What does it mean to build a Jewish future through scissors, glue, and pixels? In this episode, I sit down with collage artist Alex Woz, who I met at the Jerusalem Biennale. We talk about the graphic design industry, swap stories about our favorite Jewish artists, and get honest about why we make what we make.
Alex grew up in an antisemitic city and turned that experience into an artistic mission. We explore the weird parallels between cutting and pasting found images and prompting AI, what makes art original, and how we’re both in conversation with Jewish creative lineage from Moritz Daniel Oppenheim to today.
This conversation goes deep on legacy: What are we leaving behind for our descendants? What does Jewish creativity look like when it refuses to disappear? And why is Alex a practitioner of Jewish futurism, even if he works with analog and digital hand tools instead of code ?
What happens when flow has no boundaries? In Episode 4 of The Jewish Futurism Lab, I explore how creativity without limits turns into exhaustion, addiction, or production without reflection. This episode introduces Shabbat not just as religious practice, but as a design principle: a refusal built into time that prevents work from consuming the people inside it.
Drawing connections between Mussar ethics, inclusive design, and systems thinking, I examine how Jewish tradition offers practical frameworks for sustainable creativity. From classroom constraints that sharpen student focus to the Golem story’s “erase key,” this episode asks: Where is your pause? Where do you step back before momentum takes over?
Join me as I unpack why limits aren’t the enemy of creativity. They’re what make creativity sustainable and accountable.
Jewish futurism: A creative and philosophical framework suggesting that Jewish civilization is closer to its beginning than its end, using Jewish ideas, symbols, stories, and values to imagine and design ethical futures. It resists nostalgia that freezes the past while rejecting futures that erase identity or ethics.
Judeofuturism: An alternative term emphasizing the honoring of infinite bounds of Jewishness while imagining desired Jewish futures. Often used interchangeably with Jewish futurism in artistic and cultural contexts.
Metamodernism: A cultural discourse and paradigm that emerged after postmodernism, characterized by oscillation between modernist sincerity and postmodernalist irony, hope and melancholy, naivety and knowingness. It integrates aspects of both modernism and postmodernism, accepting progress, spirituality, and grand narratives while maintaining critical self-awareness. [Inference] This framework aligns with Jewish futurism’s simultaneous engagement with tradition and radical future-building.
Areyvut (mutual responsibility): A foundational middah (ethical quality) in Jewish futurism, emphasizing that future-building is a collective project rather than an individual quest. This principle grounds innovation in communal accountability.
Avodah (sacred service): The practice of treating innovation and creative work as sacred service. In Jewish futurism, this reframes technological and artistic creation as spiritual practice.
Creative middot: [Inference] Ethical qualities or character traits applied to creative and design practice within Jewish futurism. This extends the traditional concept of middot (virtues) into the realm of innovation and making.
Hiddur olam: [Inference] A term combining hiddur (beautification, enhancement) with olam (world), suggesting the beautification or enhancement of the world. [Inference] In Jewish futurism, this concept may relate to world-building and the ethical imperative to make beautiful, livable futures.
Liminal space: From the Latin limen (threshold), the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to their new status. Liminal spaces are characterized by ambiguity, potentiality for transformation, and often create a sense of communitas (deep togetherness). In Judaism, the mikvah (ritual bath) serves as a quintessential liminal space, marking transitions from unmarried to married, non-Jew to Jew, and symbolizing moments of profound transformation and renewal. The mezuzah on doorposts also marks liminal space, acknowledging thresholds as sacred transition points between outside and inside, public and private.
Temporal Concepts
Short-termism: The practice of prioritizing immediate results and quick rewards over long-term consequences and far-seeing action. Jewish futurism explicitly resists short-termism by emphasizing multi-generational responsibility and ethical planning that extends beyond a single lifetime.
Backcasting: A planning method that begins by defining a desirable future and then works backward to identify the steps needed to achieve it. Unlike forecasting (which projects from the present forward), backcasting starts with a vision and maps pathways from that future goal back to current actions.
Forestalgia: A yearning for an idealized future, as opposed to nostalgia’s longing for the past. [Inference] This concept resonates with Jewish futurism’s forward-looking orientation while maintaining connection to tradition.
Forward-looking responsibility: The ethical obligation rooted in ancient texts and lived memory to ask “What kind of world are we building next?”. This reflects Judaism’s historical orientation toward future generations.
Long-term thinking: An exercise that Jewish futurism frames not as escapism or frivolity but as a core calling.
Creative and Methodological Framework
Flow state: A psychological state of complete absorption in an activity where nothing else seems to matter, described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as optimal experience. In flow, skills seamlessly meet challenges, self-consciousness disappears, and action and awareness merge. [Inference] Flow states are central to creative practice in Jewish futurism.
Experiential learning: A learning approach that emphasizes hands-on activities, concrete experience, and reflective observation. [Inference] This method supports the embodied, practice-based nature of Jewish futurist work.
