Episode 40: The Torah of Not Knowing: Julie Weitz on Yiddishkayt, ritual, and performance
In Episode 40 I talk with Berlin-based visual artist, performer, and researcher Julie Weitz. After dipping into Julie’s childhood in a religious Jewish family in Chicago, we discuss her substack essay, “I don’t know, Adonai,” in which she wrote movingly about the late songwriter and musician David Berman in the context of a ritual she led at the Walter Benjamin memorial in Port Bou, Spain. We think together about walking backwards, the Angel of History, and the metaphysics and politics of not-knowing. We then discuss two of Julie’s other projects grounded in her deep research into Yiddish folk culture and history. In the site-specific performance work, “Holy Names for our Dybbuk,” Julie performs as a dybbuk (possessive spirit) at sites of historical violence in Poland, including a former Nazi concentration camp in Kraków and the former Warsaw Ghetto. In “Hereland,” an ongoing educational and activist project, Julie, Daniel Voskoboynik and their collaborators have been deeply studying the early-twentieth century pacifist Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares (1869–1931), whose prophetic anti-political-Zionist views and embrace of the condition of exile are vital to us today. We discuss “Hereland” and its many incarnations including the film, “A Grenets-Mayse | A Border-Story,” soon to be exhibited at the Polin Museum in Warsaw. Along the way we talk about the overlap between ritual and performance, the Jewish practice of speaking directly to the dead, the relationship between grief and land, the need to reclaim our anti-Zionist ancestors, and the memories of trees.
Texts, works, artists and activist groups mentioned and discussed:
Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History
David Berman and the Silver Jews
Molly Crabapple, Here Where we Live is our Country
Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes this World: Mischief, Myth and Art
Dani Karavan, “Passages”: Hommage to Walter Benjamin
Daniela Naomi Molnar: Return the Key Episode “Memory of a Larger Mind”
Benjamin Moser, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History
Jenny Romane at Klez Canada: walking backward ritual
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization
Abraham Sutzkever, “What Will Stay Behind” translated by Zackery Sholem Berger
Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares, A Passionate Pacifist: Essential Writings, edited, translated and introduced by Everett Gendler
Michael Waszynski, The Dybbuk (film)
Julie Weitz, “I don’t know, Adonai”
Julie Weitz “Holy Names for our Dybbuk”
Julie Weitz and Daniel Voskoboynik, Hereland: Reforesting Diasporic Jewish Imagination; A Grenets-Mayse | A Border-Story
Music by Ben Roberts : Benjamin.Roberts447@gmail.com
Comments and ideas to Juliealicecarr@gmail.com
Julie Weitz
Julie Weitz is a visual artist, performer, and researcher whose interdisciplinary practice moves between site-specific performance and participatory ritual, extending into video, photography, textiles, drawing, writing, and cultural organizing. Across these forms, she translates between archival and embodied research, activating ancestral memory and folklore as living, improvisational methodologies for collective experience. Weitz approaches diasporic culture as an experimental field shaped by rupture, transmission, and reinvention, where performance and material form become tools for re-sensing how histories persist in the present.
Weitz is a Fulbright Scholar (2023–24) and a Wallis Annenberg Helix Fellow at Yiddishkayt (2020–23). Her performances have been presented at Jewish Museum (Amsterdam), Dokumentale (Berlin), ExtraCity Kunsthal (Antwerp), and Harvard Divinity School (Cambridge), among other venues. Her artwork has been exhibited at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco), POLIN Museum (Warsaw), Jewish Museum (Vienna), Coaxial Arts Foundation (Los Angeles), and the Jüdisches Museum (Augsburg). Weitz has been featured in Artforum, Art in America, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, BOMB, and Hyperallergic. She is currently based in Berlin.
For regular updates, follow Weitz on substack.
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