A captivating look at the Jewish Australian community and how it has pushed cultural and political boundaries.
The Jewish Museum of Australia’s Wild: Stories of a community pushing boundaries is a quirky and eclectic exhibition of cultural artefacts from different periods that offers a snapshot of Jewish Australians’ cultural productions and records of interactions with wider Australian society. This exhibition is linked to the recent Festival of Jewish Arts and Music, which had the theme ‘walk on the wild side’, referencing Lou Reed’s song of the same name.
It has (at least) two distinctive strands – one primarily focused on historical artefacts linked to early Jewish settlement and socio-cultural mobilisation in Australia, and the other focused on different types of activism led by, or directed at, the Jewish community. The curators have conceptualised an overarching theme for the disparate pieces in the collection through the notion of pushing boundaries: expanding the contours of Jewish community-formation in Australia through migration and settlement; exploring new ideas through the arts, media and music; and reshaping social conventions and normative structures through activism (including LGBT+ and Indigenous land rights activism).
Prints such as Bernard Picart’s Procession des Palmes chez les Juifs Portugais (1721) and Louis Kahan’s Flight into Egypt (1975) represent different types of journeys – of escape and departure. Items about or from Hungary, Morocco and Yemen reflect the diverse origins of people in the Jewish Australian community, and the many nationalities that make up the Jewish diaspora.
Read the review by Arjun Rajkhowa of the exhibition at the Jewish Museum of Victoria on ArtsHub.