Divergent thinking: A mental process that generates multiple creative solutions to a single problem by exploring various possibilities, brainstorming, and taking unconventional paths. It encourages thinking outside conventional boundaries and considering different perspectives without immediately worrying about feasibility.
Systems thinking: An approach that analyzes problems by understanding the broader context and examining relationships and interactions between components. Rather than focusing on isolated elements, systems thinking reveals how all parts connect and influence one another, helping designers anticipate unintended consequences and solve root causes.
Design thinking: [Inference] A human-centered problem-solving methodology that emphasizes empathy, ideation, prototyping, and iteration. [Inference] In Jewish futurism, this approach is integrated with Jewish ethical frameworks and values.
UX Design (User Experience Design): An approach that focuses on optimizing user interactions with products and services. When combined with systems thinking, UX design considers how all parts of a product, user, and environment connect rather than isolated touchpoints.
Ethical and Creative Framework
Creation as systems design: One of two foundational coordinates of Jewish futurism, derived from the Zohar’s vision of divine networks. This approach views creative work through the lens of interconnected systems.
Ethics as boundary of holiness: The second coordinate defining Jewish futurist practice, informed by warnings about unintegrated revelation and the Golem narrative’s lessons about ethical creation.
Ritual innovation: The practice of adapting and transforming Jewish rituals for contemporary contexts. This includes AI-integrated rituals and speculative narratives exploring modern Jewish spirituality.
Hitpashtut ha-gashmiyyut (stripping of corporeality): A Hasidic concept meaning liberation from the material to make room for the spiritual. In Jewish futurism, this can inform approaches to technology and embodiment.
Artistic and Design Terms
Neon-infused aesthetics: Contemporary visual language in Jewish Futurist art that uses bright, technological imagery to explore Jewish themes. This aesthetic bridges traditional symbolism with speculative design.
Speculative chronology: The use of speculative fiction, alternate histories, and future narratives to explore Jewish identity and possibilities. This encompasses literature, art, design, architecture, music, and technology.
Tel Atid (Hill of the Future): A symbolic concept in Jewish futurism representing future-building sites. The term combines archaeological connotations with forward orientation.
Let me start by saying what Jewish futurism is not, at least for me.
It is not putting a Star of David on a sleek sci-fi object and calling it a day. It is not “Jewish, but make it cyberpunk.” And it is definitely not about predicting the future like some kind of techno-prophet.
For me, Jewish futurism feels more like a reunion of kindred spirits.
A pulling back together of a long, messy line of prophets, mystics, cartoonists, coders, muralists, and weird uncles who stayed up too late arguing midrash. A line that runs from Torah and golems to comics and game engines. Not to escape history, but to carry it forward with intention.
When I build something under this banner, I try to remember that I am plugging into that line. And I need a way to check myself while I’m doing it.
So think of this not as a manifesto, but as a conversation. Something you can keep open next to your sketchbook, your code editor, or your half-finished ritual prototype.
Before you make anything, pause
Before the fancy shaders. Before the slick prompts. Before the paint flies.
Ask a simple question: What am I actually doing here, and who does it impact?
I come back again and again to this tension.
Am I sanctifying technology, or am I just showing off?
Tech is a utensil. It is not the main character. So I ask myself: what am I trying to elevate? Where is the kavannah? Where is the hiddur mitzvah, the moment where something becomes more beautiful, more meaningful, more reachable for someone else?
If the honest answer is “it’s just cool,” that’s not a failure. But it is a cue to slow down and look again.
Every golem needs an off switch
This part matters more than we like to admit.
The Golem story is our original dev-ops parable. The impressive part is not that the creature walks or lifts heavy things. The Jewish part is the letter you can erase to stop it.
When you’re working with powerful systems, AI, networks, social platforms, feedback loops, you have to ask:
What is the kill switch?
What are the limits, the norms, the literal or metaphorical buttons that stop this if it starts causing harm?
If there is no answer, you may be building the wrong kind of golem. Or at least one that needs more thought before it leaves the workshop.
And while we’re here, I try to be suspicious of the word “disruption.” Disruption is easy. Repair is harder.
So I ask: what does this actually repair? A dead corner of ritual? A missing story? A lack of joy? A pattern of exclusion?
If I cannot name the repair, I might just be speeding up something that was already broken.
The future does not work without memory
Jewish futurism is obsessed with what comes next, but it refuses to get there by burning the archive.
I try to ask myself: am I innovating with memory, or without it?
Innovation without memory is another version of a golem. Powerful, impressive, and hollow.
So I name my sources. Texts, stories, communities, teachers. I try to let at least one move in the work be a reply to someone who is not in the room anymore.
And I think about time differently.
Jewish time loops. We return to the same holidays, the same readings, the same traumas, but never in quite the same way. There is always another layer.
Does my work do that? Does it circle, repeat, echo, or sync to rhythms larger than me? Or is it just a straight rocket out of history?
