I spent some of the last couple of weeks working on an essay for the NYC Jewish Museum; they’re doing an upcoming show on new ritual, and asked me to write one of the essays for the catalog, which was a whole big pile of fun. I got to geek out about the Havurah movement, the birth of Jewish feminism, ritual theory, and all the silly fabulousness that has come out of post-punk/Burning Man-era Judaism. And I got to do it all in the context of bringing my rabbi-fu into a conversation about visual art. Given that I’m the daughter of an art historian who had a brief, but impassioned, mini-career in museum education, it was a very cool and special opportunity. The best part, though, was that they asked me to choose a bunch of images that I thought might illustrate the piece–so I got to invoke some of my favorite artists, folks who have worked on the sublime, the transcendent, the impulse to ascend and to sanctify, as well as to namecheck a few more contemporary iconic images and amazing projects. Goodness only knows what the final result will look like, (I think there will be edits before this whole thing is done) but it was sweet to get to use the part of my brain that used to think about art an awful lot, and hasn’t done much of that in way too long.
In other news, there’s an interview up at Nextbook, and I’m gigging at the Center for New Words, at the Central Sq. Library in Cambridge, MA, next Thruz. Do come out for it if you’re all New England like that.