In May, we completed the two-year pilot of the Cultural Leadership Program, a fellowship designed to develop artists and producers who create Jewishly-inflected work and lead through their art, cultural projects, and social initiatives. The fellowship is animated by the idea that throughout history, artists and culture makers have been central to the project of renewing Judaism, enabling successive generations to discover the beauty of their inheritance and draw on its resources to imagine and create Jewish futures. It is also driven by our belief that artists are important catalysts for social and communal change. Their work sparks learning and dialogue about critical issues, offers narratives that can shape more inclusive and just societies, and develops participatory processes that mobilize communities to act. Finally, the program was designed to respond, however modestly, to the persistent gap between the vast potential and desire of artists to lead and the frameworks that exist to galvanize them to contribute to the flourishing of Jewish communities and the broader cultural ecosystem.
One of the most frequent questions we received throughout the process of planning for and launching the fellowship was: what is Jewish cultural leadership? The question is revealing. We do not struggle to imagine what leadership looks like for Jewish education, religious life, or communal institutions, nor question the need to invest in people and ideas that enliven these fields. There are many reasons why Jewish cultural leadership is less well understood. Jewish artistic and cultural production is wonderfully vast and porous, intersecting with nearly every dimension of Jewish and secular life. Yet, it is generated largely outside formal institutions and structures.
Good art takes risks and is often unsettling, inviting us to open ourselves to challenging ideas, narratives, and perspectives that may be at odds with the norms and boundaries of mainstream Jewish spaces. The impact of artists’ work is also difficult to measure on short time horizons, and there has been relatively little research or narrative work done to highlight models of excellence for Jewish cultural leadership. This is not the only reason funding is scarce for Jewish artists, but the lack of sustained and substantial support inhibits the field and our sense of what could be possible if artists had robust resources to lead.
In many ways, this pilot program was an effort to live into the question of what Jewish cultural leadership can be and do in the world. One can begin to formulate an answer by looking at the work of the fifteen visionary Jewish artists and producers who make up the inaugural cohort. They are expanding the boundaries of Jewish artistic work within their disciplines, facilitating spiritual and cultural practices that draw upon and expand Jewish tradition, creating rich educational material and experiences for diverse audiences, developing pathways for intercultural connection and community building, and addressing urgent social and political issues through their art and organizing. And, because artists must support themselves through multiple streams of work, many fellows do most or all of these things in their roles as teachers, organizers, and spiritual leaders. These fifteen fellows, along with thousands of other Jewish artists and cultural producers in the field, are vital resources for imagining and reaching toward an unknown Jewish future, one that is multi-vocal, dynamic, culturally-specific, and open to the world.
As program designers, the pilot enabled us to experiment with and reflect on what kinds of resources and conditions enable Jewish artists to grow as cultural leaders. We designed many kinds of educational and community building experiences—intensive seminars and study tours, online short courses and study groups, short retreats focused on social connection and creative exploration, work-in-progress presentations, and more. Our in-person seminars were organized around broad themes and processes at the heart of Jewish cultural work: personal identity and collectivity, inheritance and memory, perceiving the present and its potentialities for change, relating and creating across difference, and imagining futures. The seminars brought fellows into encounters with a wide range of artists, activists, communal leaders, and cultural institutions, with the aim of offering models and insights that could inform their work. Much of the online learning focused on deepening fellows’ Jewish wellsprings through exposure to ideas, texts, rituals, material culture, art, and histories that we hope will be generative for their work going forward. Fellows also benefitted from personalized advising focused on supporting their creative work and career development.
The two most important aspects of the program, undoubtedly, were the financial resources to support fellows’ work and the multivalent cohort. There is very little direct funding for artists to create Jewishly-specific work, and much of it comes in the form of microgrants, which cannot support ambitious work or sustain projects. Importantly, the fellowship stipend was not tied to specific production expectations—it was designed to support fellows’ time in the program as well as their creative work and lives. The cohort emerged as a powerful anchor and resource for fellows, who felt inspired and supported by their peers. We imagined it could take years for fellows to begin collaborating with one another; instead, it happened right away—fellows interviewed one another on their podcasts, filmed music videos, co-hosted exhibitions and events, and more. We see this activity as a strong indication of the depth of personal and creative relationships within the cohort. As one fellow put it:
I couldn’t have anticipated how rich the relationships would be. And how deeply I have found myself integrating some of the thinking about artists’ relationships to social change that the fellowship facilitated. It really has shifted how I carry myself in the world.
One fellow’s reflection on the importance of the cohort in the context of a well-resourced program powerfully captures how we envisioned the various aspects of the fellowship weaving together:
The cohort of artists and those conversations and relationships were profound and will be, I think, lasting. The overall durational (2 year!) framework of faith in my work as an artist under the rubric of cultural leadership felt like both a vote of confidence and a kind of dare—the best kind of provocation. And the financial support became a big part of how I supported myself during those two years.
We are thrilled that the program has been greenlit to continue beyond the pilot and are now completing our internal evaluation as we work toward recruiting the next cohort this November. We are also in the process of hiring a new director for the fellowship to lead the program into its next chapter. We look forward to sharing our progress along the way as well as the announcement for the open call later this fall. While so much was seeded in the pilot, the real promise of this program will be realized only with longevity—a future in which hundreds of Mandel cultural leaders are working in the field, collaborating, and cementing a widespread understanding that Jewish artists are key leaders for our communities and the society at large. May it be so.
-Eva Heinstein: Director, Mandel Institute