I think of this as visual midrash
Midrash is not commentary. It is argument. It is wrestling.
Visual midrash just uses different tools.
Pixels. Lines. Sound. Code. Motion.
So I ask: which story am I arguing with? Which verse am I stretching, healing, poking at, or refusing to let go of?
If I am using generative systems or futuristic aesthetics, can I actually point to the Torah, prophet, or folktale that is in the room with me while I work?
If I cannot, that is information worth listening to.
If it costs nothing, it might not be finished yet
This is the uncomfortable part.
Good Jewish futurist work usually carries some tension. Between me and my community. Between hope and fear. Between what feels safe and what feels honest.
I think about Asher Lev painting the crucifixion. Not because I want to shock anyone, but because he showed what it looks like to take your tradition seriously enough to struggle with it in public.
If everything in the work feels pleasant and agreeable, I pause. I ask what I am avoiding.
And I try to practice anavah, humility, especially when working with big ideas and powerful tools.
Where do I admit I do not know? Where do I invite critique? Where do I let uncertainty live inside the work instead of editing it out?
Jewish stories are full of vessels that shatter when they hold too much light. That warning is still relevant.
Speed is not the same thing as light
Early Futurism loved speed for its own sake. Jewish futurism is more interested in illumination.
So I ask: does this actually help someone see something? A wound. An injustice. A joy. A strange truth that needed a frame.
If I am accelerating things, is it in service of understanding and empathy, or just adrenaline?
That distinction matters.
This is not a solo practice
Jewish futurism is a team sport. No lone techno-messiahs.
I try to ask: who is the “we” in this project?
Every healthy Jewish creative space I admire, from the Bezalel workshop to Vitebsk to the beit midrash, includes peers, elders, skeptics, and students. If I am making in a vacuum, I want to know what that protects me from, and what it costs the work.
This is where areyvut, mutual responsibility, shows up.
Does the project open doors for others? Share tools? Offer access or visibility? Leave the landscape more generous than it found it?
And when I step away, can anyone carry something forward? A format. A method. A story. A set of instructions.
Jewish futurism often moves like a relay baton. If everything ends with me, I might be breaking the chain.
Finally, I listen to the feel of it
Jewish futurism has a particular emotional texture.
Not “does it include a Jewish symbol,” but does it feel like it belongs to our long, strange story?
Could it sit next to a page of Talmud? A Chagall window? A Jack Kirby spread? A poem written in exile?
Is there any trace of the desert, the shtetl, the city, the bus stop, the protest, the beit midrash?
And is there a move here that only I could have made?
The future is full of generic chrome. Jewish futurism gets specific. It brings in accents, neighborhoods, family stories, and uncomfortable details. That specificity is what makes the work feel like a real chapter in the Jewish story, not a reskinned sci-fi asset pack.
I keep this list nearby when I work. Sometimes taped to the wall. Sometimes scribbled in the margins.
I do not try to hit every point every time. That would freeze the process.
But if I cannot hit any of them, that is usually a sign. What I am making might be about the future, just not yet operating in the Jewish futurist key.
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.
In this episode, I make the case that Jewish futurism isn’t new at all. Long before rockets, algorithms, or AI, Jewish tradition was already asking future-oriented questions about survival, ethics, memory, and change. From Noah and Enoch to Babel, Joseph, exile, and Shabbat, this episode traces how Torah stories are structured around anticipating disruption, redesigning meaning, and passing responsibility forward to people we will never meet. Jewish futurism, I argue, isn’t about predicting the future. It’s about preparing us to meet it awake, accountable, and in relationship.
Episode 1: Welcome to The Jewish futurism Lab: Torah, Tech, Tomorrow
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In this first episode, I’m introducing The Jewish futurism Lab and what this podcast is here to build: a space where Torah learning, creative practice, and emerging technology meet. I’ll share a quick bit about who I am, what Jewish futurism is, and why I’m drawn to Jewish futurism, then lay out what you can expect in future episodes, essays, and projects connected to my work at mikewirthart.com. We’ll start with the foundation, what Jewish futurism is, why it matters right now, and how we can imagine bold, ethical Jewish futures without losing our roots.
When I teach graphic design history at Queens University of Charlotte, we hit a point in the semester that always makes me a little uncomfortable, because I know it’s coming before the students do. We’re talking about Italian Futurism, those bold typographic posters, a visionary sounding manifesto bursting with energy, those declarations about speed and machines and destroying museums. At first, students lean forward and feel like the work looks alive and feels thrilling. And then we read more deeply into the Marinetti’s words and we see that this movement became a propaganda apparatus for Mussolini’s fascist regime.
The first page of the manifesto of Il Futurismo by FT Marinetti 1909
Those promising-sounding ideas about breaking with the past? They’re loaded with fascist and racist intentions. That gorgeous energy? It was weaponized.
