February 3, 2025 • 29 mins
Jodi Kornfeld is rabbi of Beth Chaverim Humanistic Jewish Community in Deerfield, Illinois, and co-editor of a new book, Contemporary Humanistic Judaism: Beliefs, Values, Practices.
Co-hosts: Jonathan Friedmann & Joey Angel-Field
Producer-engineer: Mike Tomren
Contemporary Humanistic Judaism
https://jps.org/books/contemporary-humanistic-judaism/
Jodi's Bio
https://bethchaverim.net/about-beth-chaverim/our-rabbi
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Adat Chaverim – Congregation for Humanistic Judaism, Los Angeles
https://www.humanisticjudaismla.org/
Jewish Museum of the American West
https://www.jmaw.org/
Atheists United Studios
https://www.atheistsunited.org/au-studios
Co-hosts: Jonathan Friedmann & Joey Angel-Field
Producer-engineer: Mike Tomren
Contemporary Humanistic Judaism
https://jps.org/books/contemporary-humanistic-judaism/
Jodi's Bio
https://bethchaverim.net/about-beth-chaverim/our-rabbi
Amusing Jews Merch Store
https://www.amusingjews.com/merch#!/
Subscribe to the Amusing Jews podcast
https://www.spreaker.com/show/amusing-jews
Adat Chaverim – Congregation for Humanistic Judaism, Los Angeles
https://www.humanisticjudaismla.org/
Jewish Museum of the American West
https://www.jmaw.org/
Atheists United Studios
https://www.atheistsunited.org/au-studios
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mister, is Judaism exactly?
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Is it just a religion? It's much more than a religion.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
If you don't shut up this priest, it's gonna hit you.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Well, if it's more than a religion, Is it a
way of life?
Speaker 1 (00:17):
No, No, it's not quite a way of life. If
you want the.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Father to hit you, he's Irish or no, they got
a temper. What is Judaism exactly? Judaism is a way
of eating. Welcome to Amusing Jews, where we celebrate Jewish
(00:49):
contributors and contributions to American popular culture. I'm Jonathan Friedman
and I'm Joey Angelfield producer engineer Mike tomarn is working
somewhere behind the scenes. Amusing Jews is a project of
a dot Javerine corrugation for Humanistic Judaism, the Jewish Museum
of the American West, and Atheist United Studios, Hey, Joey.
(01:10):
Jewish culture is much larger than Jewish religion, which makes
up an important but relatively small and arguably shrinking aspect
of what it means to be and live as a Jew.
Yet Jewish culture, while diverse, vibrant, and complex, is not
completely borderless. Tensions between particularism and universalism abound, including when
(01:33):
we look at the creative arts. We're happy to chat
with Zody Kornfeld, Rabbi of bethkavery humanistic Jewish community in Deerfield, Illinois,
and co editor of a new book, Contemporary Humanistic Judaism Beliefs,
Values and Practices. Jody, Welcome to Amusing Jews.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited
about the topic, and I feel that I need to
say at the outset. I grew up in a household
that frequently would ask the question, you know he's Jewish?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Right?
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Whoever it was, right, Danny Kay is on some show.
You know, Danny Kay is Jewish?
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Right?
Speaker 1 (02:09):
And then it goes beyond that with Sandy Kofax. Of
course that he's Jewish, you know that? And I seem
to have passed that trade along to my son so
that he'll send me little links to things. Did you
know he's Jewish? So clearly one's religious observance was not
at issue, it was one's identification as being Jewish.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
In the book Contemporary Humanistic Judaism, you described the Jewish
cultural canon as the various ways Jewish experiences and memories
are expressed through literature, theater, visual arts, music, movies, and
other creative forms. How does this canon differ from a
religious Jewish canon?
Speaker 1 (02:51):
So I think part of the answer to that is
really lies in the question as you've posed it, because
you delineated so many different forms of creativity. As you said,
these are cultural expressions, literature, theater, visual arts, music, movies,
and you could have added food and humor to that list.
So the religious canon, it's much narrower, and of course
(03:15):
it's considered closed, even if there's some evidence to the contrary. So,
for instance, another version of the Book of Isaiah was
found after the Bible was canonized, and it's on display
in Jerusalem, but it's not part of the Bible, even
if it corrected things or added things. So the religious
(03:36):
canon is limited to religious texts such as the Torah
and the Talmud, and it's unchangeable. Its contents were set
by men, so the limit on what voices were represented
is inherent in that. And while Torah and Talmud could
be considered part of Jewish literature, the cultural canon is
(03:59):
so much wider. It's subject to additions and substitutions. I
suppose would be another way of putting it, and it's
representative of so many more voices. It's almost a paradox
to call it a canon, because a canon is implied
to be a closed body. But canon can also represent
(04:21):
a larger body of work, so the canon of American literature,
for instance, and it continues to grow. So I think
size and breadth would probably be good descriptors of the
difference between the two.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
I think also when we think of the root of
the term canon from the Greek usage back in the day,
which was borrowed by the canonizers of the Hebrew Bible
and so forth, they were really looking for quality. So
the best representative genres or whatever it might be, where
the things that made it into the canon. So if
we look at that in terms of pop culture, we
(04:57):
also have this ability to kind of curate and be
quality control players in that as well, as we're sort
of thinking about what is our canon and what do
what do we keep in and what do we keep out?
Not that you know, we have to rely on something
that's prefixed, as you're saying, but we can also like
kick out the bad stuff as it arises as well.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
I think we might consider that, you know, Oftentimes good
ideas rise and bad ideas fall, and so we don't
need like a rating system to know that. We just
sort of it doesn't sit well with us, or it's
not well received, or whichever way we want to do it.
