

Danielle Durchslag: My pleasure. It's true.

Mark Gunnery: Yeah. I want to thank all of you for your time today. This has been a really great conversation, and I really appreciate it. You've just heard Danielle Durchslag, Hannah Aliza Goldman, and Liora Ostroff. Danielle Durchslag is an artist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, and her video collage, Dangerous Opinions, appears in the dissent section of A Fence Around The Torah. And it's available to view at afencearoundthetorah.com. Danielle Durchslag, Thank you so much for joining us.

Danielle Durchslag: Oh, thank you. It was a total pleasure. Thank you.

Mark Gunnery: I've also been speaking to 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 part of a group multimedia installation called, I Mean…How Do You Define Safety? Hannah Aliza Goldman, thank you for joining us.

Hannah Aliza Goldman: Thank you.

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

Liora Ostroff: Thank you.

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 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.