FT Marinetti 1909
This is the pedagogical tightrope I walk every semester, and it’s the same tightrope I’m walking in my work on Jewish futurism.
I’m trying to rescue the core impulse of futurism, the bold, beautiful desire to imagine and design better futures, from what Italian Futurism did to it.
Because here’s the thing: Italian Futurism started with legitimate, even utopian desires, and it still became a cautionary tale. If you’re going to study any kind of futurism seriously, you need to meet Italian Futurism early, not to emulate it, but to understand exactly what can go wrong when speed replaces wisdom and aesthetics trump ethics.
Futurism vs futurism: Why the Capital Letter Matters
I’ve started being very careful about capital F versus lowercase f. Futurism with a capital F names a specific historical movement: Marinetti’s Italian avant-garde, with all its inherited baggage. It’s bound up with nationalism, misogyny, the glorification of war as “the world’s only hygiene,” and an eventual merger with Mussolini’s Fascist Party in 1920. When I write “Futurism,” I’m signaling: we’re talking about that movement, that history, those consequences.
Futurism with a lowercase “f” names something broader and more perennial: the human impulse to imagine, prototype, and design what comes next. It’s the practice of speculating about futures, whether through art, spirituality, technology, or politics. Lowercase futurism is a method and a desire, not an ideology. It’s the thing Jewish futurism, Afrofuturism, Queerfuturism, Sinofuturism, and Gulf futurism all share: the courage to ask what could be, and the willingness to build toward it.
This distinction isn’t just academic. It gives us critical vocabulary. Capital-F Futurism becomes an object of analysis and caution, the ancestor we study to avoid repeating. Lowercase futurism becomes a space for repair, reinvention, and new ethical commitments. Jewish futurism inherits the impulse without inheriting the violence.
How Futurist Movements Emerge: What They All Want at First
Futurist movements consistently arise during periods of dramatic technological transformation and cultural rupture. Italian Futurism emerged from a very specific crisis. Turn-of-the-century Italy was struggling in ways that made the country feel stuck in the past. The government was weak and unstable. There was no real national identity binding the regions together. Industrial development lagged decades behind other European powers. Poverty was widespread, modernization faced fierce resistance, crime and corruption were endemic, and millions of Italians were emigrating in search of better lives.
FIAT, 1927 Giuseppe Romano (1905–67) Fondazione Massimo e Sonia Cirulli Collection, Bologna
Meanwhile, foreign tourists flooded Italy to gaze at ancient ruins and Renaissance masterpieces, treating the country like a beautiful museum, a relic of what it once was. For young Italian intellectuals like Marinetti, this was humiliating. People came to see what Italy was, not what it is or could become. The weight of the past felt suffocating.
This pattern repeats across other futurist movements. Afrofuturism developed in response to the ongoing trauma of the transatlantic slave trade and systemic oppression, seeking to reclaim narratives and imagine liberation. Gulf futurism arose from the rapid, oil-driven transformation of the Arab Gulf states. Sinofuturism responds to China’s technological rise and Western anxieties about shifting global power.
Despite their different contexts, these movements share foundational patterns. They reject traditions they perceive as inadequate or stifling. They embrace technology as a catalyst for radical cultural change. Most importantly, they assert the right to imagine and define their own futures rather than accepting externally imposed visions.
Futurist movements emerge from communities experiencing rupture, whether from rapid modernization, colonialism, diaspora, or globalization. They often adopt manifesto culture, broadcasting bold visions to gather followers. They’re youth-driven, appealing to younger generations eager to break free from what they see as the constraints of older orders.
At their inception, futurist movements typically seek cultural sovereignty, the synthesis of heritage and innovation, celebration of dynamism and transformation, radical breaks from oppressive pasts, and social change through technology. These are legitimate, even beautiful desires. The critical question is: what values guide those transformative visions? Italian Futurism demonstrates what happens when the desire to destroy the past overwhelms the responsibility to build just futures.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti launched Italian Futurism with his 1909 manifesto, and it crackled with revolutionary energy. He declared the racing car more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace and announced war on museums, libraries, and academies. The movement promised total cultural transformation through speed, machines, violence, and youth.
But Marinetti wasn’t speaking metaphorically. He made actual political proposals to sell off Italy’s art heritage in bulk to other countries. Museums were “graveyards,” he argued, places that paralyzed Italy and prevented it from joining the modern world. Venice, beloved by foreign tourists, was dismissed as “Europe’s brothel”. Art critic John Ruskin, who had celebrated Italian cultural heritage, became an enemy figure.
John Ruskin, 29 June 1863, Photo by William Downey (1829-1915)
The Futurist manifesto even contained a self-consuming logic. It declared that when Marinetti himself turned 40, younger futurists should throw him “into the trash can, like useless manuscripts”. The movement advocated not just destroying museums once, but periodic cleansing of cultural memory. Nothing could be allowed to accumulate tradition or meaning.