Some things are limited by their time period. They might
be rediscovered later on and be seen to have value.
(05:41):
You know, other things that are considered classics. Right that
you read it and you're kind of like, whoa, that's
considered a classic in American Jewish literature. You know, I mean,
I plodded through it. Call it Sleep by Henry Roth.
And yet if you look at the body of American
Jewish literature, that is always on it.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Enjoining the show, click like and subscribe. One point made
in the book is that seeing the Hebrew Bible as
the beginning of Jewish literature, as opposed to the foundation
of Jewish religiosity allows us to view the text as
a cultural product without the usual apologetics and cognitive dissonance
that arise from a religious reading.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Could you elaborate the Bible was written by human beings
who had a particular agenda than That agenda was both
theological and national. It was to advance the formation of
the Israelitic nation and the belief in the biblical God Yahweh.
So everything was really pushed toward that end. It's not
(06:44):
a history book. It's not divinely written, it's not divinely
from a humanistic point of view, it's not even divinely inspired,
which is sort of where the reform movement I think
comes down. It's not divinely written, but it's divinely inspired.
Once that perspective is articulated, it removes the text from
(07:05):
this idea of divine authorship that allows us a different
viewpoint the Bible. It's filled with fascinating characters, including the
biblical God, and they display so many characteristics hubris or creativity,
or jealousy, family rivalries, siblings that are less than stellar
(07:27):
examples of how one should relate to one's siblings, right.
And so what happens is that the book comes alive
with metaphor, and it gives us the vocabulary to take
a look at our own relationships and our own family
structures and our own national issues and see it with
that as sort of the reference. And they, like any
(07:50):
good piece of literature, then it can find its way
into our own lives. The other thing that viewing it
as a cultural product does is it grants accessibility to
the text for people who otherwise might feel either alienated
by it, they may feel completely disassociated from it, with
the idea that if I don't believe what's in there,
(08:14):
let alone believe that anything happened. But if I don't
believe the dogma and the religious precepts that are in it,
I can't have anything to do with it. Once you
view it as a cultural product, that all changes, and
instead you can see it as part of our shared
textual history and we don't have to believe it because
(08:38):
we know it's not true. It's stories, and approaching it
that way really does allow a multiplicity, excuse me, of
viewpoints and interpretations. There's no single one. There's no you know,
I'll use the phrase, there's no way. It's just from
Sinai right as we take a look at this. Instead,
(09:00):
my own personal experience of coming to that realization that
it was a text that was accessible came through my
studies at Spurtis Institute Spurtist College in Chicago. I took
every biblical class that a professor named Rachel Dulan taught
from her, and I told her when I graduated with
my masters, I said, you profoundly change the way I think,
(09:24):
because this was no longer a text that only Orthodox men,
or only Orthodox conservative Jews could relate to. I could
then understand. She would say, ancient people are not primitive people.
And suddenly what I was realizing is they're people. They're
(09:46):
human beings, and what they went through in their time,
we're going through in our time, and so what can
we do with that. The other thing that I think
viewing it as a cultural product does is it allows
for additional artistic interpretation. So the Book of Job, for instance,
being really the thematic plotline of a serious man that
(10:09):
of that film. When we take a look at the
story of the Akhdad, the binding of Abraham and the
binding of Isaac by his father Abraham, we can take
a look at the sculpture that was done by George Siegel,
and he calls it Abraham and Isaac in Memoriam of
Kent State, and what he did in that he depicted
(10:30):
Isaac in running shorts and Abraham and jeans with a
knife in his hand, and what he was saying, especially
in protest of the Vietnam War which that was going
on at Kent state was we continue we as parents,
we as fathers, we continue to sacrifice our sons, so
(10:51):
we're not time bound. The Akada isn't seen as a
statement of faith, seen as a question of how can
you possibly be that way?
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Yeah, it's often the case that if we're not reading
it from the apologetic everyone who's you know, a protagonist
in the Bible is heroic and flawless and so forth,
that we could actually learn from their misbehaviors what not
to do.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Absolutely, and we can fit we become a participant in
that dialogue. So where the Bible, unlike the Taumud, is
in a recorded set of discussions, we as the reader,
enter into those conversations. We can have feel very free
to judge every single character, all their flaws, their ethics,
(11:40):
their behavior, and that includes the human created literary character
of the Biblical God.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Your essay in contemporary humanistru Judaism is titled, of course,
there's Jewish Art. What prompted you to write an essay
with such an emphatic title?
Speaker 1 (11:55):
So I've pretty much always had an interest and a
passion for Jewish art. I've studied it, I've written about it,
I've done some presentations about it. In fact, for my
doctoral project at SPURTUS, I wrote about Jewish art as Polemic,
where I argued that throughout the Jewish historical experience from
ancient times until modern, Jewish art held messages that would
(12:18):
be really understood only by a Jewish audience, but wouldn't
feel threatened threatening to the majority Christian culture or whatever
the majority was where Jews were finding themselves. So an
example of that would be the mosaic floors that were
in ancient synagogues of Beate, Alpha ands Force, and they've
come from the fifth and sixth century, and they had
(12:41):
depictions of the Greek god Helios. But these mosaics were
on the floor, and you kind of say, well, it's
in a synagogue. That's weird enough, but it's on the floor.
So when't people think that's disrespectful? And instead what I
considered was it's not just respectful, it was consistent with
(13:02):
architectural design at the time, and for Jews, the message
was the these gods over here, they hold no sway
on us. In fact, we can just walk on them.
