Spring 2023

We are 1/3 through the year-long LABA fellowship. Tell me what you are thinking so far about the theme of TABOO and your current project idea inspired by it.

I am in the research and pre-production stage of a documentary called “Art Jew,” tracing the extraordinary (but little-known) life of one of Weimar Germany’s most colorful figures: an influential art dealer named Alfred Flechtheim, whose triple sin of being Jewish, queer and avant-garde made him the ultimate “outsider” to the Nazis, and who became for them the literal poster-boy for what they termed “degenerate art.”

What interests me about Flechtheim, and why I am digging deep to understand him through some of our readings about taboo, is that he himself seemed to embrace the idea of being “the other” at a time and in an assimilationist Jewish culture where conventionality and conformity were prized. But not for him: he wore his extravagantly pronounced Jewish nose as a symbol of ethnic pride; he broke away from his bourgeois family’s grain business to run off to Paris, where he started buying paintings by Picasso and Kandinsky, when those artists were struggling and unknown. He fell madly in love with boxers and painters while still devoted to and in (at least platonic) love with his wife Betti. In the end, he paid a high price for his unconventionality, forced into exile where he died in obscurity.

His life and passions raise questions for me about how one both honors one’s heritage and traditions while also rebelling from them. And how one’s devotion to the new—the avant-garde—can be so strong as to constantly risk social ostracism and buck social convention. Is it a form of stubbornness, or even vanity, to be a social contrarian or an artistic maverick? The question is personal for me, since I come from a nearly identical German Jewish assimilated background, and have faced (though in a very different era) similar challenges in embracing my sexual, professional and artistic orientations.

I also have a theater project long brewing – a hybrid fictional solo play based on a true incident - which relates to the concerns of the documentary. “The Rabbi and the Sailor” examines the unsolved murder of a young San Francisco rabbi in 1922, who paid for his sexuality with his life, and whose community hushed up his murder to avoid the shame of public exposure. In pursuing both projects, I have been thinking a lot about what it means to break social, cultural, religious and sexual norms, and the tremendous spiritual and emotional pressure brought to bear on those who feel compelled to break those norms – especially on Jews, already marginalized.

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Even coming from a rather liberal, assimilated American Jewish background, I’ve been surprised at how powerful the forces of social, moral and sexual conventions have been in shaping my own life, and what a constant struggle (internally and externally) it has been to choose to live and work openly as an artist, a Jew, and a queer person. All three axes of my identity have been, at different times, taboo in worlds I intersect with. So autobiographically I am very interested in examining more deeply the nature of what is forbidden, and what makes someone an outsider.

IMAGE: Alfred Flechtheim by Nils Dardel