Tag: jewish art

  • Episode 6: Ethical AI and Jewish Art

    Episode 6: Ethical AI and Jewish Art

    The Jewish futurism Lab
    The Jewish futurism Lab
    Episode 6: Ethical AI and Jewish Art
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    In this episode, I look at how AI is impacting Jewish artistry itself: from how I and other Jewish artists research, sketch, and prototype with AI-generated imagery, to how algorithms are beginning to influence our visual language, ritual design, and the stories our communities tell about themselves. I raise concrete questions about authorship, ownership, and credit when AI systems remix Jewish symbols and styles at scale, and I ask what happens to kavannah, memory, and responsibility when part of the “hand” in Jewish art is computational. Throughout, I frame AI as both a powerful tool for midrashic reinterpretation and speculative Jewish futures, and a disruptive force that can flatten nuance, decontextualize heritage, or sideline human makers if we do not respond with clear ethical commitments.

    Let’s not wrestle with this golem alone. Check out this episode.

    Software referenced:

    DiffusionBee

    Episode Transcript:

    Welcome back to the Jewish futurism Lab, where we unpack Torah, tech, and tomorrow. I’m Mike Wirth, Jewish futurist, community artist, and design educator coming to you from Crowntown, Charlotte, North Carolina.

    In the previous episode, I talked about Shabbat as a design principle and why creative flow needs boundaries. Today, I want to talk about the tool everyone is arguing about: AI and artmaking.

    This is the episode where Jewish futurism gets real about what happens when the newest technology meets the oldest creative tradition.

    Let’s get into it.

    Here’s the thing. Jewish artists have been in this position before.

    When photography emerged in the late 1800s, painters panicked. When digital design arrived in the 1990s, I remember illustrators worrying their skills would become obsolete. Now AI is here, and we are asking the same question our ancestors asked:

    Does this tool make me more creative or less human?

    I want to flip that.

    Instead of asking whether Jewish artists should use AI, I want to ask how Jewish artists can use AI in ways that stay true to who we are and what we are trying to build.

    Let’s acknowledge the anxiety. It is real.

    AI image generators are trained on millions of artworks without permission or compensation. AI can produce in seconds what takes us hours or days. Companies are already replacing illustrators and designers with AI outputs.

    That fear makes sense.

    You type a prompt into an AI tool and three seconds later you have an image that took your bubby’s generation a lifetime to learn how to paint.

    So what is this?

    Creation? Theft? Collaboration with something that has no soul, like a golem?

    What does it mean when a people who have been creating for thousands of years suddenly have a tool that can make anything but understands nothing?

    Let’s be honest. AI is still pretty dumb. And if you are a Jewish artist, there is an extra layer.

    We have spent generations fighting to tell our own stories and control our own narratives. Now there is a tool that can generate “Jewish art” without understanding what it means to be Jewish. It can slap a Star of David onto anything. It can generate a menorah that looks cool but does not understand Hanukkah. It can produce Torah scrolls with the wrong number of columns or Hebrew letters that spell gibberish.

    I have seen this in my own work.

    In my article Judaism Has No Ready-Made Answer for AI, I wrote that Judaism has no neatly filed ruling for generative AI. And that is the point.

    Judaism is a living tradition built on argument, interpretation, and contextual wisdom. We do not wait for someone to hand us answers. We wrestle with questions together.

    Yes, the panic is real. But we have been here before.

    In graduate school at Parsons School of Design in 2001, required reading included Walter Benjamin and his 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He asked what happens to art when it can be endlessly reproduced.

    Benjamin said art has an aura, a sense of uniqueness tied to time and place. A painting in a museum has an aura. A photograph of that painting does not. Mechanical reproduction makes art accessible, but something shifts. Something is lost.

    Now AI is doing to digital art what photography did to painting. It is reproducing not only the image but the act of creation itself.

    So where is the aura of AI art?

    Maybe the aura does not disappear. Maybe it moves from the object to the intention.

    When the printing press arrived, scribes worried. When photography emerged, painters worried. Jewish artists like Man Ray and Diane Arbus used cameras to see the world differently.

    Later, media theorist Lev Manovich wrote in Artificial Aesthetics about how AI can simulate aspects of an artist’s style but struggles when form and meaning are deeply intertwined. AI can copy surface aesthetics. It cannot live a Jewish life.

    That matters.

    Jewish futurism is not about decoration. It is about designing possible futures.

    So here is my framework.

    First: Are you using Jewish source material generatively?

    Good looks like prompting AI to visualize a scene from Talmud, then reshaping it through your own interpretation. Problematic looks like typing “Jewish art” into a generator and calling it finished.

    Second: Is this design or just decoration?

    Jewish futurism builds futures. It prototypes. It iterates. It asks what the work does, not just how it looks.

    Third: Does your process include limits?

    AI has no Shabbat. You need one. Set time limits. Limit prompt variations. Require human refinement. Build in pause.

    Fourth: Are you in conversation with lineage?