FT Marinetti’s Futurist Cook book- where he calls for the ban of pasta form the Italian diet, 1913 Posterhaus
The seeds of destruction were there from the beginning. Marinetti glorified war as “the world’s only hygiene” and promoted aggressive Italian nationalism. When the Futurist Political Party merged with Mussolini’s Fascist movement in 1920, artistic vision was subordinated to political power. The philosophical contradictions, celebrating individual creative genius while demanding conformity to nationalist ideology, created tensions that made the movement culturally irrelevant even as it gained political influence.
Aeroritratto di Mussolini aviatore, Alfredo Ambrosi, 1930
Five Things That Went Catastrophically Wrong
1. Glorification of Violence and Destruction
Italian Futurism didn’t just accept violence as a historical reality. It actively celebrated war, aggression, and destruction as aesthetic and moral goods. The movement embraced Italian expansionism and cultural supremacy, making technological progress inseparable from domination. Rather than synthesizing past and future, Italian Futurism sought to obliterate history entirely, creating a vacuum that fascist ideology eagerly filled.
This pattern wasn’t unique to Italy. The source material connects Futurism to similar state-sponsored iconoclasm in revolutionary France, Soviet Russia, and Maoist China. When modernization ideology justifies cultural destruction, it creates dangerous precedents. The logic always sounds progressive at first: we must destroy the old to make way for the new. But that destruction rarely stops where its advocates promise.
2. Absence of Ethical Guardrails
The movement valued technology and speed for their own sake, with no moral framework to guide their application. Machines were beautiful because they were fast and powerful, not because they served human flourishing. This absence of empathy-centered design principles meant that when political power beckoned, the movement had no philosophical foundation to resist authoritarianism.
Marinetti viewed Italy’s cultural heritage not as something to be honored or reinterpreted, but as a burden to be liquidated. There was no question of what wisdom traditions might offer, no consideration of what future generations might need from the past. Speed was the only value.
3. Authoritarianism Over Democracy
Italian Futurism began with anti-monarchist and anti-clerical positions, challenging established power. These principles were quickly abandoned when Marinetti saw opportunities for influence within Mussolini’s regime. The movement became a propaganda tool, with artistic vision subordinated to the authoritarian state. Individual creative genius, once celebrated, was channeled into serving nationalist ideology.
4. Exclusionary Cultural Supremacy
Italian nationalism and cultural dominance were core tenets from the start. There was no space for pluralism, interfaith dialogue, or universal design principles. The aggressive rejection of tradition created a vacuum where fascist ideology could flourish, as the movement offered speed and violence but no sustaining vision of human connection. Not to mention that the regime implemented Italian Racial Laws in 1938, introducing discrimination and persecution against Jews of Italy.
The humiliation Marinetti felt when tourists treated Italy as a museum of the past was real. But his response, to erase that past entirely rather than build new futures in dialogue with it, became toxic. Cultural sovereignty doesn’t require cultural amnesia.
5. Aesthetic Without Substance
When Mussolini refused to make Futurism the official state art of fascist Italy, the movement collapsed into cultural irrelevance. Decades of manifesto-writing had produced style over philosophical depth. Without a sustainable ethical foundation, Italian Futurism had nothing to offer once political winds shifted.
The movement’s self-consuming logic guaranteed this outcome. If nothing is allowed to accumulate meaning, if every generation must destroy what came before, then no stable cultural foundation can ever form. You can’t build futures on ground you keep setting on fire.
Jewish futurism: Building From Different Ground
This is where my work begins. Jewish futurism emerges from fundamentally different premises, offering a model for how technological optimism can coexist with ancient wisdom and ethical responsibility. Where Italian Futurism glorified destruction, Jewish futurism centers empathy-led innovation, positioning technology as a tool for meaning-making rather than domination.
Jewish history demonstrates millennia of resilience and reinvention without destroying the past. Continuous reinterpretation, of texts, traditions, cultural practices, allows Jewish communities to honor ancestral heritage while embracing modernity. This mirrors Afrofuturism’s Sankofa principle, which emphasizes learning from the past to inform future trajectories. Rather than revolutionary destruction, Jewish futurism practices synthesis and transformation.
In my own practice, Jewish futurism is rooted in Jewish thought: tikkun olam (repair of the world), justice, responsibility. Technology is never valued for its own sake but always in service of deeper moral commitments. This philosophical grounding provides the ethical guardrails that Italian Futurism catastrophically lacked. The question at the heart of my work is: “What kind of ancestor will you be?” That question changes everything.
Where Marinetti wanted to be thrown in the trash at age 40, Jewish futurism asks what we’re building that will outlast us, what we’re passing down that future generations will need. It’s not about preserving everything unchanged. It’s about being in active, creative dialogue with tradition while we build what comes next.
