In the Pacific Northwest, Radio Jewce has turned its looking glass from a goat farm to a young artist.
The second episode of Radio Jewce, a podcast focused on Jewish life in the Pacific Northwest, was released three weeks ago and is the first in a “Student Short Series.” It focuses on Elizabeth Goldsmith, an 18-year-old student at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.
Goldsmith is an artist, which posed a challenge for Ellena Rosenthal and Aaron Peterson, the podcast co-creators: How do you communicate someone’s visual art in a purely audio medium?
“I can describe something, but it’s never going to be like what seeing the actual piece would be in person,” Rosenthal said. “Going through a script, I don’t want to make really dry sentences about Elizabeth’s art because it’s the farthest away from being very dry. But words can only give me so much in the descriptions that I’m making, so I have to … [be] very careful about the words I pick to describe something.”
Goldsmith’s art focuses on depicting the Holocaust — in her words, “the devastating past and struggling future of the Jewish people.”
To give viewers a sense of what it’s like to see Goldsmith’s art with their own eyes, Rosenthal had the idea to integrate sounds of the Holocaust, including a speech given by Adolf Hitler.
“It was kind of a hard thing to include those powerful sounds just because it is almost disturbing, just hearing Hitler’s voice speaking like that,” Peterson said, “and I showed it to a few people and immediately when they heard that they were almost cringing.
“But it was pretty necessary just because, like I said, it mirrors her techniques of integrating some of those images in her art.”
Goldsmith and her work came to Radio Jewce’s attention through Peterson’s mother — she lives in Salt Lake City, where she teaches Hebrew and had Elizabeth as a student.
“My mom said, ‘Oh, I know someone going to Lewis & Clark, you should go meet with her for coffee,’ ‘cause that’s what Hillel professionals do,” Peterson said with a laugh.
“My mom has always raved about her artwork, so I thought it would be a good chance to do something special with this radio broadcast.”
The student shorts are intended to show how college students around the Pacific Northwest find ways of engaging in and connecting with Judaism.
!["Shadow of Stone" by Elizabeth Goldsmith. Oil. "As our Jewish history transitions into the blissful movement to Israel, our destroyed temple remains our most holy sanctuary. However, our past still lingers closely at our heals [sic]." | Supplied by Elizabeth Goldsmith](https://newvoices.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Screen-Shot-2016-02-04-at-2.34.29-PM-400x404.png)
“As our Jewish history transitions into the blissful movement to Israel, our destroyed temple remains our most holy sanctuary. However, our past still lingers closely at our heals [sic].”
Radio Jewce will continue with longer episodes, too. Rosenthal is currently working on an episode about Jews in prison.
“I’m not going to give all the secrets away because we still want people to listen, but the first interview that took place happened in an airport where I actually spoke to someone who was working in this correctional facility for seven years, and I caught him right before he was about to go on a plane — because he ended up moving away from Portland, so I called him and he was like, well, meet me at the airport, we can talk,” she said.
She’s also trying to get in touch with a former inmate of Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, a women’s prison in Wilsonville, Oregon.
“I am very interested in the more humane things that go on behind prison doors,” she said, “and I think this could be a really good looking glass into what that might be like.”
Listen to the latest episode of Radio Jewce below:
Chloe Sobel graduated from Queen’s University and is editor in chief of New Voices.