    From Marc Chagall to El Lissitzky and the UNOVIS collective in Vitebsk, Jewish making has always been relational. AI can simulate a style. It cannot understand why that style mattered.

    Fifth: Can you explain your choices?

    If you cannot articulate why something serves your vision, it is not finished.

    Sixth: Is your particularity present?

    Jewish futurism values specificity. Your family stories. Your corner of the diaspora. If anyone could have made it, push further.

    And finally: Does it make you feel human while you are doing it?

    If yes, you are on the right path.

    I use AI through a hybrid method. AI for ideation. Me for refinement. I generate variations, print them, mark them up, then rebuild them by hand in Photoshop, Procreate, or with pencil and paper.

    AI for process, not just product.

    I document prompts. I disclose when AI was involved. I treat AI like a study partner, not a rabbi. It is my hevruta, not my authority.

    I have even fine-tuned a version of Stable Diffusion on my own artwork so it reflects my visual language rather than borrowing someone else’s. Not to automate my creativity, but to support it.

    And I build in my Shabbat. I step away. I come back. Most outputs are not good. That is fine. They teach me what not to do.

    AI is not going away. If Jewish artists sit this out, others will use these tools to tell Jewish stories without us.

    Photography did not kill painting. Digital tools did not kill hand illustration. AI will not kill art. But it will change who makes it and how.

    Jewish futurism says stay in the conversation.

    Use the tools. Keep your soul intact. Make something only you could make.

    The aura may not disappear. It may move from the object into the why.

    I use AI not because it replaces me, but because it helps me be more of who I already am: a designer, a remix thinker, a teacher, a systems builder.

    Use it wisely. Use it with intention. Keep your hand on the erase key.

    You have a soul. AI does not.

    Bring your kavana. Bring your lineage. Bring your particular Jewish vision of the future.

    That is Jewish futurism. Not Jewish-flavored content. Not aesthetic vibes. Real engagement.

    If this resonated, share it with another artist wrestling with these questions.

    Until next time: keep making, keep questioning, keep your hands dirty and your intentions clear.

    I’m Mike Wirth. This has been the Jewish futurism Lab.

  • Episode 3: Practicing Jewish futurism

    Episode 3: Practicing Jewish futurism

    The Jewish futurism Lab
    The Jewish futurism Lab
    Episode 3: Practicing Jewish futurism
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    In this episode, I move from defining Jewish Futurism to actually doing it. What does it look like to practice Jewish Futurism in your creative work, your teaching, your community building, or your daily life? How do Jewish texts, rituals, and patterns of thought become tools for imagining futures rather than artifacts of the past?

    I explore Jewish Futurism as a lived methodology. One that shows up through design, storytelling, ritual adaptation, speculative thinking, and creative constraint. Drawing from Torah, rabbinic interpretation, art practice, and my own community-based projects, this episode looks at how Jews have always practiced futurism by rehearsing futures, holding multiple meanings at once, and designing systems meant to survive change.

    This episode is an invitation. Not to agree with a definition, but to experiment. To treat Jewish tradition as a living design system. And to ask how your own creative practice might become a site where past, present, and future meet.

  • Prophetic Sensation: Neurodivergence and Jewish futurism

    Prophetic Sensation: Neurodivergence and Jewish futurism

    An Essay on ADHD, Flow, and Revelation Through Pattern

    Introduction: Where Neurodivergence Meets Jewish Futurism

    Neurodivergent people are often told our brains need fixing. Jewish tradition is often told it needs preserving, frozen in amber to survive. Both framings are wrong, and both miss the same truth: difference isn’t deviation, it’s design principle.

    I have the unique pleasure of being Jewish, neurodivergent, and an artist. This intersection isn’t burden or coincidence. It’s the source of my creative and spiritual practice. This essay argues that neurodivergence and Jewish futurism aren’t just compatible frameworks, they’re overlapping systems that reveal each other’s deeper possibilities. My late ADHD diagnosis showed me that the creative and spiritual practices I’d developed weren’t workarounds for a broken brain. They were Jewish futurist methodology, and my neurodivergence was the engine driving it.

    Jewish futurism, as I define it, is a design methodology and creative practice that imagines ethical Jewish futures without freezing the past or erasing identity. It recognizes that Jewish civilization is closer to its beginning than its end, requiring radical idea development rather than preservation of fixed forms. Rather than asking “how do we preserve Shabbat as it was,” Jewish futurism asks “what does rest look like in a future we design?” Neurodivergence operates on similar principles. A neurodivergent brain resists linear, settled narratives. It sees patterns others miss, makes unexpected connections, and questions endlessly. Both frameworks reject the notion that there’s one correct way to think, create, or practice. Both demand that we build new systems rather than simply accommodate ourselves to existing ones that weren’t designed for us.

    The overlap is way more than just metaphorical. Jewish practice has always contained practices that change how we think and feel: repetitive prayer motion, textual wrestling, embodied ritual. Neurodivergent minds have always sought ways to access flow states (shefa in Hebrew), regulate brain chemistry, and channel intense perception into creative work. When these two meet, something revelatory happens. Ancient wisdom reveals itself as neurodivergent technology. Neurodivergent experience reveals itself as a form of prophetic sight.

