One of our recent guests, David Winitsky, was asked to recommend a work of art he loves — he chose Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. I found myself returning to its insomnia plague scene: a plague that causes forgetting so total that the community must label everything just to function ("this is a cow, you must milk it") — a meditation on what happens when a society tries to forget its political violence and darker episodes. The novel insists that memory is essential to identity, individual and collective.

America feels like it's walking into a forgetting plague of its own making — asked to forget the norms of democracy, and asked to forget the harder parts of our past. Memory and forgetting have been on my mind. Jews are commanded to remember, but being Jewish has also always meant forgetting — every generation, ours included, has had to let go of some of what came before in order to recreate itself.

I wanted to talk through all of this, so I sat down with Rachel Atias — a wonderful writer with a fertile mind — on day one of her Art Lab alumnihood. (This cohort of Art Lab artists just completed the program; she's the first to be interviewed, with more voices to come.) Rachel recently taught a workshop on forgetting and on writing the pieces of our forgotten selves, at The Shuk, the Jewish Day of Learning sponsored by the Jewish Federation here in Portland. Forgetting came up a lot in our conversation — but so did hope, and whether hope is warranted.

I think you'll enjoy this one, and enjoy getting to know Rachel's writing.

Links in the show notes as usual.

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

Links

Art/Lab: artlabpdx.org/

Rachel's Website: rachelattias.com

Gefilte Fish — Portland Review: portlandreview.org/gefilte-fish-by-rachel-attias/

Pond Scum — Does It Have Pockets: www.doesithavepockets.com/fiction/rachel-attias

A Fish in the Bathtub: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fish_in_the_Bathtub

Judy Margles, longtime director of the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, joins me to talk about the institution she spent a career building — and the tensions built into its dual mission of Jewish cultural memory and Holocaust education. We discuss how Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education (OJMCHE) "third leg," pluralism, became the connective tissue between those two mandates, and how October 7th has complicated that commitment both toward the broader world and within the Jewish community itself. Judy shares a story about discovering that every parent in her friend group had a child at the Gaza rallies, and what that revealed about generational change. The conversation moves into the state of Jewish arts and culture right now — from the fight over the Israel Pavilion at the Venice Biennale to the movement of art across borders during wartime — and into bigger questions: what makes art endure, whether artists owe the Jewish community anything, and where Jewish culture actually comes from. Enjoy.

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

Links

• Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture: artlabpdx.org

• Our podcast on Youtube: @theartlabpodcast

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

• Rothko Chapel, Houston: https://rothkochapel.org/

• The Jewish Museum, New York — current exhibitions (including the Walter Benjamin photography show Judy references): https://thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/

• Portland Art Museum: https://portlandartmuseum.org/

I think about language a lot. Understanding and translating Hebrew is a core part of what keeps me busy and engaged, and in my study of Kabbalah I often confront the limits of what language can convey. But language isn't just a philosophical puzzle — in our broader culture it's being used and abused, deployed in culture wars, for political division and demagoguery. Language can also be a form of self-determination, of pushing back against oppression.

Think of how Jews in the late 19th century reclaimed Hebrew — turning it from a sacred religious tongue into a living secular language. In doing so, they largely turned away from Yiddish, the vernacular of diaspora Jewish life. Hebrew was the language of return; Yiddish was the language of exile.

But in recent decades, Yiddish itself has undergone its own reclamation — not as a language of exile, but of resistance. For many Jews outside or critical of the Zionist mainstream, Yiddish carries a different kind of Jewish identity: diasporic, radical, rooted in solidarity and working-class organizing. You may recall my conversation with Mark Rubin, who draws on some of that same tradition in his own protest music. Today's guests are very much in that spirit.

Maia Brown and Stefanie Brendler of Brivele are a Seattle-based Jewish duo making Yiddish music rooted in anti-fascist, anarchist, and labor organizing. Their latest album draws from the Proletpen — radical Yiddish writers working in New York between the 1920s and 1950s — and the music is as urgent as anything being made today.

We talk about what drew them to Yiddish, how punk shaped their sound, and what it means to perform this music in Jewish spaces right now, when the community is so fractured. It's a rich, sometimes challenging conversation. I'll say upfront: my guests hold strong views on what's happening in Gaza — views I don't entirely share, and said so during our conversation. I think that exchange is worth hearing, and I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

Enjoy the episode.

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

Notes

Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts and Culture: artlabpdx.org

https://www.brivele.com/

YIVO Encyclopedia entry on Yiddish: encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/235

Information on Dora Teitleboim: hcongressforjewishculture.org/people/4097/Taytlboym-Dora