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 for nine months: once a month with fellowship director Leora Fridman; once a month for text study with Hadar Ahuvia, our rabbinic educator; 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, 65 fellows have participated in the program across six 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 and current director Leora Fridman.
As NJCF co-founder 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
About | Staff | Supporters
Leora Fridman
Leora is the Director of the New Jewish Culture Fellowship. She is an NJCF alum and the author of Bound Up: On Kink, Power and Belonging, 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 Parapraxis, Fence, the New York Times, and the Believer, among others. Leora has taught for institutions including Columbia University, Mount Holyoke College and the New School for Social Research, 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.
Fellowship DirectorMaia Ipp is co-founder 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.
Hadar Ahuvia
Hadar Ahuvia is a choreographer, performer, ritual facilitator and educator weaving genres and generations. Her work Everything You Have is Yours examining the creation and dissemination of Israeli folk dance earned her a Bessie nomination for Outstanding Breakout Choreographer, a Dance Magazine “25 to Watch” in 2019, and inspired the documentary of the same name by Tatyana Tenenbaum (DOC NYC 2024). Ahuvia has presented her work across the US and internationally, is working towards rabbinic ordination, leads services at Congregation Kolot Chayeinu in Brooklyn, organizes with Rabbis for Ceasefire, and leads text study for the New Jewish Culture Fellowship. She is working on a cycle of performances inspired by the sonic gestures of Eastern European Ashkenazi prayer.
Rabbinic FellowFounding Directors
Rabbi Matt Green is the Creative Director and Co-Founder of Union House and co-founder of the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, and has been a leader in Jewish communal life for over a decade. He is also the Associate Rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, where he has served in different roles since 2015. He serves as the director of Brooklyn Jews, CBE’s community of young Brooklynites looking for connection to Jewish culture, time and ritual. Matt sits on the Education Advisory Board of OneTable and was an Atra Vanguard Fellow in the 2023-2024 cohort. He has a BA from the University of Michigan, and received rabbinic ordination from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. In 2018 he was named one of the New York Jewish Week’s “36 Under 36,” leaders to watch.
NJCF is a very small organization of part-time staff, and is counseled also by an advisory board of former staff, former fellows and community members.
About | Staff | Supporters
We are grateful to our partners for sustaining NJCF
The New Jewish Culture Fellowship cannot exist without the support—large and small—of a community that values groundbreaking Jewish art and culture.
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.