    The Cloud of Noise

    In the late 1980s, I stood before Jackson Pollock’s Lavender Mist at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and felt my world tilt. The painting’s scale overwhelmed me. With no subject or focal point, my eye moved constantly, never resting. The density of marks created illusory movement that simultaneously pushed and pulled me. I wasn’t seeing anything sinister. The optical effects themselves stimulated my young brain in a way I’d never encountered before. The disorientation frightened me because I’d lost control of my own perception.

    Decades later, when my doctor asked if I could remember childhood moments of sensory overload, this returned to me. But it’s also the story I tell about falling in love with art. My neurodivergence wasn’t separate from my artistic calling. It was delivering information through my body, through sensation, showing me a path I would spend my life following. I would later learn that ADHD brains don’t produce enough dopamine naturally, the neurochemical that regulates focus, motivation, and pleasure. This means my brain is constantly seeking stimulation, novelty, and intensity to feel what neurotypical brains get more easily. It also means that when I find the right stimulus (complex patterns, rhythmic motion, creative flow), I can hyperfocus with an intensity that feels transcendent. This isn’t a disorder to fix. It’s a different operating system that needs different fuel.

    The All-Night Dance

    I realized art-making could produce that fuel in college during the late 90s. I had procrastinated on a large painting for class, one of my mosaic-like pieces built from tiny dashes, dots, and patterns. Now I faced an all-night session with the piece due at 8am.

    Panicking, I cranked up music and danced my frustration away. I hadn’t yet learned to daven (the rhythmic, often swaying motion of Jewish prayer), but I knew how to headbang. The swaying motion of my brain (probably bouncing off the inside of my skull) gave me a surge of energy and focus. That launched an all-night painting dance. The first time I felt it.

    A floormate studying art therapy explained that creativity and flow were connected. It stuck with me. When I’m in that state, I’m moving, dancing, pausing, getting back up and working. Eventually it all becomes rhythmic. Stopping can be hard because I love the feeling. My brain is finally getting the dopamine it needs, and it feels like coming home.

    Discovering Shefa Before Diagnosis

    Before my ADHD diagnosis, I began practicing Jewish meditation and connected with the ecstatic state that emerges from davening. When I worked up faster and faster in motion, I entered an ecstatic state producing focused, euphoric sensation. This showed how deep into flow I had gone. In Jewish mystical tradition, this is called shefa, the flow of divine abundance. That flow is holy and sacred.

    I developed meditation as a way to enter flow state on demand. When I had creative work with limited time, I couldn’t noodle around waiting for the zone. I needed a technique to get there in minutes. Meditation does this for me. What I didn’t understand then: my neurodivergent brain was seeking the dopamine regulation it craved through ancient Jewish practice. The practice was already there, waiting for my body to recognize it as both medicine and revelation.

    The Late Diagnosis as Renarration

    My late ADHD diagnosis functioned as a Jewish futurist act of renarration. Jewish futurism rejects nostalgia that freezes the past. A late diagnosis forces you to reinterpret your entire history through a new lens. Experts describe a 2-3 year period of deepening self-awareness and making sense of the past while getting to know yourself perhaps for the first time. This mirrors Jewish practice of wrestling with text and meaning, returning to the same stories and finding new interpretation. In Hebrew, this return is called teshuvah, and it doesn’t mean going backward. It means turning to face something you couldn’t see before.

    I worried that medication and therapy would dull or damage my creativity. Thank God it didn’t. Instead, I finally felt focus and clarity like I’d never known. The drawbacks shifted. Learning to stop became a new challenge because I can get so hyperfocused that I lose the sense of time completely. I’ve set alarms for work time now. While time management was never my strength before diagnosis, I’m now hyperfocused and productive instead of procrastinating and wasting time.

    This is Jewish futurist methodology: using constraints and identity to design ethical, sustainable futures. Setting alarms isn’t giving up on natural creative flow. It’s designing a life where I can create without burning out. It’s building a future that works with my brain, not against it.

    Returning to Lavender Mist

    When I looked at Lavender Mist again as a photo online after my diagnosis (I haven’t returned in person yet), I anticipated the sensation. This time I felt like I could be inside the painting. I could follow individual splashes of paint throughout the entire piece. It seemed to pulse like neurons. Maybe it’s because I’m older and have studied the work for 35 years. Maybe it’s something else.

    What appeared as a cloud of noise in childhood now reveals the complex interconnectedness of the universe and our lives. My pattern recognition explains why I remember flags, logos, fonts, and motifs with uncanny precision. As a kid, I spent hours memorizing the flags in my family’s encyclopedia books. When I didn’t quite understand what I was seeing and it altered my physical balance or other sensations, I craved it.