They're not subject to being idols. The other thing is
the emphatic title is also a counterpoint to an argument
(13:24):
that is still heard the less loudly these days, and
that has to do with the Second Commandment prohibition on
graven images, that in fact it's a prohibition against idolatry,
it was never a prohibition against the images themselves. And
Jews were then considered to be an anti iconic people,
(13:46):
people of the book, but not people of images. And
in fact, Jews are human beings. They've always been human beings,
and so that artistic urge, that creative urge, I think
was present throughout. So I wanted to emphasize those kinds
of things. There had been sort of an argument that
there could not be Jewish art because Jews didn't have
an identifiable homeland. They didn't have a place, and so
(14:12):
without a place, how could you name something Jewish art?
You know, you might say there's Greek art, well, that
came from Greece, right, But what were Jews to be doing?
And when we shift that paradigm and look across time
and space instead of seeing what's lacking, we could see
Jewish art has always existed regardless of location. Jews have
(14:36):
shared a tradition and ancestry, a textual history, a vocabulary,
of faith, even where the faith was questioned, And so
I really wanted to make the point that even if
there are doubters still out there, is there such a
thing as Jewish art. Yeah, there really is such a thing,
(14:58):
and they may be harder to discern because we're representing
different kinds of backgrounds as well. But then when we
move into the modern times, what we have happening. Jews
are leading figures in almost every art movement that there was.
So if we think of Cubism, we've got Shigaalamdigliani. We
think of Impressionism, we've got Camille Pissaro. If we think
(15:21):
of pop art, we've got George Siegel. If we think
about abstract expressionism, we've got Mark Rothko. We think about
kinetic art, we've got Yakofagam. And so to suggest that
Jews aren't artistic or didn't care about art belies the
historical truth.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
You note that when Jewish culture entered modernity, the images
Jewish artists created included both Jewish and non Jewish subjects
as their world and worldview expanded. What in your view
constitutes Jewish culture in the modern age, and how does
this inform what qualifies as so called Jewish art.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
I think that just like the canon, the cultural canon
is wider. I think that what happens with Jewish culture
is it too, gets wider and wider, and we kind
of approach it, approach and are arriving at a point
where we can say that rather than having things being
(16:23):
Ashkenas eccentric, which is, you know, sort of a category
air that I think we all make, we can open
it up and see, oh, there's these tremendous contributions from
the Sefhardi men and is Raki Jews. It's just that
we didn't know about them. When we move beyond things
that were written and created by men, then we can
start to see, oh, wait a minute, there's all this
(16:44):
other stuff that was created by women, by Jews of color,
by people who are otherwise marginalized. So modernity has given
us the ability to widen the lens that we're taking
a look at. Then where that sort of leads into
what's Jewish art? If the if the themes are starting
(17:05):
to get or the content of Jewish art is starting
to become more universal. I think I would put myself
in the category of agreeing with the sculptor Jacques Lipschitz,
and he said Jewish art art is Jewish if a
Jew creates it. So we're taking a look not just
at the content, what does the what does the painting
(17:25):
look like, what does the photograph look like, what does
the music sound like? But we're taking a look at context.
What do we learn about the entire background of the artists,
the musician, the writer, because they're bringing that forward to
their creation, and so it might not at first look
(17:48):
like it is as a Jewish theme. But I think
when we when we really step back and widen the perspective,
we're learning a lot that can happen. Camille Pasorro is
a good example. He was an atheist, he wasn't a
practicing Jew. He and his brothers all had biblical names.
And yet when you take a look at a painting
(18:09):
of a French peasant, for instance, not a Jewish girl,
you know we pretty much know that. Yet he was
one of the leading artists who spoke out against Dega
when Dega was doing his anti semitigrants right, so his
Jewish background informed how he was living his life, and
(18:33):
I think that we do that all the time. So
with this broader definition, we're able to bring in an
ever increasing number of experiences and move beyond Jewish art
simply being perhaps crowns on a tora cover. You know,
ritual objects. Here's a nice, a nice manoa and it's
(18:53):
decorated well, or here's acute acute dradl or whatever that
might be.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Yeah, you're reminding me years ago when I was in
a band called Rabbinical School Dropouts. It was sort of
a esoteric spas Klesmer ensemble as we called it. We
were interviewed by the foreword I Believe, and you know,
someone there asked me what makes your music Jewish? And
being in my early twenties, I wanted to be cheeky
(19:19):
and I said, you know, I'm Jewish, so everything I
do is Jewish, and more and more as I've gotten older,
I appreciate the wisdom of my younger self because that's
actually true, exactly what you're saying. If a Jew creates something,
there's something Jewish about it. It's almost up to the
interpreter to discover what that might be. To some extent
(19:42):
mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
And Mark Schagh paraphrasing him, I think I quoted in
my essay said that if I were not a jew I,
what I create would be entirely little different. You know
that we do bring that perspective, and it sort of
goes back to you know, my ca rural Jewish upbringing
in a conservative household. All right, we need to note
(20:05):
that piece. But the cultural piece of well, you know,
he's Jewish, you know, I mean, Sandy Kofax didn't pitch
on yong Kipur in the World Series. But what most
people don't realize is he didn't go to synagogue either,
you know, so it was never about there a person's
religiosity or level of absurdments.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
The wonderful thing about that Sandy Kofax story is because
he was staying in his hotel in Minnesota during that game,
every rabbi within the Twin Cities said that he was
at their synagogue, you know, because he didn't go anywhere,
so he went everywhere.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
And you know, when Hayk Greenberg didn't play on Russia,
he played on Russiashana but not on yng Kipur because
they found some Talmudic phrase that youth were playing in
the streets of Jerusalem. And so since youth were playing,
never mind, baseball hadn't been invented. But since youth were playing,
they had you know, he had like rabbinic blessing to
(21:03):
go ahead and play.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
It seems that moving away from strict definitions of Jewish
culture not only expands what might be understood by that term,
but also more realistically reflects the diversity of Jewish lives
and perspectives. Would you agree?