What We Can Learn: Five Lessons for Building Responsible Futurisms
Ethics Must Precede Aesthetics: Beauty and innovation without moral grounding enable atrocity. Technology requires wisdom traditions to guide its use. Speed without wisdom is just velocity. It doesn’t know where it’s going or why. When Marinetti proposed selling Italy’s art heritage in bulk, he showed what happens when aesthetic ideology overrides ethical consideration.
Honor the Past While Building the Future: Synthesis surpasses destruction as a strategy for cultural renewal. Tradition provides foundation for innovation rather than serving as an obstacle to it. Jewish tradition treats time as cyclical rather than linear, where past, present, and future dynamically interact. The humiliation Italy felt at being treated as a museum was real, but erasure isn’t the only response. We can acknowledge what’s broken in our inherited traditions while keeping what sustains us.
Center Human Dignity Over Cultural Supremacy: Universal design principles create futures for all people, not just dominant groups. futurism must be liberatory rather than oppressive, replacing nationalism with empathy and collaboration. Jewish futurism creates shared spaces for collective growth and interfaith collaboration. The pattern of state-sponsored iconoclasm, from revolutionary France to Soviet Russia to Maoist China, shows us what happens when one vision of the future tries to erase all others.
Resist Political Opportunism: Artistic movements must maintain ethical independence even when political power beckons. When survival requires moral compromise, the movement has already failed. Marinetti’s compromises to ensure the movement’s survival hollowed it out from within. The proposals to liquidate cultural heritage weren’t just aesthetic statements. They were political calculations about access to power.
Root Innovation in Community: Collective meaning-making replaces the cult of individual genius. As I’ve learned in my own practice, the future, like design itself, is fundamentally a team sport. It thrives when we create collectively and collaboratively. Collaboration and care supersede competition and domination. The Futurist manifesto’s call to throw Marinetti himself in the trash at 40 reveals a movement with no concept of intergenerational continuity, no way to pass wisdom forward.
The Responsibility of Imagining Futures
Every speculative vision carries political and ethical consequences. Italian Futurism’s trajectory from revolutionary art movement to fascist propaganda machine demonstrates that enthusiasm for the future, absent ethical grounding, can enable profound harm.
When I stand in front of my design students at Queens, looking at those bold Futurist posters, I don’t want to just critique them. I want to show what it looks like to rescue the core impulse, the courage to imagine radically different futures, from what got corrupted. The frustration Marinetti felt was real. Italy was stuck. The weight of the past was crushing. Foreign tourists treating the country as a beautiful corpse was genuinely humiliating. But his solution, to burn it all down and start from nothing, created more problems than it solved.
Jewish futurism offers that alternative model: technological optimism rooted in ancestral wisdom, innovation guided by empathy, futures built through synthesis rather than destruction. We can honor what we’ve inherited while transforming it. We can be critical of traditions that harm while keeping what sustains. We can build futures that acknowledge the past without being imprisoned by it.
The question isn’t whether we’ll imagine futures. In periods of technological transformation, futurist movements will inevitably emerge. The question is what values will guide those visions. Will we learn from history’s warnings about the price of speed without wisdom, aesthetics without ethics, innovation without responsibility? Or will we repeat Italian Futurism’s mistakes with new technologies and new manifestos?
I’m betting we can do better. Jewish futurism, and the broader family of ethical futurisms it’s part of, shows us how. We can be bold and careful. We can embrace transformation and honor memory. We can design futures that are actually livable, not just fast. That’s the work. That’s what I’m trying to build.
Experimenting with AI tools is one of my favorite parts of my practice, and this particular video generator turned out to be a very cool collaborator. It is not 100 percent accurate, but it gets surprisingly close, and that “almost right” quality ended up becoming part of the interest for me. NotebookLM is a Google product, available at https://notebooklm.google.com, and it works differently from a general chatbot like Gemini or ChatGPT, because it builds everything from the specific sources you feed it rather than from the entire internet.
The video that NotebookLM generated based on my article.
NotebookLM’s video overview tool ended up acting like a surprise co‑director for a project where I wanted to explain proto Jewish futurism in the context of the Vitebsk People’s Art School. Instead of hand crafting every frame, I loaded it up with my recent article and asked it to propose a first pass at a lesson: a narrated video that walks viewers through how Jewish, revolutionary, and avant garde energies briefly converged in Vitebsk. To be more specific, it appears to be a combination of the slideshow generator + a podcast voice generator combined to make a “video”. The result was messy in places, visually strange, and full of small errors, but it still managed to deliver my main argument about Jewish futurist tendencies in this short and intense moment of art education.
Setting up the experiment
I started with a pretty simple goal: turn a dense, theory heavy pile of notes on Vitebsk, Marc Chagall, and the Russian avant garde into something a non specialist could actually watch and follow. NotebookLM’s promise of an auto generated video overview sounded like the right kind of constraint and collaborator for that task. Because it works on data that you explicitly upload or link, I gathered my materials into one place historical sources, exhibition texts, and fragments from my ongoing writing on Jewish futurism and treated the notebook as a compact archive that the system could mine for a narrative, instead of letting it improvise from generic web knowledge.