    This craving led me to love jazz as a teenager, dive into complex video games, and eventually learn BASIC, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java, PHP and MySQL. I built a career in multimedia, infographics, illustration, and interactive installations. I’ve always been chasing the feeling those early experiences showed my brain. I suspect I’m not alone in this. Many neurodivergent artists, coders, musicians, and designers describe similar origin stories: an early overwhelming encounter with complexity that felt like a calling.

    Teaching Flow States

    With therapy and treatment, my self-awareness lets me focus more on my students’ states. I have hours of meditation practice and training that I now relay to my students. The methods and practices my therapists and mentors taught me, my resources, literature, and guidebooks are open to them. I observe when students enter and exit flow states.

    I now weave sensory-friendly methods into my classroom curriculum. I guide students through sensory-friendly design practices. I set outcomes and classroom practices using timers, reminders, and feedback-centric approaches to projects.

    One example: I use a digital whiteboard to doodle and lecture. I pause my lecture to allow students to reflect and doodle on my slides or drawings. My therapists say those brief pauses give my brain time to catch up. They give neurotypical people a moment to rest and reflect as well.

    Building in transitions allows flow to extend learning and enables pivots to new topics or activities without harsh interruption. These practices don’t just help neurodivergent students. They make learning more sustainable and creative for everyone. This is ongoing. I still have loads of questions. Luckily, I have colleagues who are music therapists at my university. I want to work with them to learn more.

    Prophecy Through Sensation

    I could say these feelings were prophetic, though they didn’t come with instructions. Only feelings. I wasn’t told to go forth. I was given the physical sensation that my brain loved, and I knew I should follow it into my future. Powerful. Looking back, it could have been prophetic.

    The Pollock moment wasn’t isolated. In the late 90s, I heard Dave Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo à la Turk” and lost my mind. I’d never heard 9/8 time before and it was an experience to be had. Parts of my brain were firing for the first time. In the late 2000s, reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, a book gave me this sensation for the first time. When I painted my first mural in college, I felt it too. Each time, my body told me: this matters, follow this.

    This sensation guides my creative problem-solving. When I built a microcontrolled LED pomegranate sculpture, the solution appeared in my imagination. I knew I wanted specific patterns and wrote code to simulate them. The solving came from trying out code ideas rather than looking up answers. I felt like I had it in my head and didn’t want to jump ahead. I would have felt bad, like I skipped a step and missed the chance to connect to the problem more deeply than just using an answer. When I get a taste of that Jackson Pollock feeling, I know the idea is worthy to act upon.

    I see these prophetic moments in my students. In 2012, I taught a digital installation course where students built interactive experiences with projectors, cameras, and software. This was a challenge many had never faced, and there was no real framework for it. The students stayed in the lab longer than I’d ever seen. Each one was hyperfocused on coming up with a great idea and executing it. One student made a cubist magic mirror. Participants would look into the camera and see their face broken into multiple planes like a cubist painting. It was a technical achievement and an exciting concept. This student could achieve deep focus, and I was overjoyed. I watched them receive revelation through the making itself.

    My meditation practice has delivered visions that became art. After I read the legend of the Sambatyon River (a legendary lost river where the lost tribes of Israel are said to be on the other side), it appeared in my head as a complete image. I illustrated it as an art piece. It was amazing to bring that clear and crystallized vision to life. I want to one day make it an immersive interactive digital experience for people in a gallery. How amazing to reconnect with the lost tribes through sensation and technology.

    This is the question I’m sitting with now: what if prophecy today arrives not as commandment but as sensation? Rather than a booming voice with harsh instructions like Moses received, perhaps prophecy today is a neurological connection born of overwhelming encounter with beauty or complexity. Perhaps neurodivergent people, who feel sensory input more intensely, are receiving information that neurotypical perception processes more quietly.

    I think art functions as revelation for neurodivergent people in this way, which makes art therapy crucial to intersect with neurodivergent experience. Because we feel so deeply (words, pictures, information, pattern, sound), we can embody it in ways that catalyze transformation. We don’t just see the painting or hear the music. We feel it rewire our nervous system. We receive direction through our bodies.

    AI as Neurodivergent Technology

    AI has become a second brain for my ADHD practice. It helps me go down rabbit holes with purpose and stay on track when I get lost. It lets me use my own entrance points into thinking and learning through conversation. I love having it roleplay scenarios and offer critique to get another perspective, especially at 2am when I might be working and no human collaborator is available.

    I use LLMs regularly. I run DiffusionBee with my own custom fine-tuned image model based on hundreds of images of my own work. I use NotebookLM to make infographics and slide decks for students in my design history class. I help students use AI to vibe-code or troubleshoot issues with digital projects. Before AI, staying organized and fighting the paralysis of starting to write were my biggest challenges. Now I use my custom-trained AI model to sketch with. I can pose any character into a new image, allowing me to expand my body of work into new camera angles and compositions. This has pushed me beyond what I could do alone.

    The relationship to flow state is complicated. If I jump to AI too early, I usually get weak output because I don’t yet know why I’m doing what I’m doing. Without human purpose, AI feels like a toy. But it speeds up the juxtaposition process dramatically. I can merge, twist, blend, and oscillate images in a fraction of the time I could on my own using Photoshop and collaging elements together to make references to paint or draw.