Speaker 1 (21:18):
I absolutely agree with that. You know, I have not done,
for instance, twenty three in meters, but I suspect it
would be one hundred percent Ashkenasec and so expanding to
include the experiences of this farding of Mizrahi, of Jews
of color, of LGBTQ, plus Jews of women, women's voices.
(21:43):
You know, even when I read the Bible, it's a
patriarchal document, no doubt, but there were women just like
you know, like I said, you know, Jews have always
been human beings and there were women in that society.
So what can we tease out of it? So I
absolutely agree that it's that when we get away from
(22:04):
strict religious definitions and we move to an ever expansive
definition of Jewish culture, it's going to include.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
More, oftentimes the Jewish content of a creative work is
hidden beneath the surface. You include abstract expressionist Mark Ropko
as a creator of Jewish works, yet his mature paintings
typically feature just two or three rectangles. Some view these
austere color field paintings as representing mass open graves of
(22:33):
the Holocaust. What role does the audience play in defining
a Jewish work of art or literature, or music or dance,
et cetera.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
As I as I think about that question, I think
that there's sort of an unspoken contract between an artist
and his and his and their audience, and whether that
is a viewer, whether it's a reader, whether it's a participant,
that that that unspoken contract resist well from the invitation
that the work of art represents. The illusions and the
(23:05):
meanings that are in these things, I think are activated
by the audience. An artist may have one set of
intentions and the viewer may come away with something entirely different.
I'm reminded that a lot of years ago, when I
was teaching my third grade Sunday school class, I was
talking about Jewish art and Jewish artists, and I showed
(23:27):
two different color fields by Rothcoe, and one was red
and orange and one was either blue and white or
blue and black, I can't quite remember. And I said,
is this Jewish art? And one of my students said,
the one that was red and orange was not Jewish art,
but the one that was blue, that had blue in it,
that was Jewish art, because blue is a Jewish color.
(23:50):
So you're talking about the same artists, the same kind
of thing, you know. And again, when we start to
think about context, Rothcoe was the only one in among
his siblings who was sent to a header a very
strict upbringing. So I look at his abstract expressionism as
sort of a rebellion against that. Instead of everything being
so tight, we're going to get it down to its
(24:12):
bare essence and still be able to express what we
need to see. I think. Also in the book, we
have an article by Judicide about secular spirituality, and she
recounts the idea of union and communion that comes from
being one voice among many. So whether she was singing
in a small group, whether it was one hundred, or
(24:33):
whether she was on a protest march and people were
singing and there were, you know, thousands and just scores
of people singing at the same time, it transcended her
beyond just what she was saying. So that experience it's
very different, of course than passive listening. And so I
think the role of the audience, the role of being
(24:54):
a participant, is very much it's sort of a mute
ual situation between the creator human and uh yeah, not
that creator, between the between the creator, the artistic creator,
and the audience.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
For members of our audience who'd like to explore the
wide world of Jewish arts, what are some good and
perhaps less obvious places to start.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
So at the end of the book we include a
section called go forth and Learn, and that has both
recommendations of written material as well as non textual material
such as film and paintings and music and things like that.
It's only a starting point because, after all, at some
point we had to turn the manuscript in and get
(25:44):
the book published, you know, because that section could have
been as big and growing as the rest of the book.
So so that's one place to start with what's in there.
Generally I would suggest historical fiction, historical Jewish fiction, because again,
if it's going to take the reader to a time
and place that they're not otherwise familiar with, they're going
(26:06):
to learn something about the Jewish experience, and the different
authors that I've read in that kind of genre pretty
much have done their homework, so we can rely on it. Again,
it's not a history. These aren't history books, but they've
done their research, so it has more than just a
single kernel of truth. I'd also suggest that as far
(26:32):
as a less obvious place are children's books, because they
really reflect the author's experiences. For example, that classic book
The Keeping Quilte by Patricia Polaco, she not only has
I mean the Keeping Quiote becomes the upa at you
at generational weddings until her very own, which was an
(26:53):
inner faith marriage, And so it's going to give the
Jewish experience in a way that it's it's simple, it's elegant,
elegant and eloquent. Looking at Maurice Sendak is another way
to do that with Where the Wild Things Are, for instance,
and particularly for kids, but I think for their parents
(27:13):
as well, they know all of these books, they just
don't know that there's a Jewish backstory to them. And
so with Sennak, the characters the wild Things were really
depictions of his relatives that you know, they spoke this
guttural Yiddish and they would come right up to him
and pinch his cheek, look at you, that kind of thing.
(27:34):
They were terrifying to him as a child, you know.
So I think that there's a universality to that experience,
but again, most people just read it at face value
and aren't able to kind of go beyond that. Another
example I think would be the comic book industry, and
(27:55):
so we're talking about a lot of pop culture kinds
of things. To add to this Jewish cultural canon, it
was that industry was founded by Jews because they were
discriminated against and couldn't get jobs, and so they sort
of started this. And Superman has quite the Jewish backstory.
