Artist Robert Russell has been exploring the remnants of displaced histories—objects that exist as evidence of destruction, displacement and exile. Though these objects come from vastly different contexts, they share an unsettling commonality of being orphaned from their original purpose. Russell’s paintings are an act of restoration—not to return these objects to their original use, which is impossible, but to complete them, acknowledge their incompleteness and their violence and, in doing so, perhaps to sanctify them. The paintings in Russell’s most recent series which opens April 5 at Anat Ebgi Gallery in LA, are still life paintings of Judaica from the now Muslim world. They depict artifacts that belonged to Jewish communities in places like Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Turkey, and Syria – communities that have been eliminated or nearly eliminated. His recent body of works is not about nostalgia or preservation but an effort to complete what is unfinished and making something new out of that. Read more from Russell here.
In organizing an exhibition, curator Sal Robinson always has a moment when she discovers an intriguing angle and suddenly wants to devote the entire exhibition to that topic alone. In the course of working on the exhibition Franz Kafka for the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City, that moment came when she learned how Kafka became a devotee of Yiddish theater and that his profound engagement with this world immediately preceded his own literary breakthrough that led to The Metamorphosis. In the end, Robinson knew she couldn’t make the whole exhibition about the influence of the Yiddish theater on Kafka’s life and work, but she did include a Yiddish theater poster among the extraordinary holdings in the Franz Kafka exhibit, which runs through April 13, 2025. Read more from Robinson here.
When comedy writer Rob Kutner decided to write a new comedic history of the Jews, The Jews: 5,000 Years and Counting, he figured he had enough experience making depressing political news funny that he could navigate the complicated history. But then October 7 happened, forcing him to rethink everything. In a blog for Reboot, Kutner explains how he grappled with the new challenge by embracing some advice from his editor: “We’ve been through worse. We’re not going anywhere.” He realized Jews have continued to grow, pivot, and flourish even in the face of every pressure not to. Learning about, arguing about, and yes, even joking about the worst things that have been done to us (and sometimes by us) can all be invaluable steps forward on our people’s never-ending mission to try and make things better. Read more from Kutner here.
Artist Day Schildkret reimagines the Passover Seder plate as an organic, immersive multimedia experience – featuring evocative tablescapes that explore the brokenness, grief, resilience and renewal of Jewish identity amid rising antisemitism. In a blog for Reboot, Schildkret says that this installation, The Broken Seder, presented at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco from April 3–6, came about after his seder last year erupted into grief, anger and division. Friends clashed over what was happening in Israel and Palestine, over what it now meant to feel safe as a Jew in the world. What was once a table of shared ritual had become a site of rupture. He left shaken by the fracture it revealed. His new installation reimagines the seder table as a meditation on brokenness and wholeness. Through visceral, symbolic tablescapes, it explores the raw emotional terrain of Jewish life today: exposed, hardened, hopeful, protective, alarmed, rooted, resilient. Read more here.
The new performance piece Deadclass, Ohio, running now at The Tank in New York City, is about Mitchell Polonsky’s Holocaust survivor grandparents. But it is not a play about the miraculous stories of their survival or rehearsing traumas they would have preferred to leave buried. Loosely inspired by Tadeusz Kantor’s The Dead Class and assembled from original text, recycled memories, family secrets, old photos, live violin score, and verbatim fragments of rediscovered memoirs and voicemails, Deadclass, Ohio instead is sort of a summoning or a seance for the living and a love song for the dead. It explores the terrifying and beautiful ways memory travels between generations, the ways in which we carry the ghosts of our ancestors around with us. The piece by The Goat Exchange runs at The Tank through March 23. Read more about it here.