The New Jewish Culture Fellowship (NJCF) brings together an interdisciplinary cohort of groundbreaking Jewish artists to share work, discuss issues and texts, and learn from and with each other over the course of an academic year. Fellows come from all creative fields—visual arts, writing, performance, music, and more—and apply with projects that would benefit from the feedback and support of peers similarly drawn to exploring the rich, complex inheritance of Jewish life and identity in all its forms. In 2022, NJCF was featured in an Artforum article proposing “an alternative future for Jewish art.”
Our first three cohorts were comprised of New York-based artists, but in 2022, NJCF went national. Artists from across the US now come together for virtual meetings. With breaks for holidays, fellows meet weekly from October to June: twice a month with fellowship director Maia Ipp; once a month for text study with Rabbi Matt Green; and once a month in one-on-one (chevruta) pairings with another fellow in the cohort. Artists receive support in the form of a modest production stipend of $1,000, accountability and feedback, advocacy and promotion, and access to a growing audience. They’re invited to propose classes or events that showcase their work—screenings, concerts, exhibitions, workshops, and more—to NJCF’s local and national audience.
NJCF is an artist-led and artist-oriented project. We prioritize attention to process and generative critical inquiry. Our leadership style comes out of non-professionalized, collective arts organizing; instead of a top-down approach, we treat each cohort as a group of working artists supporting each other and co-creating their experience with us. The NJCF schedule is designed to allow artists to remain engaged in their personal, professional, and home lives without disruption, while developing meaningful relationships through regular meetings and programming.
Since 2018, 40 fellows have participated in the program across four cohorts. They continue to engage with each other through our alumni network both formally and informally. Many NJCF fellows develop ongoing professional collaborations. In spring of 2023, 30 NJCF fellows and alumni were featured in Material/Inheritance: Contemporary Work by New Jewish Culture Fellows, an exhibition and festival at the Jewish Museum of Maryland in Baltimore curated by NJCF alum Leora Fridman.
As NJCF director Maia Ipp wrote in her widely shared 2019 essay Kaddish for an Unborn Avant-Garde: “Making art, like Jewish practice, is premised on the belief that a careful attention to process itself is necessary to imagine and ultimately reach an unknown, but desired, outcome. Artmaking and Jewish life both demand surrender and determination; precision and wild abandon; patience and urgency; solitude and community. And at the very center of both Judaism and experimental artmaking is a generative tension between modernity and tradition; between a commitment to the lineage that formed us, and the desire to see and represent the world anew.”
Artists are inheritors and generators of this prophetic tradition. The New Jewish Culture Fellowship celebrates that creative birthright by supporting, challenging, and advocating for the next generation of Jewish artists.
Connect with us at info@newjewishculture.org
Maia Ipp is the co-founder and Artistic Director of the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, and a writer of fiction and cultural criticism. Since 2015, she has worked in the United States and Central and Eastern Europe with Jewish and non-Jewish artists to critically and creatively examine Holocaust legacy and Jewish culture. In 2016-2017 she held a research and writing fellowship with the Polish Ministry of Culture and lived in Krakow, where she co-founded FestivALT, an annual program of critically-minded Jewish art and activism. Maia was part of the team that relaunched the historic leftist magazine Jewish Currents in 2018, and now serves as Contributing Editor. In 2020-2021, she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow at Columbia University, where she also held a Felipe De Alba fellowship for fiction. She is a member of the Asylum Arts Network, and was a Wexner Graduate Fellow and Davidson Scholar.
Rabbi Matt Green is the co-founder of the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, and offers rabbinic counsel and teachings to the fellows. He is also Associate Rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, where he directs Brooklyn Jews, an experimental Jewish community. He received rabbinic ordination from the Reform Movement’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in 2018. That same year, Rabbi Green was named one of New York Jewish Week’s “36 Under 36,” for his project Grindr Shabbat, for which he used the popular gay dating app to bring Jews together for Shabbat davening in locations across Brooklyn. Through an ongoing partnership between CBE and Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in Manhattan, in 2019 he co-commissioned The Gett, a new play by Liba Vaynberg exploring love and loss in contemporary Jewish life. He also directs the Be Wise Fellowship in Entrepreneurship for rabbinical, cantorial, and education students at HUC-JIR in New York.
Leora Fridman is the Director of the New Jewish Culture Fellowship. She is an NJCF alum and the author of Static Palace, a collection of essays about chronic illness, art and politics (punctum books), My Fault, selected by Eileen Myles for the Cleveland State University Press First Book Prize, and other books of prose, poetry and translation. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Fence, the New York Times, and the Believer, among others. Leora has taught for institutions including Columbia University, Mount Holyoke College and Saint Lawrence University, and she collaborates widely with artists, writers and community groups. She is a recipient of support, grants and residencies from organizations including Fulbright, Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to writing and teaching, Leora curates exhibitions of contemporary art and performance and consults with artists and creative organizations.
Michael McCanne is the Communications Manager at the New Jewish Culture Fellowship and a writer and artist. He is an alum of NJCF and was also a 2017 fellow at Tent: Creative Writing at The Yiddish Book Center and, a 2018 resident at the Mount Lebanon Residency. His work has been exhibited at KN Gallery: Berlin, the Jewish Museum of Maryland, High Tide Gallery, Eastern State Penitentiary, Asian Arts Initiative, and Atelier FAS Gallery. In 2020, Michael received a grant from the Wave Farm/NYSCA Media Arts Assistance Fund to complete his first film A Minor Figure, a collaboration with Jamie Weiss. The film premiered at Documenta Madrid and showed at Curtocircuito International Film Festival, MiradasDoc, and Prismatic Ground. With Nate Lavey, he produced the podcast series Foreign Agent, distributed by Novara Media.
We are grateful to be part of the big tent of programming at Congregation Beth Elohim and its laboratory for Jewish life, Brooklyn Jews, and for the support of our funders and partners.
The New Jewish Culture Fellowship cannot exist without the support—large and small—of a community that values groundbreaking Jewish art and culture. Please donate to support our work.
The NJCF logo was designed by Samuel Holleran. It uses a modified version of the experimental typeface Gulax by Morgan Gilbert from the Velvetyne Type Foundry, designers of libre/open source fonts.