For artist and arts administrator Gabriel Chalfin-Piney-González, the desire for an anti-Zionist Jewish space didn’t start in October 2023. At 13, the Hudson Valley native was kicked out of their first Hebrew school for inquiring about Israeli treatment of Palestinians. In late 2022, they felt a strong yearning for cultural connection and wondered: Where can Jews in Chicago connect with the vastness of their art and history? Is there a way to decenter the Holocaust and honor a diasporic sense of Judaism that stands in solidarity with all oppressed people?

The idea of the wandering Jew has been central to creating and upholding Israel, but Jews in opposition to Israel still struggle to find space for their ideas and culture. There are non-Zionist temples in the United States, but almost none is explicitly anti-Zionist. An exception is Tzedek Chicago, which does not have a permanent space. In April 2023, Chalfin-Piney-González collaborated with Comfort Station’s artistic director, Katie Rauth, to host a Passover dinner for 30 Jewish creatives at a private studio in Little Village. That only strengthened their belief that Jewish people need a multigenerational arts and cultural space. By August, they’d started an Instagram announcing the Jewish Museum of Chicago, and since then, they’ve partnered with different people and institutions to experiment with what a community-focused wandering museum could be.

Last spring, they connected with local artist and educator Maya Kosover through a workshop on demystifying the production of Jewish ritual objects. Kosover sees her spirituality and artmaking as one and the same and shares Chalfin-Piney-González’s urgent desire for a Jewish arts hub. Together, the pair are committed to articulating a precise vision for a new kind of museum and finding a sustainable way to realize it. In May, they put out an open call to form an artist collective, which is having its first strategy session at the end of the month. That’s the museum’s first step in a long journey toward the ultimate goal: a place of their own.

Jewish Museum of Chicago
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Maya Kosover: Gabriel and I both attended a sacred Jewish arts retreat called L’Shem Kedushat. It was about teaching us how to make Torah parchment paper out of deer hide. The craft of making Torah scroll has really been gatekept by Orthodox men. It’s forbidden for women, queer and trans people, and disabled people, so this was a retreat specifically for those communities to learn this craft. It was taught by a rabbi who’s a woman who started as a scribe and wanted to scribe her whole Torah. No one would sell her parchment, so she’s like, “Well, if no one’s gonna sell it to me, I guess I gotta learn how to do it myself.” Now she’s like, “I want to make this craft accessible to as many people as possible.”

The event’s organizers did these regional cohorts—so there was a group of us from Chicago, a group in the Bay, all these groups who could take the learning back to their communities. Gabriel and I got connected through emails and road-tripped together as strangers. The entire car ride, [we] were just sharing ideas, talking about inspiration. Gabriel was involved in the Jewish Museum, and I was like, “What an amazing project! I would love to be involved.”

Gabriel Chalfin-Piney-González: [The museum] started as just me for the first five or six months. Initially, the museum was launched on Passover of 2023 as a collaboration with Katie Rauth. That turned into Jess [Bass’s] and my two-person show at Comfort Station [in September 2023]. 

In the beginning, it was very much learning who I was in community with already and who had already been doing this work. Lilli Sher got involved, [who’s] really active in fundraising for displaced families in Gaza and in touch with a lot of organizers in Cairo as well, so I was using the platform to support Lilli’s organizing. Lilli organized one of our first events, which was a Kleztronica event at Dorothy’s with DJ Chaia and Upshtat Zingerai. Then Lilli moved to the Bay, and it was just me for a little bit. I was thinking about how to move forward, and then I did this retreat with Maya. A month or so after the retreat, we were swimming in Lake Michigan. I was like, “Hey, do you want to run this thing with me?” 

Kosover: When Gabriel and friends looked at what Illinois museums are available, it’s the Holocaust Museum in Skokie. It’s almost an implicit, de facto Jewish history museum, but the inroad is this incredibly traumatizing cultural event. The Holocaust is part of Jewish history; it’s not all of Jewish history, and it’s only part of Jewish history for some Jews. There are Mizrahi Jews and non-European Jews [for whom] the Holocaust is not in their ancestral experience. Jews have been persecuted throughout history, but the Holocaust is this Eurocentric end-all, be-all that’s like “Jewishness starts here.” 

From the beginning, Gabriel was very clear that this is an anti-Zionist museum that believes in diasporic Judaism. This is a museum that doesn’t believe in militarism or state nationalism or that Israel is the end-all, be-all of Jewish life, art, and religion. So much of institutional Judaism right now is in alignment with Israel and Zionism. We are really trying to create something that does not exist. It exists in small pockets, right? There’s a collective organizing here, a pop-up Shabbat here, a liberation Seder here, but there is no structured, institutional place for us.

Chalfin-Piney-González: In December of 2023, during Hanukkah, we put up questions on the walls and gave people Post-its to answer. The questions were like: What are good examples of museums and other organizations to learn from? What does anti-Zionism mean to you? What would collaboration with other populations and cultural organizations look like? What does coalition-building look like with Arab-led organizations?

Kosover: We have received a ton of interest, feedback, and excitement. Finally, Gabriel and I were like, “This is not sustainable for the two of us to continue doing. We need to build a structure to get people involved.” That’s where this artist collective idea came from. 

The ten-year goal is to have a physical space that is able to host all these things—a multipurpose, intergenerational space. There’s kids getting tutored for their bar and bat mitzvahs. There’s people baking challah. Our herbalists in residence are in the garden making tinctures from Jewish herbs. The studios are alive, and the people are praying, and the organizers are activating. It’s a hub for Jewish life.

Chalfin-Piney-González: We put out this call for people who are interested in joining [the artist collective]. We broke everyone down into these teams that will be amorphous and shifting. Not all of them will happen continually. We’re convening on June 22 for a private event [to begin planning].

Kosover: What feels really important to me is we sing the shehecheyanu, which is a blessing for things that happen for the first time. My art and spirituality are really connected. When people create with materials, it’s a spiritual experience, like cocreation with the divine. So this event on June 22—we really want it to feel like we are entering a process of cocreation with one another, with the public, with Chicago. But also, like, God is here! The divine is with us, moving through us, bringing us to this work. Activism for me doesn’t come without God and strengthening our source to a higher power. How can Jewish arts be a spiritual or grounding practice?

Chalfin-Piney-González: I think the second you put the word “museum” on something, it becomes real or official. When I started this, I made an Instagram: @JewishMuseumChicago. It was pretty much anonymous, and within several weeks, I started getting real proposals from people, like, “Hey, we’re a puppet company from Poland coming to town. We’d love to perform. What is your theater setup like?” Every month, we have someone say, like, “Hey, we think we align with the museum. Can you take this archive?” We have no legal documents yet, right? We are just a couple people organizing. 

Kosover: Gabriel’s really held the intention: How do we subvert what a museum can be? So many museums actually have patterns of harm, of stealing artifacts, of being places where some stories are visibilized and others are erased. That’s at the forefront of what we’re trying to do: create a museum that is actually a site of healing, repair, and truth telling. So many times, museums feel elitist or inaccessible, like, “These people are the artists, and I’m just the passive recipient walking through.” A big part of this project is to get every single person to realize they are a creative being, that they have artistry to offer, and that it’s actually needed.