In artist Yona Verwer’s “Immersion VIII,” a nude woman in a fetal position floats in a swirl of water. The image is at once ethereal and surreal, not unlike Verwer’s first mikveh experience, a purification ritual, and central to conversion, the transition from non-Jew to Jew.

“It is the joy of weightlessness and the feeling of being spiritually elevated,”  said Verwer, the co-founder of the Jewish Art Salon, who was born Catholic in the Netherlands and converted to Judaism in 1995.

“Five years after my conversion I started including Jewish subject matter in my paintings, that is to say contemporary visual interpretations of ancient texts,” she added. “I also examine contemporary themes like identity, ecology, antisemitism and more through a Jewish lens.”

“Immersion VIII” is one of 17 works in an original and perhaps unprecedented exhibit, “Children of Ruth: Artists Choosing Judaism,” currently running at the Heller Museum at Hebrew Union College. The thought provoking display features the paintings, drawings, collages, found objects and sculptures created by artists who have discovered a home through conversion. Some of the pieces are abstract, others representational and still others combinations thereof or not readily definable at all. None of it is kitschy, reductive or derivative.

Hailing from across the globe and representing an array of ethnic, social and religious backgrounds, all the artists have forged work informed by various aspects of their conversions. There is commentary on biblical texts, illustrations of Jewish rituals and others that merge imagery from the artists’ early backgrounds with representations of and metaphors for Judaism and Jewish life. In more than a few pieces, the Golem — the ultimate outlier who is nevertheless the mystical protector of the Jewish people — makes an appearance.

“I wanted to be Jewish from the time I was 11 despite knowing almost nothing about Judaism, and not meeting a Jew until I was 19,” Verwer said.  “It felt irrational, but later, the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s words resonated — that sincere converts to Judaism possess an inherent Jewish soul, even prior to their formal conversion. In other words, converts are not outsiders but returning kin.”

The reasons for the artists’ conversions run the gamut. Kate Hendrickson grew up in West Virginia, the child of Protestants. Her mother was a choral director and organist and her father sang in the choir in both Presbyterian and Methodist churches. Neither parent was doctrinaire in their beliefs.

“I couldn’t buy Christian dogma at all or the idea that Jesus was the savior,” she said. “I married a Sephardic Jew who was raised in Morocco. His family embraced me, especially his mother. I used to follow her around in the kitchen, studying her recipes. When she died at 97, I felt ungrounded and wanted to explore Judaism. The rabbi suggested I do independent study and I attended services. Still, I wondered when I would become Jewish. A friend, another convert, said that she just woke up one morning and knew she was a Jew. The rabbi said, ‘Anytime will be a good time for you.’ I love Judaism because it feels so open-ended. It feels like home.”

In “Concealed Faith,” Hendrickson’s first series of post-conversion drawings, Hebrew letters, which are an integral part of her Cubist designs, are concealed. In the series that followed, “Faith Revealed,” Hebrew letters are even more central to the aesthetic and more clearly visible, at least to the attuned eye. Further, Hebrew letters inform the way she creates her art.

Hendrickson translates the title of each work into Hebrew, then creates cut-outs of each Hebrew letter.

“I rub graphite over the cut-outs and then randomly drop them onto my paper and rub them across the drawing, their edges and curves serving as structures for the composition.”

A number of the artists said Judaism appealed to them because of its openness to interpretation and reinterpretation, adding how much they valued the chance to express unexpected or even controversial viewpoints in their imagery.

Artist Mike Cockrill, a social justice advocate who has studied Torah for two decades, puts forth a feminist vision in his piece, “Excavation,” which reinvents Judaism’s patriarchal tradition.

Here, two women, posed in a manner that hints at Egyptian forms, are engaged in a metaphorical excavation. One holds a book, while the other, paintbrush in hand “is ready to repaint, rewrite, the traditional history from which she may have been excluded or been misrepresented,” he said. “Patriarchy lies at the women’s feet in the form of a blindfolded and disembodied head.”

Before Cockrill’s formal conversion, many of his paintings embodied an Americana vernacular, at times a tad mocking. During his Torah study period, his paintings made a radical shift, embracing an aesthetic that addressed the human condition, “the existential man, the meaning of life, which is funny but also dark,” he said.

“The rabbi who converted me was concerned that conversion would affect my painting in a negative way, that I would be doing Jewish kitsch,” he recalled. “I want to embrace my Judaism without pandering or being obvious and corny.”

