New & UPCOMING At Art/Lab

Steve Marcus is a New York–based artist who's on our radar because he's currently exhibiting work at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. His work is visually striking—sometimes funny, always interesting—and it's a genuinely profound engagement with Jewish ideas and identity through the language of pop culture.

A lot of his aesthetic is rooted in the comic-book, counterculture world of artists like Robert Crumb and others who rose to prominence in the '60s and '70s, but Steve puts a distinctly Jewish twist on it.

In this winding conversation, Steve and Rabbi Josh get into Jewish pop, "kosher pop art," and Jewish futurity—what it means to make Jewish art and culture feel alive, contemporary, and relatable, especially for people who maybe didn't grow up with it but are open to it now.

S3E30 Curating Jewish Culture in a Fractured Moment (with Rebekah Sobel)

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 former 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.

Dana Lynn Lewis is the artist founder of Portland’s Gather:Make:Shelter, a long running, project/art work that brings professional artists together with people experiencing houselessness and poverty to make work, meals and collaborations.

Participants are paid for their time and their stories and objects are brought into public view in a way that refuses the kind of usual “us and them” bifurcation that so many cities dealing with homelessness confront.

In this conversation, Rabbi Josh and Dana go back to the moment that this work ignited while visiting Senegal during the 2016 US elections. She discusses the strange clarity that came from being far away and looking in on the United States while people around her, with every reason to be cynical, insisted that something important was happening and something good would come out of this.

In this conversation with playwright Andrea Stolowitz, Rabbi Josh moves back and forth with her between cities, art forms, and identities. They begin with the contrast between New York and Portland—how New York's sheer density of artistic life (and vastly stronger funding) can make theater feel culturally central, while Portland as a city has to keep stretching to match the artistic talent here. We talk about what it means to make live theater now when audiences are trained toward screens and when nonprofit theaters are financially squeezed into taking fewer risks. They discuss The Berlin Diaries, where Andrea uses her great-grandfather's 1939 diary and a journey to Berlin to ask a blunt, painful question, “How much of her family's dysfunction is Holocaust inheritance, and how much is ordinary human messiness?” What emerges is not just trauma, but the power of omission—the knowledge that never got passed down, the silences that shape identity as much as the facts that are spoken.