Creative Siddur Project: Opening
ancient liturgy, present prayer, new translations
What is a creative act of prayer? What are the rituals we need today to guide us into surrender, awe, praise, silence? What if a bunch of artists contemplated and wrestled with a single line from the traditional Jewish prayer book and shared their discoveries in a unique laboratory of performance and workshop? Join us for a visionary experiment in collaboration between the words of our predecessors and the longings of our souls in the present.
creative siddur project: opening
learn about the artists
rebecah goldstone a dancer at Ate9 dANCE cOMPANY. she received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from the Boston Conservatory at Berklee.
cara levine is an artist based in Los Angeles, CA. She earned a BFA from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI (2007) and an MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA (2012). Using sculpture, video, and socially engaged practices, she explores the intersections of the physical, metaphysical, traumatic, and illusionary. She is the founder of This Is Not A Gun, a multidisciplinary project aiming to create awareness and activism through collective creative action. Her work has been presented in one-person, group exhibitions, and participatory events in venues around the world such as the The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco (2023), MOCA Geffen Warehouse, Los Angeles, CA (2020); Creative Time, New York, NY (2019); The Anchorage Museum, Anchorage, AK, (2019), Tenderloin Museum, San Francisco, CA (2017); Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel; Wattis Institute For Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA (2012); and Kyoto Seika University, Kyoto, Japan (2006). Levine has participated in residency programs including Santa Fe Art Institute (2017); The Arctic Circle, International Territory of Svalbard (2017); Sedona Arts Colony, Sedona, AZ (2016); SIM Residency, Reykjavík, Iceland (2015); Anderson Ranch, Aspen, CO (2014); and Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT (2013).
Levine is currently an associate adjunct professor in Fine Art and Foundations at Otis College of Art and Design and has worked in the disability arts community since 2011 in roles at various progressive art studios including the Exceptional Children’s Foundation, Inglewood, CA and Creative Growth, Oakland, CA. She organized the first annual Self-Taught Artists Fair with Public Annex in Portland, OR in 2017.
antonia lassar is a queer Jewish comedian/actor/hot person based in LA. She's best known for her viral tiktoks about Jewish life as well as her solo shows Post Traumatic Super Delightful and God Box. She has been featured by JFL, has toured venues like The New Repertory Theatre, Yale, UC Berkeley, and Smith College, and she has been featured by Autostraddle, Marie Claire, and Glamour Magazine. She was the main speaker at the 2018 National March Against Rape Culture in DC for her work using comedy to education about sexual violence.
She recently received the prestigious Mandel Fellowship for her Jewish standup comedy.
She has been a member of multiple UCB character house teams, and she regularly performs standup around LA and at your mom's synagogue.
erin mizrahi is a writer, Pushcart nominee, scholar, teacher, curator and editor-in-chief of the multimedia literary and arts journal, Cobra Milk.
Raised in the San Fernando Valley with a conscientious detour in Santa Cruz, Erin now splits her time between Los Angeles and New York. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Studies in Literature, Media and Culture from the University of Southern California and an M.A. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University. Erin has taught at Hunter College, New York University, Los Angeles, Brooklyn College, Fordham University, and USC.
Erin has held fellowships with Asylum Arts, The Institute for Jewish Creativity, The Shoah Foundation, and was a finalist for the 2020 Brooklyn Poets Hamptons Fellowship. While at the Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research, Erin studied the complexity of silences in genocide testimony. Their work is interdisciplinary, drawing on visual culture, literature, technology, pop culture, and activism, centering themes of trauma, language, performance, and memory. Their writing has appeared in Ginger Zine, Yes Poetry, Maudlin House, Anti-Heroin Chic, the Ben Yehuda Press anthology, "Strange Fire: Jewish Voices from the Pandemic, and elsewhere.
In addition to running the literary magazine, Cobra Milk, Erin is Co-Founder and Director of the Cobra Milk Reading Series, a monthly reading and music series featuring emerging and established voices. Erin also curates artist collaborations under the name Midnight Babka.
alexander nemser is a writer, poet, performer, and educator. His poems have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and n+1, among publications. He has performed his work internationally, from the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan to the Galle Literary Festival in Sri Lanka.
In 2011, he premiered “Moshe Feldstein, Icon of Self-Realization,” a one-man show co-written with playwright Joseph Shragge, at the Cherry Lane Theater as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. The show is in the voice of a street-hustling charlatan rabbi, who speaks in incantatory parables.
He is the author of a book of prose poems called “The Sacrifice of Abraham,” a sequence of fifty wild re-tellings of the story of Abraham and Isaac. The book was named among the Best Jewish Poetry of 2014 by The Jewish Daily Forward.
“The Sacrifice of Abraham” was published in summer 2014 by Bookieman, an independent publishing platform founded by artist Nino Biniashvili, with support from Asylum Arts. To purchase for $20 + shipping, write to alexandernemserinfo@gmail.com.
Alexander is also a comedy writer, with a pilot commissioned by College Humor’s Big Breakfast Productions, and a chat story, “Dating a Black Hole,” featured on the online comedy platform Dropout.
He is the co-creator of the Interfaith Institute for Vulnerability and Family Darkness, a pop-up event series offering an opportunity to debrief collectively on the subject of family dysfunction.
leeav sofer is the co-founder and artistic director of The Urban Voices Project, a non-profit that combines adult music wellness and community singing programs to bridge individuals surviving homelessness to a sense of purpose and improved health. Through healing centered engagement and Sofer’s experience in social emotional learning, clients use arts to navigate their respective journeys off the streets and back into society. These groundbreaking programs have been placed in clinics, shelters and libraries all across the Greater Los Angeles area contributing to a more comprehensive, holistic system for engaging the homelessness crisis.
These programs have garnered Sofer recognition on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, on NPR’s All Things Considered, NBC’s Today Show, Ovation TV and allowed him to share the stage with various celebrities such as Dick Van Dyke, John Legend, and Joan Baez as well as local politicians and even television appearances. In 2020, broadway legend Ben Vereen made a commitment as ambassador of Urban Voices Project to continue spreading awareness of Sofer’s work.
Sofer currently is on faculty at the Colburn School in Los Angeles where he teaches classes, directing choirs and community engagement programs. Under the auspice of Colburn, Sofer helped initiate or develop music programs to culturally elevate the surrounding communities. This includes arts and social justice classes connecting undergrad and graduate students to new forms of music activation in disenfranchised communities.
Sofer, recognized as Jewish Journal’s esteemed “30 under 30”, also leads the band Mostly Kosher, dedicated to preserving and progressing cultural folk music of Judaic heritage. In 2016, Mostly Kosher had the historical honor of being the first Jewish music ensemble at the Disney parks and performed a 2 month residency at Disney California Adventure, featured in the Festival of Holidays to be met with critical acclaim including a special on PBS.
Sofer proudly has founded and currently serves on the board as Vice-President for National Alliance for Music in Vulnerable Communities (NAMVC) and Skid Row Arts Alliance (SRAA).