From notes to video overview
With the sources in place, I asked the system to create an explainer style video focused on three threads: the Vitebsk People’s Art School, the artists at its center, and the ways their work points toward possible Jewish futures. What came back was a sequence of slides paired with narration that moves through the post revolutionary context, the founding of the school, and its radical pedagogical experiments. What surprised me was how clearly the structure echoed my own framing of Vitebsk not as a footnote in art history, but as a kind of prototype for Jewish modernity in motion.
AI generated imagery close, not exact
The visuals were where the experiment really got interesting. The system did not reach for actual archival photos or specific paintings. Instead, it produced images that felt like approximations of the artists’ styles. Scenes appeared that looked almost like Chagall’s floating shtetl figures, nearly like Lissitzky’s architectonic compositions, and somewhat like Malevich’s abstractions, but never fully matched the originals. That almost quality created a kind of productive uncanniness. The video builds an atmosphere of Vitebsk’s avant garde world without literally reproducing it, more like a synthetic memory or dream constructed from stylistic cues, which for a project about Jewish futurism feels conceptually on point.
Glitches, spelling errors, and the shape of the argument
The video is clearly not a polished museum product. There are spelling mistakes, clunky phrasing, and the occasional slightly wrong name or term. For me, that did not invalidate the experiment, it just made the mediation visible. This is a generated draft that still needs a human editor, not an authoritative final cut. What mattered more was that underneath those glitches, the bones of the explainer were solid. The video successfully communicated the ideas I wanted to surface: the social and political context of the school, the specifically Jewish dimension of the work, and Vitebsk as a site of radical possibility rather than a nostalgic lost world.
Surfacing a Jewish futurist reading of Vitebsk
The real test for me was whether the piece could carry my reading of Vitebsk as a proto Jewish futurist project. The video condensed that framing into clear, accessible language, repeatedly returning to the school as a laboratory for new Jewish forms and new ways of being together. By forcing my notes into a short, watchable format, the tool pushed me to concretize what I actually mean by proto Jewish futurism in this context: an art school that treats Jewish life as material for design, not just content for preservation, and that treats pedagogy itself as a kind of speculative world building.
In the end, the experiment showed me how an AI generated video can function both as an explainer and as a mirror for my own thinking. It reflected my argument back in another medium, making it obvious which ideas translated smoothly into narrative and which still need more nuance and friction. The off brand imagery, the typos, and the overall coherence all became part of the story, a contemporary, imperfect, and strangely fitting echo of the Vitebsk school’s own attempt to invent a new way of seeing Jewish futures.
If you haven’t tried NotebookLM, I’d make an account and try some experiments on your own.
During my semester long sabbatical, I set out to experiment with new ways to tell Jewish stories, and I kept coming back to the immersive feeling of games. While I stayed focused on my main objective, completing my book Hiddur Olam: Bereshit – Genesis and telling new Jewish stories through art and writing, this Hanukkah, I also felt a pull to expand this idea of immersive storytelling into video games, where players could step inside the work rather than only view or read it. Framing the game projects as interactive midrash let me treat code, mechanics, and level design as another layer of commentary on the same questions that animate the book: how to re engage with foundational Jewish narratives, how to honor tradition while playing with form, and how to imagine Jewish futures that feel both grounded and newly alive in digital space.
Vibe coding and my AI toolbox
For all of these projects, I leaned heavily on what I think of as vibe coding. By vibe coding, I mean describing in natural language how I want something to feel, look, or behave, then using AI coding tools to generate or refactor code until the game’s behavior matches that feeling. I used ChatGPT, Gemini, and GitHub’s coding assistants as a rotating team, asking for everything from small bug fixes and refactors to full systems like player controllers or state machines. I have 20 years of front-end and back-end web development coding experience. Having been a part of a wave of student designer-artist-coders in NY in the late 90s and early 00s making websites by day and net-art by night, vibe coding is great method to make code sketches of ideas or experiments. In this project, I would move the same block of code from one model to another when I got stuck, wanted new insight, or when I wanted to shift from quick procedural hacks into a more object oriented structure. Each of the the different LLM code “voices” helped me see new paths through the same problem. These tools gave me a sense of freedom to soar with code, where in the past I would have been creeping along, slowly teaching myself new methods and getting bogged down in syntax rather than in the Jewish and ludic questions that actually interested me.
Research questions that guided me
A cluster of questions ran through everything I made:
How can I evolve dreidel gameplay beyond a single spin and four letters?
With only four sides, can a dreidel still function as a rich, reusable dice object in a larger game system?
Can the dreidel be used more effectively to tell the story of Hanukkah, not just reference it visually?
What are better ways to tell the story of Hanukkah using the immersiveness of games?
How can I tell new digital Jewish stories that feel both grounded in tradition and native to contemporary game culture?