    It feels like both collaboration and assistance. There are tasks I can delegate to AI so I can focus on the grand vision and be the final editor saying yes or no to my idea manifested as a sketch. I still rewrite what AI gives me even if it’s good or better than what I could do. I can feel “that’s not my voice” after a quick read. This editing process is where I connect to the work.

    AI and Jewish Futurist Practice

    AI helps me explore the divergent ideas I get about interpreting Torah or Kabbalah. It’s an assistive chevruta partner (a traditional Jewish study partner) when a living one isn’t available. Often I use it to help me think about how a Jewish futurist idea might unfold over a long period of time or what impacts I might be missing or overlooking. I appreciate those bits of what AI can do for my practice. Sometimes it shares profound ideas and helps me see what I might be assuming about my thoughts. It’s helped me develop my thoughts to be more accessible and inclusive.

    I teach my students about AI and share my appreciation as an ADHD user, but I teach in a neurodiversity-friendly way and don’t specifically focus on that unless a student asks me. I want all students to see AI as a tool that can work with their brain, whatever their neurotype.

    The complications are real. LLMs can be overwhelming. Prompting can lead to dead ends without help. The technology is harmful to the planet, which makes me use it sparingly and offline or locally on my computer whenever possible. I’ve led the way to use these tools on personal computers rather than via web browser and data center, reducing the intensity of greenhouse gases. I’ve needed to write something personal fast and entered vague prompts that produced very weak output. After a few more attempts with no luck, it frustrated me so much I shut the computer and wrote it myself.

    This tension is Jewish futurist thinking in action. How do we use powerful tools ethically? How do we build sustainable practices that don’t extract more than they give? I set instructions to my chatbot to not give me answers but to have a conversation and build an outline. This helps me organize my chaotic thoughts. Then I leave the chatbot with a product I can use to write by hand. The AI doesn’t replace my thinking. It scaffolds it so my neurodivergent brain can do what it does best: make unexpected connections, see patterns, and create something that didn’t exist before.

    Neurodivergent Jewish Futurism

    Jewish futurism suggests that Jewish civilization is closer to its beginning than its end. This requires radical idea development rather than preservation of fixed forms. My ADHD brain doesn’t accept “this is how it’s always been” as an answer. That’s precisely the mindset needed to imagine ethical Jewish futures that don’t freeze the past or erase identity.

    Neurodivergent minds naturally resist linear, settled narratives. We favor pattern recognition, connection-making, and questioning that never stops. The Talmudic tradition, the central text of Jewish law and ethics built on centuries of debate and commentary, may itself reflect neurodivergent thinking patterns through its attention to detail, organizational systems, and endless questioning.

    What makes this Jewish futurism: my story demonstrates how neurodivergent experience isn’t a deviation from Jewish practice requiring accommodation. It’s a particular intensity of engagement with practices already designed to alter consciousness. My childhood terror before Lavender Mist, my college discovery that headbanging unlocked creative flow, my pre-diagnosis discovery of shefa through davening, my post-diagnosis ability to track individual paint splatters as neural pathways. These aren’t separate experiences. They’re the same neurodivergent capacity to perceive overwhelming amounts of information as sacred pattern.

    Jewish futurism asks: how do we design ethical, sustainable Jewish futures that don’t freeze identity or erase difference? My answer, embodied in my creative and spiritual practice, recognizes neurodivergent perception as prophetic sight that comes through sensation rather than instruction. We build techniques (meditation, alarm systems, rhythmic prayer, sensory-friendly pedagogy) that allow neurodivergent bodies to access flow sustainably. We teach that the overwhelm itself, when it comes from encountering beauty or holiness, is shefa.

    Closing

    I’ve been chasing the feeling Lavender Mist gave me for 35 years. In doing so, I’ve built a Jewish futurist practice that centers a simple truth: neurodivergent brains aren’t broken. We’re receiving revelation through channels that neurotypical perception might miss entirely.

    If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by beauty, if you’ve ever found focus through repetition, if you’ve ever sensed that your different brain perceives something others miss, you might be receiving revelation too. The question isn’t whether you’re broken. It’s what you’re being shown, and what futures you’re being called to design.

  • Liminal Space as Creative Method: Jewish futurism and the Multiverse of Stories

    Liminal Space as Creative Method: Jewish futurism and the Multiverse of Stories

    Back in 2014, when I first started to create my Jewish futurist art and stories, I thought that my character, the Wanderer should live a few hundred years into the future, so my spiritual technology objects could just “work” as he travels through time to different Jewish moments in history. But not everything in the Jewish cannon of stories are historical, so that became a narrative issue for my characters extraterrestrial abilities to be believable. I shifted to think about what if the character existed not in the “future” based on time, but in a liminal space built entirely out of the Jewish cannon of stories. This is the first thing to understand when thinking about Jewish futurism as a creative practice. We’ve learned to think of thresholds as thin lines, transitional moments you pass through quickly on your way from one stable state to another. But Jewish textual tradition suggests something different: the threshold itself can be a world, a zone of variable width where multiple versions of the same story coexist without resolution.