His origin story is the same as Moses, and then
(28:17):
he triumphs with you know, the triumph of good over
evil when that book comes out, you know, the comic
book first comes out by two Jewish boys. It's at
the time of the rise of Nazism in Germany. Though,
when if we can read the Bible as metaphor, we
certainly can be taking a look at some of these
other kinds of things, you know. Musically, and I tread lightly, Jonathan,
(28:43):
because this is your territory. But somewhere over the Rainbow
was the story of the immigrant experience and coming to
America and what that was. It's a lovely song in
the Wizard of Oz. But again, when we consider the
writers or Jews, wish and immigrants and here's what they're
going to be addressing that also, content and context I
(29:10):
think helps widen all of that.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Well, thank you so much, Jody for providing context and content.
It's really lovely to speak with you.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Thank you. I've had a good time. Thanks for inviting
me and to our audience.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Now back to your regularly scheduled lives.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
Amusing Jews is here to amuse you. If you like
being amused, go ahead and click like and subscribe.
Mister, is Judaism exactly?
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Is it just a religion? It's much more than a religion.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
If you don't shut up this priest, it's gonna hit you.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Well, if it's more than a religion, Is it a
way of life?
Speaker 1 (00:17):
No, No, it's not quite a way of life. If
you want the.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Father to hit you, he's Irish or no, they got
a temper. What is Judaism exactly? Judaism is a way
of eating. Welcome to Amusing Jews, where we celebrate Jewish
(00:49):
contributors and contributions to American popular culture. I'm Jonathan Friedman
and I'm Joey Angelfield producer engineer Mike tomarn is working
somewhere behind the scenes. Amusing Jews is a project of
a dot Javerine corrugation for Humanistic Judaism, the Jewish Museum
of the American West, and Atheist United Studios, Hey, Joey.
(01:10):
Jewish culture is much larger than Jewish religion, which makes
up an important but relatively small and arguably shrinking aspect
of what it means to be and live as a Jew.
Yet Jewish culture, while diverse, vibrant, and complex, is not
completely borderless. Tensions between particularism and universalism abound, including when
(01:33):
we look at the creative arts. We're happy to chat
with Zody Kornfeld, Rabbi of bethkavery humanistic Jewish community in Deerfield, Illinois,
and co editor of a new book, Contemporary Humanistic Judaism Beliefs,
Values and Practices. Jody, Welcome to Amusing Jews.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited
about the topic, and I feel that I need to
say at the outset. I grew up in a household
that frequently would ask the question, you know he's Jewish?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Right?
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Whoever it was, right, Danny Kay is on some show.
You know, Danny Kay is Jewish?
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Right?
Speaker 1 (02:09):
And then it goes beyond that with Sandy Kofax. Of
course that he's Jewish, you know that? And I seem
to have passed that trade along to my son so
that he'll send me little links to things. Did you
know he's Jewish? So clearly one's religious observance was not
at issue, it was one's identification as being Jewish.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
In the book Contemporary Humanistic Judaism, you described the Jewish
cultural canon as the various ways Jewish experiences and memories
are expressed through literature, theater, visual arts, music, movies, and
other creative forms. How does this canon differ from a
religious Jewish canon?
Speaker 1 (02:51):
So I think part of the answer to that is
really lies in the question as you've posed it, because
you delineated so many different forms of creativity. As you said,
these are cultural expressions, literature, theater, visual arts, music, movies,
and you could have added food and humor to that list.
So the religious canon, it's much narrower, and of course
(03:15):
it's considered closed, even if there's some evidence to the contrary. So,
for instance, another version of the Book of Isaiah was
found after the Bible was canonized, and it's on display
in Jerusalem, but it's not part of the Bible, even
if it corrected things or added things. So the religious
(03:36):
canon is limited to religious texts such as the Torah
and the Talmud, and it's unchangeable. Its contents were set
by men, so the limit on what voices were represented
is inherent in that. And while Torah and Talmud could
be considered part of Jewish literature, the cultural canon is
(03:59):
so much wider. It's subject to additions and substitutions. I
suppose would be another way of putting it, and it's
representative of so many more voices. It's almost a paradox
to call it a canon, because a canon is implied
to be a closed body. But canon can also represent
(04:21):
a larger body of work, so the canon of American literature,
for instance, and it continues to grow. So I think
size and breadth would probably be good descriptors of the
difference between the two.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
I think also when we think of the root of
the term canon from the Greek usage back in the day,
which was borrowed by the canonizers of the Hebrew Bible
and so forth, they were really looking for quality. So
the best representative genres or whatever it might be, where
the things that made it into the canon. So if
we look at that in terms of pop culture, we
(04:57):
also have this ability to kind of curate and be
quality control players in that as well, as we're sort
of thinking about what is our canon and what do
what do we keep in and what do we keep out?
Not that you know, we have to rely on something
that's prefixed, as you're saying, but we can also like
kick out the bad stuff as it arises as well.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
I think we might consider that, you know, Oftentimes good
ideas rise and bad ideas fall, and so we don't
need like a rating system to know that. We just
sort of it doesn't sit well with us, or it's
not well received, or whichever way we want to do it.
Some things are limited by their time period. They might
be rediscovered later on and be seen to have value.
(05:41):
You know, other things that are considered classics. Right that
you read it and you're kind of like, whoa, that's
considered a classic in American Jewish literature. You know, I mean,
I plodded through it. Call it Sleep by Henry Roth.
And yet if you look at the body of American
Jewish literature, that is always on it.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Enjoining the show, click like and subscribe. One point made
in the book is that seeing the Hebrew Bible as
the beginning of Jewish literature, as opposed to the foundation
of Jewish religiosity allows us to view the text as
a cultural product without the usual apologetics and cognitive dissonance
that arise from a religious reading.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Could you elaborate the Bible was written by human beings
who had a particular agenda than That agenda was both
theological and national. It was to advance the formation of
the Israelitic nation and the belief in the biblical God Yahweh.
