Disloyal

We discuss two pieces of art in the Jewish Musuem of Maryland's A Fence Around The Torah exhibit.

One, In The Kitchen, is an audio play and piece of communal oral history made by and for Jewish women with heritage in Arab lands. As artist Hannah Aliza Goldman puts it, "it explores themes of home, of culinary heritage, of womanhood, of family, and collective memory."

The other, Dangerous Opinions, is a video collage that takes footage from the 1988 film, Dangerous Liaisons, and uses it as a jumping off point to discuss, as artist Danielle Durchslag puts it, "the political and psychological complexities of American Jewish wealth" and "the phenomenon of WASP drag, in which rich Jewish clans copy the rituals, aesthetics, and rules of the Christian aristocracy in the hopes that a subtle kind of passing as American royalty will equate long-term security."

Hannah Aliza Goldman is a performer, writer, producer, and voiceover artist based in Brooklyn. Her audio play, In the Kitchen, is featured in A Fence Around The Torah as part of a group multimedia installation with Coral Cohen, Arielle Tonkin, and Annabel Rabiyah titled I mean… how do you define safety?

Danielle Durchslag is an artist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn. She's shown her work around the world, and is a New Jewish Culture fellow.

Liora Ostroff is Curator-in-Residence at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, where she curated A Fence Around The Torah. She's a painter whose work explores themes like queerness, Jewishness, violence, and the idiosyncrasies of life in Baltimore.