What makes a work of art Jewish when it does not announce itself with familiar symbols, dialogue, or plot?
In this episode of the Jewish Futurism Lab, Mike Wirth speaks with Douglas Rosenberg, filmmaker, artist, theorist, and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Rosenberg has helped define screendance, a form in which camera, editing, and movement work together to create choreography for the screen.
Their conversation centers on Rosenberg’s 2025 black-and-white film, The Sea, filmed on Fårö, Sweden, in the Baltic landscape closely associated with Ingmar Bergman. The 64-minute film brings together a largely untrained cast of older men to explore aging, male intimacy, solitude, community, and the marks time leaves on the body.
Mike and Doug ask a larger question: what makes Jewish art Jewish? Is it the artist’s identity, a work’s subject matter, its ritual references, its ethics, or a Jewish way of seeing? Jewish art has never had a single settled definition. It can include ceremonial objects, contemporary visual art, performance, and work shaped by Jewish history, culture, practice, or questions of identity.
They explore how Jewish themes can be woven into film through gesture, memory, rhythm, ritual, and form. The conversation moves from Jewish art history and the Conney Project on Jewish Arts, the AJS AI issue that Doug interviewed Mike for, to the aging body, the camera as choreographer, and the future of Jewish creative practice.
