Mike Wirth talks with Israeli realist painter Avraham “Avi” Vofsi about classical oil painting, Jewish identity, and his AI assisted Theodor Herzl project. They explore how to use new tools without losing the human aura, and what Jewish images might look like in the future.
In this episode of The Jewish futurism Lab, host Mike Wirth shares the story behind a UX‑driven case study in Jewish ritual. Mike talks about creating the High and Low Ritual at the Greensboro Contemporary Jewish Museum’s Social Practice Institute, and how that work led to speculative ritual objects like a geodesic sukkah dome, an experimental mezuzah, and a reimagined tallit. From there, he introduces a three‑layer framework of halakha, minhag, and design space that gives Jews clear parameters for responsible experimentation: know what’s non‑negotiable, what’s inherited custom, and what’s open for thoughtful play. Mike reflects on teaching this framework at Judaism Unbound’s Shavuot Live and previews his upcoming Lehrhaus class on speculative ritual design, ethics, and boundaries. Throughout, he argues that accessibility is not an add‑on but a core part of the mitzvah, and unfolds his evolving idea of “hiddur olam” , beautifying not just individual commandments, but the systems and worlds our rituals create.
In this episode of The Jewish futurism Lab, I share how the Hineni Project carried me from the shock of October 7 into a deeply personal relationship with one family in Israel: the family of Bar Shechter z”l, a young father and psy‑trance DJ murdered at the Nova music festival. Hineni means “Here I am” in Hebrew, a word that speaks to radical presence and spiritual readiness, and it became the frame for how I showed up as an artist, friend, and witness.
I talk about growing up in the Israeli‑diaspora in‑between space, meeting Bar through his music and his loved ones, painting his portrait in my studio, and how that canvas grew into a dream of a community mural on a wall in his hometown of Katzir. Along the way we explore Jewish grief, memory, and what it means to say “Hineni, here I am” again and again through art, even when nothing can fix the loss.
This episode explores Franz Rosenzweig’s radical vision for Jewish education through the Frankfurt Lehrhaus (1920) and traces its influence into contemporary experiments in creative, future-oriented learning. Rosenzweig rejected passive transmission of knowledge and instead cultivated dialogical, participatory study rooted in lived experience. His Lehrhaus was not simply a school. It was a reorientation of how Jewish life could be learned, practiced, and renewed in modernity.
That same impulse appears in emerging frameworks like Jewish futurism and the Hiddur Olam creative learning system, which treat tradition as a living medium rather than a fixed archive. The episode draws a line between Rosenzweig’s early 20th century intervention and present-day efforts to design learning environments that are adaptive, imaginative, and relational.
The episode also highlights the Lehrhaus in Boston as a contemporary expression of this lineage. On June 24, 2026, an in-person course on Jewish futurism will take place there, offering a practical extension of these ideas. The session invites participants to move beyond preservation toward creative responsibility, asking not only what has been inherited, but what must be built.
Along the way, the episode examines what might be missed when Rosenzweig is reduced to philosophy alone. His educational project was infrastructural. It reshaped who teaches, how learning happens, and what counts as participation. That shift remains unfinished.
In this episode of The Jewish futurism Lab: Torah, Tech, Tomorrow, host Mike Wirth sits down with his friend, Israeli digital artist and projection‑mapping creator Erez Cohen. Mike first encountered Erez’s work through a projection‑mapping piece called Metamorphosis, where veins and fungi slowly overtake a Jerusalem building and turn the city itself into a living, speculative Jewish landscape. You can explore more of Erez’s video mapping, sound, and interactive pieces in the My Works section of his portfolio at erezcohen.art.
The conversation traces Erez’s journey from hacking video games and running private servers to building immersive environments with tools like Visual Studio, TouchDesigner, and 3D animation. Together they dig into how that background in world‑building feeds directly into his practice of Jewish futurism, why his art is Jewish simply because he is Jewish, and what it means to design custom, generative experiences for a generation raised on platforms like Roblox and Minecraft.
