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Artists from this year's New Jewish Culture Fellowship cohort will be displaying their art at the Jewish Museum of Maryland.

WHO CARES ABOUT JEWISH ART, and where does it belong? The category has long faced a problem wherein work is either too Jewish—too niche, too religious, too rootless-cosmopolitan—or too secular, too queer, too political (often code for too anti-Zionist). Jewish spaces censor their own; non-Jewish spaces are afraid to engage. For artists, there’s often a question of what language one has to speak to obtain funding: a question of whether one can show up as their whole self. In her 2019 essay “Kaddish for an Unborn Avant-Garde,” Maia Ipp calls for a revitalization of the visionary in Jew...

Baltimore's Jewish Museum of Maryland takes a fresh look at racism, trauma and more in American Jewish life in "A Fence Around The Torah."

But first, I want to put these prizes in context, beginning with a word about shabbat, shmita’s temporal Jewish sibling. The world needs shabbat right now. We need boundaries. We need rest. We need time when we switch off electronics. We need at least one day that we don’t buy stuff. We need at least one day that we spend with family and friends. After a boundary-less year of covid, our need for some kind of structured shabbat has never been greater. And so, then, to shmita. The word means something like “letting go.” It’s part of the Torah. You could argue that it’s a somewhat o...