    This is where Jewish futurism lives and works.

    The Wilderness Prototype

    The Book of Numbers, Bamidbar in Hebrew, literally means “in the wilderness.” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks identified this wilderness period as Israel’s formative liminal experience, a space “between Egypt and the Promised Land” where the people transformed from “escaping slaves” into “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation”. The wilderness wasn’t just a route to somewhere else. It was the place where identity formed, where law was given, where the impossible work of becoming happened.

    Wandering Israelites 2024, Digital Illustration, By Mike Wirth

    Jewish futurism inherits this structure. It positions itself in a wilderness between deep tradition and speculative futures, refusing to resolve that tension into either pure preservation or pure innovation. The creative power comes from staying in the threshold.

    Multiformity: When Stories Refuse to Collapse

    Jewish textual tradition demonstrates something unusual: it preserves multiple versions of the same story without declaring one correct and the others false. The Talmud includes the story of how Jewish children survived Pharaoh’s decree in two different midrashim, Exodus Rabba 1:12 and Exodus Rabba 23:8, telling “essentially the same story” with different details and emphases. Both remain authoritative. Both are studied. Neither cancels the other out.

    This happens again with the creation narratives in Genesis, which offer two distinct accounts that the rabbis never harmonized. When Genesis 2:23 has Adam declare “this time (zot hapa’am) bone of my bone,” the rabbis read the phrase “this time” as evidence there must have been a first time, another woman before Eve. This reading generates the Lilith tradition, which itself exists in radically different versions across texts. Sometimes she’s a Mesopotamian demon, sometimes Adam’s first wife who refused subordination, sometimes multiple Liliths entirely (the Matron Lilith mated with Samael, the Lesser Lilith with Asmodeus). The tradition never consolidates these into one coherent mythology.

    This is what I mean by calling liminal space a “storehouse of options.” All these versions exist together, not as rough drafts leading to a final text, but as a permanent multiplicity. The creative work happens in the space between versions, where meaning emerges from juxtaposition and contradiction rather than resolution.

    Metamodernism and the Jewish futurist Oscillation

    Jewish futurism operates through what contemporary theory calls metamodernism, an approach that “oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naivete and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation”. This isn’t confusion or inconsistency. It’s a deliberate method of holding contradictions in productive tension.

    Marc Chagall’s I and the Village (1911)

    Consider Marc Chagall’s I and the Village (1911), which projected “mystical futures” while remaining rooted in shtetl imagery, or Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower (1921), which used “dynamic, visionary architecture” to anticipate “new Jewish identities” while drawing on Jewish cultural memory. Both works refuse to choose between past and future. They exist in the oscillation itself.

    Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower (1921)

    My own practice with neon aesthetics, AI-integrated rituals, and speculative spiritual objects tries to inhabit this same oscillating space. The work is simultaneously reverent toward tradition and radically speculative about Jewish futures. It takes the midrashic impulse (interpreting and expanding upon existing texts) and applies it to material culture, visual art, and interactive experience. The question isn’t whether to look backward or forward, but how to create in the charged space where both directions exist at once.

    The Danger of Over-Explanation

    Here’s where methodology becomes crucial. The liminal space has power precisely because it resists total systematization. When you map everything, explain all the connections, resolve all the contradictions into a coherent world, you destroy the liminal quality you were trying to work with.

    The internet phenomenon of The Backrooms demonstrates this perfectly. In 2019, someone posted a single unsettling image on 4chan: an empty office space with yellowed lighting that evoked uncanny familiarity and wrongness. Its power came from mystery and minimalism. You could project your own dread onto that space. It remained undefined.

    But as one analysis explains, “the internet tends to reject simplicity. A mere image cannot suffice; it demands depth, a narrative, characters, and intricate worldbuilding”. Within months, The Backrooms “transformed from a strange setting into an entire alternate dimension, complete with its own physical laws and terrifying creatures. There are countless levels, each featuring unique themes, ecosystems, backstories, and factions”. A commenter captured what was lost: “Modern Fandom kills that feeling of liminality and making up your own interpretations. You’re never just ‘alone’ with a game or story giving you fractured information”.

    The lesson for Jewish futurism is clear. The moment you turn the “storehouse of options” into a fully mapped shared universe (like the Marvel Cinematic Universe or an RPG sourcebook), you’ve left liminal space behind. You’re no longer working with multiformity but with a single systematized world that happens to contain variety.

    Dwelling in the Threshold

    Jewish futurism as creative practice means learning to dwell in the threshold rather than passing through it. It means producing work that operates like midrash, creating new versions that coexist with rather than replace existing ones. It means embracing the metamodern oscillation between tradition and speculation, between melancholy and hope, between the archive and the unknown.