Mike and Erez also reflect on collaborating on a digital projection project for Israel after October 7, the impact of war and canceled exhibitions on an artist’s plans, and the tension between staying present to crisis and still imagining the futures our kids might inhabit. It is a grounded, personal look at how one artist is using projection, sound, and code to explore Jewish identity, memory, and possibility in real time.
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In this episode, Mike unpacks Hiddur Olam, his creative Torah system and multi‑volume art book series that reimagines Genesis through Jewish futurism, design thinking, Mussar, and Kabbalah. Listeners will hear how weekly parsha study, visual storytelling, and spiritual practice come together as a framework for beautifying the world through creative Torah.
Discover Hiddur Olam, a creative Torah system and illustrated book series that reimagines the first portions of Genesis as luminous encounters between humanity and the Divine. Mike Wirth shares how Torah study, design thinking, Mussar, and Kabbalah weave into a practical framework for Jewish futurist creativity and spiritual growth. Learn how weekly parsha art, reflective commentary, and a structured creative process became the backbone of a multi‑volume Hiddur Olam series and its upcoming companion workbook. This episode is for artists, educators, rabbis, and seekers who want to turn their own creative practice into a form of Torah learning and world‑beautifying action.
In this episode of The Jewish futurism Lab, I sit down with Mexican artist and papaya visionary Alejandro Glatt, the first Mexican artist to send a papaya to the Moon as part of the Lunaprise art museum project connected to NASA’s Artemis missions. Recorded on the day of the Artemis II launch, our conversation weaves together Jewish futurism, space exploration, and the surprising holiness of fruit in my own evolving sense of contemporary Jewish life.
Alejandro and I first met at the Jerusalem Biennale, and in this interview I explore how his “Papayas to the Moon” work merges art, ritual, and space technology, turning a simple papaya into a cosmic symbol of life, diaspora, and connection. I ask him about his “Feel the Fruit” experiences, his role as a community builder and trip leader to Israel, and how he imagines Jewish civilization carrying its stories, symbols, and sacred objects into orbit and beyond.
As you listen, you’ll hear me probing how Alejandro’s art on the Artemis missions reshapes my own questions about Jewish presence in space, how beauty and tiferet might travel with us off‑planet, and why sending a papaya to the Moon could be a kind of blueprint for future Jewish creativity among the stars. You can explore more of Alejandro’s work at alejandroglatt.com and see how his papayas are expanding the conversation about Judaism, ecology, and interstellar imagination.
Before science fiction was a genre, Hugo Gernsback was already building the infrastructure for it: radio magazines, hobbyist communities, wild speculative stories, and the first publication devoted entirely to imagining tomorrow. A Jewish immigrant from Luxembourg, he launched Amazing Stories in 1926 and quietly trained a generation of readers and writers to think in futures, long timelines, and unintended consequences. His magazines hosted women in leadership roles, predicted computer dating, video calling, and the social costs of new technology, while also carrying the casual racism and sexism of their era. We place him alongside Einstein, the artists of Vitebsk, and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to ask what it meant for Jewish creators to be building the future from the cultural margins. And we end with the question he would have loved most: who is building that kind of futures literacy today?
In this episode of The Jewish Futurism Lab, Mike Wirth sits down with Shai Davidai, the Israeli‑born social psychologist and former Columbia Business School professor who became a prominent voice for Jewish students after October 7. Together they trace Shai’s journey from secular Israeli kid to public Jewish advocate, unpack what really happened for him on campus, and explore how his training as a social psychologist shapes the way he reads our power, our responsibility today, and the continuity of our legacies tomorrow. They talk about fatherhood, professorship, and podcasting, and ask what kinds of institutions, communities, and narratives the Jewish future will need.
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In this episode of The Jewish futurism Lab, Mike Wirth uses the 4C model of creativity to map out what we really mean by “creative” in an age of AI art and endless images. He traces his own journey from parametric code experiments to Jewish futurist murals, then layers in Jewish history, exile, and the long tension around graven images as a lived curriculum in world‑building.
Along the way, Mike explores flow, aura, and authorship, asking who holds intention and responsibility when AI enters the studio. The conversation lands in Jewish futurism as an ethical frame, inviting listeners to treat narrative and technology as tools for building livable futures.
