This episode takes a different tack on one of this podcast's central themes; Jewish culture—how it's made, displayed, argued over, and lived. In this episode, I sit down with Rebekah Sobel, the Director of the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education (OJMCHE), for a conversation that treats museums not as neutral storehouses, but as active cultural engines: places where communities decide what gets remembered, how it gets framed, and who gets to speak.

Rebekah comes to this work through anthropology and archaeology. She says that objects don't "tell the truth" on their own—people interpret them. One of the through lines of our conversation is that Jewish culture is always being curated, whether it's in a gallery, a classroom, a feed, or a synagogue. And right now—especially post–October 7—the Jewish communal conversation is being curated by outrage and polarization more than by the tradition's own capacity for multi-vocal debate. Rebekah describes the museum's work in light of this moment: holding public trust while admitting that every exhibit is perspectival; creating spaces for people to be together again before they make declarations; and pushing access to Holocaust education statewide.

Finally we talk about what it looks like when Jewish culture is presented in real time to a real public—like OJMCHE's programming around Steve Marcus's "Psychedelicatessen," where religious symbolism collides with counterculture humor. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Rebekah Sobel.

Links:

Art/Lab www.artlabpdx.org

More on Rebekah Sobel here: www.linkedin.com/in/rebekah-sobel-5321b75/

Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education: www.ojmche.org/

Polin Museum (Warsaw) polin.pl/en/about-museum

The Genesis: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose.

In this episode I sit down with writer, poet, and Alexander Technique teacher Eve Bernfeld to talk about what it means to sustain a creative life in the middle of parenting, teaching, and everyday obligations. We talk about discipline and devotion — daily writing practices, working through creative resistance, and what happens when you take yourself seriously as an artist even when time, energy, and certainty are in short supply.

Our conversation moves through Jewish prayer, fairy tales, and Jewish magic as living creative resources rather than abstract traditions. Eve reflects on discovering tkhines (vernacular women's prayers), writing contemporary poetic prayers that emerge directly from domestic life, and finding her way back to speculative and magical fiction rooted in Jewish sources. Along the way we talk about vulnerability, belonging, the body as part of artistic practice, and how creativity can be a way of reclaiming parts of ourselves we thought we had left behind.

Show Notes

Art/Lab (Portland) — https://artlabpdx.org/

Eve Bernfeld's Website: http://www.evebernfeld.com/

Tkhines (Yiddish women's prayers) — YIVO Encyclopedia — https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article.aspx/Tkhines

The Artist's Way (Morning Pages origin) — Julia Cameron — https://juliacameronlive.com/the-artists-way/

"Shitty first drafts" https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/10332/bird-by-bird-by-anne-lamott/

Alexander Technique (general overview) — AmSAT — https://www.amsatonline.org/alexander-technique/what-is-the-alexander-technique/

Omer: A Counting https://www.ccarpress.org/shopping_product_detail.asp?pid=50132

Grimm tale "The Jew in the Thorns https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm110.html

The Genesis is created, produced and edited by Rabbi Joshua Rose and is supported by Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music composed by Rabbi Joshua Rose

My guest today is journalist Rebecca Clarren. Her work has appeared in Mother Jones, High Country News, The Nation, and Indian Country Today. For her reporting, she's won a Hillman Prize, received an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, and earned multiple grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. But as you'll hear in our conversation, she's much more than a journalist.

Her debut novel, which we touch on, is Kickdown, which was shortlisted for the PEN Bellwether Prize. Clarren is also a published poet; her work has appeared in North American Review, Catamaran, CutBank, and Poetry Northwest.

We spend most of our time talking about The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance, an extraordinary book in which she turns her journalistic eye on her own story—and her family's. It was named a Best Book of 2023 by several publications, won the Will Rogers Medallion Award, and was shortlisted for the High Plains Book Award and the Great Plains Book Award.

Rebecca and I talk about Jewish identity and values, and how those shape her work. She has a passion for amplifying marginalized and silenced voices—and for uncovering the stories that get buried beneath the dominant narrative. We talk about storytelling, contested truth, and what it means to hold multiple perspectives at once.

We also talk powerfully about grief and loss, and how they've informed her life and her work. Israel and Gaza come up because we're talking about competing narratives and moral urgency—and she offers a striking framework for balancing truth and compassion, rooted in learning with her rabbi.

It's a rich conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it. This is my conversation with Rebecca Clarren.

The Genesis is created, produced and edited by Rabbi Joshua Rose and is supported by Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music composed by Rabbi Joshua Rose

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Links & Show Notes

Art/Lab: artlabpdx.org

Rebecca's website: https://www.rebecca-clarren.com/

Indian Land Tenure Foundation: https://iltf.org/

Peter Beinart's Being Jewish Adrer the Destruction of Gaza: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/775348/being-jewish-after-the-destruction-of-gaza-by-peter-beinart/