So everything was really pushed toward that end. It's not
(06:44):
a history book. It's not divinely written, it's not divinely
from a humanistic point of view, it's not even divinely inspired,
which is sort of where the reform movement I think
comes down. It's not divinely written, but it's divinely inspired.
Once that perspective is articulated, it removes the text from
(07:05):
this idea of divine authorship that allows us a different
viewpoint the Bible. It's filled with fascinating characters, including the
biblical God, and they display so many characteristics hubris or creativity,
or jealousy, family rivalries, siblings that are less than stellar
(07:27):
examples of how one should relate to one's siblings, right.
And so what happens is that the book comes alive
with metaphor, and it gives us the vocabulary to take
a look at our own relationships and our own family
structures and our own national issues and see it with
that as sort of the reference. And they, like any
(07:50):
good piece of literature, then it can find its way
into our own lives. The other thing that viewing it
as a cultural product does is it grants accessibility to
the text for people who otherwise might feel either alienated
by it, they may feel completely disassociated from it, with
the idea that if I don't believe what's in there,
(08:14):
let alone believe that anything happened. But if I don't
believe the dogma and the religious precepts that are in it,
I can't have anything to do with it. Once you
view it as a cultural product, that all changes, and
instead you can see it as part of our shared
textual history and we don't have to believe it because
(08:38):
we know it's not true. It's stories, and approaching it
that way really does allow a multiplicity, excuse me, of
viewpoints and interpretations. There's no single one. There's no you know,
I'll use the phrase, there's no way. It's just from
Sinai right as we take a look at this. Instead,
(09:00):
my own personal experience of coming to that realization that
it was a text that was accessible came through my
studies at Spurtis Institute Spurtist College in Chicago. I took
every biblical class that a professor named Rachel Dulan taught
from her, and I told her when I graduated with
my masters, I said, you profoundly change the way I think,
(09:24):
because this was no longer a text that only Orthodox men,
or only Orthodox conservative Jews could relate to. I could
then understand. She would say, ancient people are not primitive people.
And suddenly what I was realizing is they're people. They're
(09:46):
human beings, and what they went through in their time,
we're going through in our time, and so what can
we do with that. The other thing that I think
viewing it as a cultural product does is it allows
for additional artistic interpretation. So the Book of Job, for instance,
being really the thematic plotline of a serious man that
(10:09):
of that film. When we take a look at the
story of the Akhdad, the binding of Abraham and the
binding of Isaac by his father Abraham, we can take
a look at the sculpture that was done by George Siegel,
and he calls it Abraham and Isaac in Memoriam of
Kent State, and what he did in that he depicted
(10:30):
Isaac in running shorts and Abraham and jeans with a
knife in his hand, and what he was saying, especially
in protest of the Vietnam War which that was going
on at Kent state was we continue we as parents,
we as fathers, we continue to sacrifice our sons, so
(10:51):
we're not time bound. The Akada isn't seen as a
statement of faith, seen as a question of how can
you possibly be that way?
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Yeah, it's often the case that if we're not reading
it from the apologetic everyone who's you know, a protagonist
in the Bible is heroic and flawless and so forth,
that we could actually learn from their misbehaviors what not
to do.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Absolutely, and we can fit we become a participant in
that dialogue. So where the Bible, unlike the Taumud, is
in a recorded set of discussions, we as the reader,
enter into those conversations. We can have feel very free
to judge every single character, all their flaws, their ethics,
(11:40):
their behavior, and that includes the human created literary character
of the Biblical God.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Your essay in contemporary humanistru Judaism is titled, of course,
there's Jewish Art. What prompted you to write an essay
with such an emphatic title?
Speaker 1 (11:55):
So I've pretty much always had an interest and a
passion for Jewish art. I've studied it, I've written about it,
I've done some presentations about it. In fact, for my
doctoral project at SPURTUS, I wrote about Jewish art as Polemic,
where I argued that throughout the Jewish historical experience from
ancient times until modern, Jewish art held messages that would
(12:18):
be really understood only by a Jewish audience, but wouldn't
feel threatened threatening to the majority Christian culture or whatever
the majority was where Jews were finding themselves. So an
example of that would be the mosaic floors that were
in ancient synagogues of Beate, Alpha ands Force, and they've
come from the fifth and sixth century, and they had
(12:41):
depictions of the Greek god Helios. But these mosaics were
on the floor, and you kind of say, well, it's
in a synagogue. That's weird enough, but it's on the floor.
So when't people think that's disrespectful? And instead what I
considered was it's not just respectful, it was consistent with
(13:02):
architectural design at the time, and for Jews, the message
was the these gods over here, they hold no sway
on us. In fact, we can just walk on them.
They're not subject to being idols. The other thing is
the emphatic title is also a counterpoint to an argument
(13:24):
that is still heard the less loudly these days, and
that has to do with the Second Commandment prohibition on
graven images, that in fact it's a prohibition against idolatry,
it was never a prohibition against the images themselves. And
Jews were then considered to be an anti iconic people,
(13:46):
people of the book, but not people of images. And
in fact, Jews are human beings. They've always been human beings,
and so that artistic urge, that creative urge, I think
was present throughout. So I wanted to emphasize those kinds
of things. There had been sort of an argument that
there could not be Jewish art because Jews didn't have
an identifiable homeland. They didn't have a place, and so
(14:12):
without a place, how could you name something Jewish art?
You know, you might say there's Greek art, well, that
came from Greece, right, But what were Jews to be doing?