Is this creative act, moving ritual objects into speculative, interactive worlds, an example of Jewish futurism in practice?
How will Jewish people play dreidel in the future?
Each experiment became a different argument or provisional answer to these questions.
So, over 8 nights, I played with various game and interaction experiments. Here are my best of the best, in no particular order.
Dreidel Run: Neon Grid
Best for dreidel kinetics
With Dreidel Run, I leaned into the question of how to evolve dreidel gameplay at a purely kinetic level. Here, I made the case that the dreidel can succeed as a contemporary and arguably futuristic game mechanic when it is allowed to be fast, flashy, and even a little mindless, while still anchored in
Hanukkah imagery like gelt and glowing colors. Using the Temple Run game mechanics, the experiment argues that not every Jewish game needs an explicit narrative lesson, and that embodied fun, quick reflexes, and the pleasure of catching coins and dodging hazards can themselves be a form of connection, a way of feeling Hanukkah as energy and rhythm rather than only as a story told in words.
Dreidel x Katamari mashup
Best for dreidel physics
In the dreidel and Katamari Damacy inspired mashup, I took seriously the question of whether a small, four sided object could scale up into a world building tool. The design argues that as the spinning dreidel absorbs gelt and grows, it enacts a kind of visual and mechanical midrash on Hanukkah’s themes of accumulation,
excess, and the tension between material things and spiritual light. By exaggerating the physics, I could show how a simple ritual object might literally reshape its environment, and in doing so, I tested how far dreidel based mechanics can stretch before they stop feeling like dreidel play and become something new. Another fun way to play with the dreidel kinetics.
Dreidel Physics Sandbox
Best Holiday Stress Reliever
The smaller dreidel physics sandbox experiments addressed the quieter research question of how players might encounter Jewish content without a fixed goal at all. The spinning battle top game transforms the dreidel into a tornado like object tasked to destroy Seleucid idols of the Temple. It’s instant gameplay makes the argument that
open ended, low stakes experimentation can be a valid form of digital Jewish learning, where the “lesson” is not amoral but a felt sense of spin, friction, wobble, and collapse. In the second experiment I used the Marble Madness type game play, making the dreidel become
a tiny lab for thinking about stability and risk, which echoes Hanukkah’s precariousness, and invites players to linger, tinker, and waste time in a way that is still charged with symbolic possibility. These were worthwhile explorations of the exciting and kinetic nature of the dreidel game.
Dreidel Catan prototype
Most conceptual
In my Catan style prototype, I explored whether a four sided dreidel could act as a meaningful dice object inside a complex resource and territory game that could help tell the story of Hanukkah in terms of the Maccabees, Hellenized Jews, and Seleucids as groups competing for resources and domination in Jerusalem. The design argues that it can, because each side of the dreidel already carries narrative weight, and that weight can be elevated when paired with a card, tableau and board game system like Catan. Resource bonuses, penalties, or events that shape a shared board.
By letting the dreidel drive the different outcomes for each player I was curious to replace the dice with two dreidels. Pushing the game narrative of dreidel from a closed loop into a network of context specific effects.While buggy and complicated, this was one way that Hanukkah themes of scarcity, risk, and negotiation might live inside a modern strategy game.
Hanukkah Quest 1: The Temple of Gloom
Best for Hanukkah story
Hanukkah Quest 1: The Temple of Gloom tackles the question of how to better tell the story of Hanukkah with the immersiveness of a game. Here, I argue that interactive midrash is possible when puzzles, jokes, and spatial navigation all serve as commentary on the holiday’s themes, such as hiddenness,
illumination, desecration, and rededication. Instead of retelling the miracle in a linear script, the game invites players to stumble through a gloomy, playful temple and slowly piece together meaning from their own actions, which models a Jewish way of learning that is iterative, interpretive, and grounded in wandering and return.
Jewish futurist wisdom
These experiments do not just gesture toward Jewish futurism, they enact it and point toward where it might go next. They show that Jewish futurism means keeping ritual objects and stories in play, while re staging them inside interactive systems where players can touch, bend, and argue with them in real time, like a digital beit midrash that anyone can enter. By dropping the dreidel and Hanukkah into arcade runners, resource economies, absurd physics toys, and point and click temples, the work suggests that the future of Jewish storytelling may live in responsive systems rather than fixed scripts, and in shared worlds that generate many valid readings instead of a single correct answer. Your vibe coding practice, using AI to rapidly prototype and reconfigure these systems around a felt sense of Jewish meaning and play, is a clear example of Jewish futurism in practice, and it opens hopeful paths forward: networked Jewish game spaces, collaborative “midrash servers,” classroom rituals that unfold as playable worlds, and future projects where new holidays, communities, and speculative texts are first tested as games before they are written down. In that sense, these games are not an endpoint but a launch pad, a sign that Jewish life will keep unfolding inside new technologies, still circling the same core questions of memory, risk, light, and communal responsibility, while inviting the next generation to help code what comes next.