Other artists combine ethnic or cultural elements of their pre- and post- conversion lives. Carol Man forged a design that couples Hebrew and Chinese calligraphy. Vicky Vogl, the daughter of an Ecuadorian mother and Czechoslovakian Jewish father, created an exquisitely detailed puppet theater depicting a Golem in a setting that also embraces a Latino aesthetic.

“The clock has Hebrew letters and the hands move counterclockwise,” she said. “The colors and craftsmanship are Ecuadorian and European.”

The genesis of this exhibit was almost a fluke. Curator Nancy Mantell recalled that at an earlier exhibit about the Torah, one artist revealed that she was Norwegian, had converted to Judaism, and was working on a textile project based on Torah portions. “We were so impressed by her commitment to her Jewish learning it made us start thinking, ‘Wow, are there other artists who have joined the Jewish people and have Jewish themes in their art?’” Mantell recorded.

She and Susan Picker, the assistant curator, put out a request for submissions. Throughout the process of choosing submissions, Picker says she was taken with the artists’ “love of Judaism and a sense of return to their deepest souls, with a love of grappling with Jewish texts.”

Alan Hobscheid, who grew up in Chicago, the son of a lapsed Catholic father and Japanese mother, became exposed to Judaism in college through friends and later married a Jewish woman. To some degree his conversion was expedient and, simultaneously, an expression of osmosis, he admitted. But, also, he stressed he always had a curiosity about Judaism.

As a convert he was especially drawn to the way that “Judaism doesn’t sugar coat or obfuscate God’s relationship to man,” he said. “The doubt and skepticism spoke to me. So does the duality in many of the customs, such as the cleaning up and preparation for Passover. It’s very serious, but there are fun elements.”

Still, in his oil painting, “Bedikat Chametz,” the literal darkness of that pre-Pesach ritual especially spoke to him. The painting portrays a man on the floor in a darkened space, scrounging around, searching for the last bits of leavened bread in order to dispose of it.

“It’s not despairing at all,” said Hobscheid. “There’s a beauty in it and conversion is a similar process. You must leave something behind in order to move on to something else.”

“Children of Ruth” runs through Feb. 26 at the Heller Museum at Hebrew Union College.

 

The post One was born Catholic, another was a West Virginia Protestant — now they’re all making Jewish art appeared first on The Forward.

Yirmiyahu Danzig (aka @that_semite on Instagram and @Unpacked on YouTube), an Israeli Jewish rights and anti-racism activist of Caribbean and Ashkenazi descent, usually explores questions of identity on his Instagram account in English, Hebrew and Arabic. But last week, he posted a video where he speaks to Orthodox passers-by on the streets of Jerusalem — in Yiddish.

Although the official language of Israel is Hebrew, many Hasidic Jews in Israel speak Yiddish regularly.

Danzig, a digital educator for Unpacked, wrote me in an email that his work as an educator and activist is focused on dialogue. Until now his goal has been to try to bridge divides between Israelis and Palestinians through language, culture and empathy.

But in 2020, as tensions between Haredi and non-Haredi Israelis kept mounting over issues like the military draft, Danzig saw the same need for dialogue between those two groups as he did for Israelis and Palestinians — using language, culture and history to humanize, understand and imagine a shared future.

But he knew that he couldn’t access that world without knowing any Yiddish. So he decided to learn it, and did so on his own, using Yiddish language textbooks. He also took a few lessons, one-on-one, to practice speaking the language. “I’ve always found that speaking to people is the best way to internalize a language.”

Now that he’s fluent, Danzig created a video in the Haredi Jerusalem neighborhoods of Mea Shearim and Geulah in which he approaches people on the street with a microphone, asking them if they speak Yiddish.

In the clip, he begins by asking passers-by an easy question: “What’s your favorite Yiddish word?” — eliciting unsurprising responses like lekhayaim and zolst zayn gezunt un shtark, may you be healthy and strong. But the conversations get more interesting once he starts asking people why it matters to speak Yiddish in Israel.

Although there are no women in the clip, Danzig said it wasn’t intentional. “It was difficult to find Haredi women comfortable appearing on camera with a man,” he said. “But I remain committed to including more female Haredi voices, as I do across my work in Israeli and Palestinian society,” he said.

Danzig was raised in San Diego, with a father from Israel and a mother from Guyana. He was surrounded with Hebrew, Mizrahi music, reggae, hummus, falafel and plantains.

His father’s family traces back generations in Jerusalem’s Old Yishuv, the name used for the Jewish community in Palestine before the arrival of the modern Zionist movement. “My grandfather spoke Hebrew, Palestinian Arabic and Palestinian Yiddish,” he said. “I watched him move seamlessly between Jewish and Arab worlds in Jerusalem and Jaffa. He passed on to me his love for Hebrew and Arabic.”