And when we shift that paradigm and look across time
and space instead of seeing what's lacking, we could see
Jewish art has always existed regardless of location. Jews have
(14:36):
shared a tradition and ancestry, a textual history, a vocabulary,
of faith, even where the faith was questioned, And so
I really wanted to make the point that even if
there are doubters still out there, is there such a
thing as Jewish art. Yeah, there really is such a thing,
(14:58):
and they may be harder to discern because we're representing
different kinds of backgrounds as well. But then when we
move into the modern times, what we have happening. Jews
are leading figures in almost every art movement that there was.
So if we think of Cubism, we've got Shigaalamdigliani. We
think of Impressionism, we've got Camille Pissaro. If we think
(15:21):
of pop art, we've got George Siegel. If we think
about abstract expressionism, we've got Mark Rothko. We think about
kinetic art, we've got Yakofagam. And so to suggest that
Jews aren't artistic or didn't care about art belies the
historical truth.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
You note that when Jewish culture entered modernity, the images
Jewish artists created included both Jewish and non Jewish subjects
as their world and worldview expanded. What in your view
constitutes Jewish culture in the modern age, and how does
this inform what qualifies as so called Jewish art.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
I think that just like the canon, the cultural canon
is wider. I think that what happens with Jewish culture
is it too, gets wider and wider, and we kind
of approach it, approach and are arriving at a point
where we can say that rather than having things being
(16:23):
Ashkenas eccentric, which is, you know, sort of a category
air that I think we all make, we can open
it up and see, oh, there's these tremendous contributions from
the Sefhardi men and is Raki Jews. It's just that
we didn't know about them. When we move beyond things
that were written and created by men, then we can
start to see, oh, wait a minute, there's all this
(16:44):
other stuff that was created by women, by Jews of color,
by people who are otherwise marginalized. So modernity has given
us the ability to widen the lens that we're taking
a look at. Then where that sort of leads into
what's Jewish art? If the if the themes are starting
(17:05):
to get or the content of Jewish art is starting
to become more universal. I think I would put myself
in the category of agreeing with the sculptor Jacques Lipschitz,
and he said Jewish art art is Jewish if a
Jew creates it. So we're taking a look not just
at the content, what does the what does the painting
(17:25):
look like, what does the photograph look like, what does
the music sound like? But we're taking a look at context.
What do we learn about the entire background of the artists,
the musician, the writer, because they're bringing that forward to
their creation, and so it might not at first look
(17:48):
like it is as a Jewish theme. But I think
when we when we really step back and widen the perspective,
we're learning a lot that can happen. Camille Pasorro is
a good example. He was an atheist, he wasn't a
practicing Jew. He and his brothers all had biblical names.
And yet when you take a look at a painting
(18:09):
of a French peasant, for instance, not a Jewish girl,
you know we pretty much know that. Yet he was
one of the leading artists who spoke out against Dega
when Dega was doing his anti semitigrants right, so his
Jewish background informed how he was living his life, and
(18:33):
I think that we do that all the time. So
with this broader definition, we're able to bring in an
ever increasing number of experiences and move beyond Jewish art
simply being perhaps crowns on a tora cover. You know,
ritual objects. Here's a nice, a nice manoa and it's
(18:53):
decorated well, or here's acute acute dradl or whatever that
might be.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Yeah, you're reminding me years ago when I was in
a band called Rabbinical School Dropouts. It was sort of
a esoteric spas Klesmer ensemble as we called it. We
were interviewed by the foreword I Believe, and you know,
someone there asked me what makes your music Jewish? And
being in my early twenties, I wanted to be cheeky
(19:19):
and I said, you know, I'm Jewish, so everything I
do is Jewish, and more and more as I've gotten older,
I appreciate the wisdom of my younger self because that's
actually true, exactly what you're saying. If a Jew creates something,
there's something Jewish about it. It's almost up to the
interpreter to discover what that might be. To some extent
(19:42):
mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
And Mark Schagh paraphrasing him, I think I quoted in
my essay said that if I were not a jew I,
what I create would be entirely little different. You know
that we do bring that perspective, and it sort of
goes back to you know, my ca rural Jewish upbringing
in a conservative household. All right, we need to note
(20:05):
that piece. But the cultural piece of well, you know,
he's Jewish, you know, I mean, Sandy Kofax didn't pitch
on yong Kipur in the World Series. But what most
people don't realize is he didn't go to synagogue either,
you know, so it was never about there a person's
religiosity or level of absurdments.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
The wonderful thing about that Sandy Kofax story is because
he was staying in his hotel in Minnesota during that game,
every rabbi within the Twin Cities said that he was
at their synagogue, you know, because he didn't go anywhere,
so he went everywhere.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
And you know, when Hayk Greenberg didn't play on Russia,
he played on Russiashana but not on yng Kipur because
they found some Talmudic phrase that youth were playing in
the streets of Jerusalem. And so since youth were playing,
never mind, baseball hadn't been invented. But since youth were playing,
they had you know, he had like rabbinic blessing to
(21:03):
go ahead and play.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
It seems that moving away from strict definitions of Jewish
culture not only expands what might be understood by that term,
but also more realistically reflects the diversity of Jewish lives
and perspectives. Would you agree?
Speaker 1 (21:18):
I absolutely agree with that. You know, I have not done,
for instance, twenty three in meters, but I suspect it
would be one hundred percent Ashkenasec and so expanding to
include the experiences of this farding of Mizrahi, of Jews
of color, of LGBTQ, plus Jews of women, women's voices.