    Most importantly, it means resisting the urge to explain everything, to make it all cohere. The wilderness between Egypt and the Promised Land was where transformation happened precisely because it was undefined space, liminal territory where old certainties no longer held but new ones hadn’t yet solidified. That’s the space where Jewish futurism works.

    The magic is in the mystery. Once the mystery is gone, so is the magic.

  • My Name Is Asher Lev: A Blueprint for Jewish futurism

    My Name Is Asher Lev: A Blueprint for Jewish futurism

    Images included are used solely for commentary and academic analysis under fair use provisions of U.S. copyright law.

    During the first year of the pandemic in 2020, a friend recommended I read My Name Is Asher Lev. We had just finished watching Shtisel, the Israeli drama about a Haredi family in Jerusalem. Akiva, the show’s painter protagonist, is gentle, passionate, and deeply conflicted between his community’s expectations and his need to create (Lyons; Mazria Katz; “The Art and Politics of Desire”). His journey is like Asher Lev’s and raises a still-vital question, what makes art Jewish?

    Promotional still from Shtisel. Copyright Yes TV. Used for academic commentary.

    Our connection of Asher Lev to Shtisel illuminated an ongoing continuum of reinvention in Jewish storytelling and ritual. Originally a novel, Asher Lev’s journey was adapted for the stage by playwright Aaron Posner, premiering at the Arden Theatre Company in 2012 and later finding success Off-Broadway, where it won several awards including the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play (“My Name Is Asher Lev – Dramatists”; Broadway.com; Fountain Theatre). The adaptation brings Potok’s exploration of art, faith, and family into the lived immediacy of theater, allowing new audiences to encounter and interpret these questions on their own terms. In this way, Asher Lev’s/Akiva’s conflict with tradition, creativity, and communal belonging, continues to inspire and reshape Jewish art in every new medium.

    Cover of My Name Is Asher Lev. Copyright Anchor Books, 2003. Used here under fair use for purposes of scholarly analysis.


    Reading Asher Lev reframed the question for me. Both Akiva and Asher are artists negotiating communal obligation and personal inspiration, risking nearly everything to remain true to their gifts. Their stories trace a path toward sacred creativity, providing a foundation for what can be called Jewish futurism.

    When Chaim Potok published My Name Is Asher Lev, he gave Jewish artists an enduring guide. Potok’s Hasidic protagonist struggles to reconcile tradition and creative drive. As Potok writes, “…an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist” (My Name Is Asher Lev). This tension between individuality and belonging is a persistent theme in Jewish artistic life. Jewish futurism affirms that Jewish art isn’t fixed in the past; rather, it unfolds with every creative act, no matter the medium.

    Potok’s novel contends that creative instinct itself is sacred. Asher paints not out of pride, but from necessity, a need that is intertwined with spiritual purpose. Potok argues, “A life is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven” (Potok, Goodreads). For Asher, creative intuition becomes a form of ruach elohim, the divine breath of creation.

    The narrative of Asher Lev is rooted in the idea of Tzelem Elohim, the belief that each person is made in the image of God. When Asher paints The Brooklyn Crucifixion, he is not betraying his Judaism. Instead, he translates personal anguish into communal compassion (SparkNotes; LitCharts). This ability to turn emotion into understanding reflects a hallmark of Jewish artistic practice. Maurycy Gottlieb, the nineteenth-century Jewish painter, struggled in similar ways. His art often explored the tensions between personal identity, Jewish tradition, and the surrounding culture (YIVO Encyclopedia; Culture.pl; Jewish Virtual Library; Brandeis).

    Maurycy Gottlieb – Ahasuerus wandering (Self portrait) – 1876, Oil on Canvas. Image is in the Public Domain. Used here under fair use for purposes of scholarly analysis.

    Like Asher Lev, Gottlieb faced societal expectations and pressures from family, peers, and the broader Jewish community. He frequently channeled his own pain and longing into works that resonate with empathy and universal dignity (YIVO Encyclopedia; Jewish Virtual Library; Brandeis; Segula Magazine). Their creative journeys illustrate how Jewish artists inspired by the concept of Tzelem Elohim bring individual and collective experience into dialogue, turning private struggles into forms of connection and healing.

    Akiva’s journey in Shtisel parallels Asher’s in many ways. He transforms his family and grief into paintings, using creativity as a form of tikkun, or repair (Lyons; Mazria Katz; “The Art and Politics of Desire”). Despite resistance from his world, Akiva, like Asher, brings faith and creativity together, refusing to separate the two.

    Jewish modernism’s dialogue with tradition is exemplified by Marc Chagall, whose paintings fill modern art with Jewish memory and mysticism. As Chagall observed, “If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing” (Chagall qtd. in “Analysis of Marc Chagall”; Grad). Chagall’s career models how Jewish creativity can look forward while remaining emotionally and spiritually grounded.

    Self portrait with palette 1917, Marc Chagall, Liozna, near Vitebsk, Belarus, Image from source. Used here under fair use for purposes of scholarly analysis.