Although Yiddish wasn’t part of his upbringing, Danzig expressed pride that he was a descendant of the Perushim — the students of the great 18th century Lithuanian rabbi, the Vilna Gaon, many of whom settled in in the Old Yishuv in the early 1800s and married local and Iraqi Jewish women.

In fact, the Yiddish dialect spoken in Jerusalem today, called yerushalmi yidish, is very similar to Lithuanian Yiddish — evidence of the deep linguistic influence that the Vilna Gaon’s students had on the language in Israel’s holiest city.

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In a disturbing open letter, an anonymous group has claimed credit for storming a Jewish event at Pomona College in California held to commemorate the lives of the children, women, and men murdered by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, or subsequently in captivity in Gaza — a harrowing incident in which security failed to deter the intruders and protect those gathered inside the venue.

As previously reported by The Algemeiner, footage of the incident from earlier this month showed the group, whose members concealed their faces with keffiyeh scarves, attempting to raid the room while screaming expletives and pro-Hamas slogans. They ultimately failed due to the prompt response of the Claremont Colleges Jewish chaplain and other attendees who formed a barrier in front of the door to repel them, a defense they mounted on their own as campus security personnel did nothing to stop the disturbance.

“Satan dared not look us in the eyes,” says the note, which the group released on social media, while attacking event guests and Oct. 7 survivor Yoni Viloga. “Immediately, zionists [sic] swarmed us, put their hands on us, shoved us, while Viloga retreated like he did on October 7th, 2023.”

Appearing to threaten murder, the group added, “We let that coward know he and his fascists settler ideology are not welcome here nor anywhere. zionism is a death cult that must be dealt with accordingly [sic].”

First promoted by the “Claremont Undercurrents” social media page, the note is so laden with expletives that The Claremont Independent — the official student newspaper of the Claremont consortium of which Pomona College is a member — declined to publish the entirety of its contents. However, it did publish some of the more virulent comments targeting Viloga, over whom the group obsessed: “Viloga comes from a family of genocidal settlers”; “Viloga served in the zionist [sic] occupational force and is a settler on stolen land”; “Yoni’s fictitious ‘state’ destroyed 92% of Gaza.”

Pomona College, which vowed to find and punish the students responsible for the disruption, denounced this latest action, telling the Independent that “the language shared in a post by Claremont Undercurrents is vile, threatening, and highly disturbing. It has no place on our campus.”

Radical, pro-Hamas student groups continue to convulse higher education campuses across the West.

Earlier this month, National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), a primary organ of the student anti-Zionist movement in the US, appeared to call for executing Muslim “collaborators” working with Israel in retaliation for the death of Palestinian influencer Saleh Al-Jafarawi during a conflict between the Hamas terrorist group and a rival clan, Doghmush, in Gaza City.

“Saleh’s martyrdom is a testament to the fact that the fight against Zionism in all its manifestations — from the [Israel Defense Forces] to its collaborators — must continue,” the group said in a statement posted on social media. “In the face of hundreds of thousands of martyred Palestinians these past two years alone, collaborators and informants maintain their spineless disposition as objects of Zionist influence against their own people.”

The statement went on to volley a series of unfounded charges alleging that anti-Hamas forces are “exploiting Gaza;s youth for money” and pilfering “desperately needed aid to the killing of their own people in service of Zionism.” NSJP concluded, “Death to the occupation. Death to Zionism. Death to all collaborators.”

In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, Israeli professor Michael Ben-Gad has been unrelentingly pursued by a pro-Hamas organization which calls itself City Action for Palestine. It has subjected him to several forms of persecution, including social media agitprop, spontaneous, unlawful assembly at his place of work, and even a petition of their own.

City Action for Palestine is one of London’s most notorious anti-Zionist groups, convulsing higher education campuses across the city with pro-Hamas demonstrations which demonize pro-Israel Jews, attack policies enacted to combat antisemitism, and amplify the propaganda of jihadist terror organizations. Ben-Gad is not its only victim, as the group has targeted Members of Parliament, the Union of Jewish Students, and City University London president Anthony Finkelstein, who is Jewish and the child of a Holocaust survivor.

“Regardless of diverse views on the recent Gaza war and the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we deplore any campaign that seeks to intimidate and drive out lecturers because they are Israeli, Jewish, or members of any other group,” a petition, signed by hundreds of professors calling for a defense of Ben-Gad’s rights, said in response to the hate campaign. “Academics and students have a right to go about their work at any university without facing harassment.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.