(21:43):
You know, even when I read the Bible, it's a
patriarchal document, no doubt, but there were women just like
you know, like I said, you know, Jews have always
been human beings and there were women in that society.
So what can we tease out of it? So I
absolutely agree that it's that when we get away from
(22:04):
strict religious definitions and we move to an ever expansive
definition of Jewish culture, it's going to include.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
More, oftentimes the Jewish content of a creative work is
hidden beneath the surface. You include abstract expressionist Mark Ropko
as a creator of Jewish works, yet his mature paintings
typically feature just two or three rectangles. Some view these
austere color field paintings as representing mass open graves of
(22:33):
the Holocaust. What role does the audience play in defining
a Jewish work of art or literature, or music or dance,
et cetera.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
As I as I think about that question, I think
that there's sort of an unspoken contract between an artist
and his and his and their audience, and whether that
is a viewer, whether it's a reader, whether it's a participant,
that that that unspoken contract resist well from the invitation
that the work of art represents. The illusions and the
(23:05):
meanings that are in these things, I think are activated
by the audience. An artist may have one set of
intentions and the viewer may come away with something entirely different.
I'm reminded that a lot of years ago, when I
was teaching my third grade Sunday school class, I was
talking about Jewish art and Jewish artists, and I showed
(23:27):
two different color fields by Rothcoe, and one was red
and orange and one was either blue and white or
blue and black, I can't quite remember. And I said,
is this Jewish art? And one of my students said,
the one that was red and orange was not Jewish art,
but the one that was blue, that had blue in it,
that was Jewish art, because blue is a Jewish color.
(23:50):
So you're talking about the same artists, the same kind
of thing, you know. And again, when we start to
think about context, Rothcoe was the only one in among
his siblings who was sent to a header a very
strict upbringing. So I look at his abstract expressionism as
sort of a rebellion against that. Instead of everything being
so tight, we're going to get it down to its
(24:12):
bare essence and still be able to express what we
need to see. I think. Also in the book, we
have an article by Judicide about secular spirituality, and she
recounts the idea of union and communion that comes from
being one voice among many. So whether she was singing
in a small group, whether it was one hundred, or
(24:33):
whether she was on a protest march and people were
singing and there were, you know, thousands and just scores
of people singing at the same time, it transcended her
beyond just what she was saying. So that experience it's
very different, of course than passive listening. And so I
think the role of the audience, the role of being
(24:54):
a participant, is very much it's sort of a mute
ual situation between the creator human and uh yeah, not
that creator, between the between the creator, the artistic creator,
and the audience.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
For members of our audience who'd like to explore the
wide world of Jewish arts, what are some good and
perhaps less obvious places to start.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
So at the end of the book we include a
section called go forth and Learn, and that has both
recommendations of written material as well as non textual material
such as film and paintings and music and things like that.
It's only a starting point because, after all, at some
point we had to turn the manuscript in and get
(25:44):
the book published, you know, because that section could have
been as big and growing as the rest of the book.
So so that's one place to start with what's in there.
Generally I would suggest historical fiction, historical Jewish fiction, because again,
if it's going to take the reader to a time
and place that they're not otherwise familiar with, they're going
(26:06):
to learn something about the Jewish experience, and the different
authors that I've read in that kind of genre pretty
much have done their homework, so we can rely on it. Again,
it's not a history. These aren't history books, but they've
done their research, so it has more than just a
single kernel of truth. I'd also suggest that as far
(26:32):
as a less obvious place are children's books, because they
really reflect the author's experiences. For example, that classic book
The Keeping Quilte by Patricia Polaco, she not only has
I mean the Keeping Quiote becomes the upa at you
at generational weddings until her very own, which was an
(26:53):
inner faith marriage, And so it's going to give the
Jewish experience in a way that it's it's simple, it's elegant,
elegant and eloquent. Looking at Maurice Sendak is another way
to do that with Where the Wild Things Are, for instance,
and particularly for kids, but I think for their parents
(27:13):
as well, they know all of these books, they just
don't know that there's a Jewish backstory to them. And
so with Sennak, the characters the wild Things were really
depictions of his relatives that you know, they spoke this
guttural Yiddish and they would come right up to him
and pinch his cheek, look at you, that kind of thing.
(27:34):
They were terrifying to him as a child, you know.
So I think that there's a universality to that experience,
but again, most people just read it at face value
and aren't able to kind of go beyond that. Another
example I think would be the comic book industry, and
(27:55):
so we're talking about a lot of pop culture kinds
of things. To add to this Jewish cultural canon, it
was that industry was founded by Jews because they were
discriminated against and couldn't get jobs, and so they sort
of started this. And Superman has quite the Jewish backstory.
His origin story is the same as Moses, and then
(28:17):
he triumphs with you know, the triumph of good over
evil when that book comes out, you know, the comic
book first comes out by two Jewish boys. It's at
the time of the rise of Nazism in Germany. Though,
when if we can read the Bible as metaphor, we
certainly can be taking a look at some of these
other kinds of things, you know. Musically, and I tread lightly, Jonathan,
(28:43):
because this is your territory. But somewhere over the Rainbow
was the story of the immigrant experience and coming to
America and what that was. It's a lovely song in
the Wizard of Oz. But again, when we consider the
writers or Jews, wish and immigrants and here's what they're
going to be addressing that also, content and context I
(29:10):
think helps widen all of that.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Well, thank you so much, Jody for providing context and content.
It's really lovely to speak with you.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Thank you. I've had a good time. Thanks for inviting
me and to our audience.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Now back to your regularly scheduled lives.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
Amusing Jews is here to amuse you. If you like
being amused, go ahead and click like and subscribe.
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