    This same process of transformation is reflected in Potok’s exploration of art’s creative and destabilizing power. “Art is a danger to some people… Picasso used to say, art is subversive,” Potok reminds us (Bookey). In both modern and traditional contexts, Jewish artists risk pushing boundaries in order to offer new interpretations of spiritual experience.

    Jewish spiritual practice teaches that every action gains significance through intention, or kavanah. Potok mirrors this sentiment: “Creativity, self-expression, and truth…emerge from honesty about oneself” (LitCharts). Jewish futurists apply this mindset to every new creative medium, continually asking if their work reveals more goodness and light.

    Today, artists like Deborah Kass and Archie Rand carry these values forward as Jewish artists fully integrated into the mainstream art world. Kass’s OY/YO at the Brooklyn Museum and Rand’s The 613 both embody the creative tension between reverence and innovation (Brooklyn Museum; Rand).

    Silent Remembrance (self-portrait), 2024, Mike Wirth, Digital Illustration. Image property of artist.

    My own contemporary Jewish work was inspired by these characters. In my digital illustration piece, Silent Remembrance, I restaged a self portrait by Felix Nussbaum, a Jewish-German painter who perished in the Shoah (Holocaust).

    All of our artwork is apart of a has a legacy and reaffirms the idea that beauty and sacredness can and should coexist.

    The journeys of Asher Lev (page and stage), Akiva from Shtisel, Maurycy Gottlieb, Marc Chagall, and many Jewish contemporary creatives illuminate a vibrant continuum of Jewish artists who, across generations and media, confront the tension between personal inspiration and communal tradition (Morinis; Segula Magazine; YIVO Encyclopedia; SparkNotes; LitCharts; Wullschlager). Each pursues the middah of emet (truth), striving for honesty and authenticity in their creative practice, even when this honesty leads to conflict or alienation within their communities. Asher paints his deepest truths, Akiva wrestles to honor his art within the constraints of Jerusalem’s Haredi world, Gottlieb channels his longing for acceptance and identity into portraits and biblical scenes, and Chagall infuses his canvases with heartfelt reverence, mystical memory, and universal feeling (Grad; Art Prodigy Blog).

    Along the way, each artist embodies anavah (humility), recognizing their role as a vessel for creativity, and rachamim (compassion), using their gifts to turn personal struggle and sorrow into works of empathy and communal connection. Their creative processes mirror the stages of Mussar: deep self-examination, engagement with inner and outer conflict, risking rejection or misunderstanding, and ultimately returning to offer artistic repair, tikkun, to their communities and to Jewish tradition itself (Morinis; Mussar Institute; Ritualwell; My Jewish Learning).

    Through these acts of creative repair and ethical growth, their art becomes a conduit for goodness and revelation. Their stories remind us that Jewish artistic futurism is not static but unfolds wherever artists grapple honestly, humbly, and compassionately with the tensions of their lives. Revelation and healing do not end in moments of exile or struggle; rather, they continue through every artist who brings fresh insight and loving repair to their people.

    If you’ve not read My Name is Asher Lev, watched Shtisel, or viewed Gottlieb’s work, I highly recommend all three. I’m excited to see the stage production, myself. I hope you find kindred souls in these stories, like I have.

    Works Cited

  • Rimon: The Cosmogranate, A Jewish futurism Interactive Light Installation

    Rimon: The Cosmogranate, A Jewish futurism Interactive Light Installation

    • Project Title: “Rimon: The Cosmograntate”
    • Project Type: Interactive Installation
    • Year Created: 2023
    • Technology: Controllable LED, ESP32 Microcontroller, WLEDs, Ultrasonic Sensors, Microphone input
    • Goal: Create an immersive space that reacts to participants’ audio and motion input.
    • Awards: 2023 Blumenthal Arts Fellowship Grant Winner

    “Rimon: The Cosmogranate” is an immersive art piece, inspired by the Hebrew word ‘rimon,’ meaning pomegranate. Its form mirrors the fruit, emitting a radiant significance. At its core, it merges art with interaction. Inner sensors respond to audience movement and sound input, translating presence and voice into a dynamic interplay of lights and sounds.

    This kinetic symphony crafts a unique and captivating experience that boasts shining over 14k LED lights. The project honors a tradition of Jewish ingenuity, echoing the pomegranate’s role in the Torah and the cherished Sukkah during Sukkot. Rooted in Mike Wirth’s Jewish futurism body of work, the project blends ancient wisdom with futuristic visions.

    illustration of Mike's cosmogranate.
    Mike’s original illustration that inspired the installation. (2021)

    This resonant symbol, shared across cultures and religions, serves as a unifying emblem. Here, technology, spirituality, and community converge, each light and sound carrying a timeless narrative. Step into this radiant realm, where history’s echoes meld with the pulse of innovation, weaving a tapestry of unity and celebration across generations.

    The Interaction

    Audio Input Test in Mike’s Studio (2024)

    Exhibitions

    Charlotte International Arts Festival

    Charlotte, NC, USA

    AUG – SEPT 2023

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    Art Fields

    Lake City, SC

    JUN – AUG 2024

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