News Highlights Jewish Studio Project and Hebrew College Open New Creativity Studio on Newton Campus

The Hebrew month of Elul is a time of reflection, reconnection and renewal. Tradition teaches that the core practice of this time is teshuva, returning to ourselves, one another and to the Divine. Yet, while returning may seem like going back to what was, the Hasidic master Kalonymous Kalman Shapira teaches that teshuva is actually a creative act. This time in the calendar is one both of returning to our roots and of creating something new.

Jewish Studio Project (JSP) was founded on the core belief that each of us is created creative. JSP supports individuals, organizations and communities in cultivating creativity as a Jewish practice for spiritual connection and social transformation. JSP truly began in the Hebrew College beit midrash when then-rabbinical student Adina Allen experimented with bringing the art-making practices she grew up with in her mother’s studio to text study as tools to process and interpret Torah. (Hebrew College was proud to honor Rabbi Adina Allen `14 last May at our Spring 2024 Gala “Branching Out. Blossoming Together.”)

Seeds that began to sprout in Boston then took root in the Bay Area post-ordination when Rabbi Adina `14 and her spouse Jeff Kasowitz officially launched JSP, soon setting up the JSP Studio in Berkeley, CA as a new kind of Jewish space for creativity and text learning. Now, nearly ten years later, JSP has grown into an organization with international scope, fueled by fresh thought leadership, a network of over 100 facilitators and educators, partnerships with hundreds of organizations, and community offerings reaching tens of thousands of people each year. JSP is thrilled to be rerooting in the soil where it first began.

During this sacred time in the Jewish calendar, amidst the intensity and heartbreak of this year, JSP and Hebrew College are partnering to bring new possibilities to the Greater Boston community. This September, JSP will open a new Studio in collaboration with and on the shared campus of Hebrew College. This unique partnership, which has been in formation for years, is the first-of-its-kind, integrating a multi-modal creative process studio on a shared community campus and rabbinical school, just steps from the beit midrash.

Hebrew College offered a generative environment for exploration and innovation, one that was crucial to JSP’s founding. Rabbi Adina writes in her new book The Place of All Possibility about the ways rabbinical school served as a living laboratory to experiment with new ways of approaching text and tradition.

“As I deepened my practice of Torah study…I experienced the many ways that a purely cerebral approach to the text…can short-circuit our deeper learning, obstructing the primordial power of these texts to activate that authentic, vital place within us, where new meanings are born. And so, together with like-minded colleagues and teachers, I began to experiment. I played with bringing together the creative process I had been immersed in growing up with the dynamic study of sacred texts I was learning in rabbinical school. I felt the dynamism and depth of insight that art-making, employed as a self-reflective method of inquiry, brought to the experience of learning Torah, and heard the excitement from others at the prospect of engaging in text study with their full selves.”

The work of JSP centers on bringing together the intellect and the imagination and emerges from a deep belief that we cannot solely think our way out of the intense challenges we face. Instead, we need to call on our other ways of knowing – our intuition, our emotions, our memories — all aspects of self that creativity can help us explore and express.

Over the past several years, JSP’s philosophy, pedagogy and methodology have been extending further out into Jewish spaces across the country offering a unique creative methodology to those seeking a sense of hope and possibility grounded in Jewish text and tradition. In response to this increase in demand and in alignment with the organization’s strategic goals and vision of making this work accessible to all who seek it, JSP is taking intentional steps to invest in specific regions around the country. Longstanding partnerships in the area made Boston an easy choice as the first such region for JSP to invest in and grow its capacity to offer its work as a resource to the amazing organizations, leaders, schools, and spiritual communities that exist there.

The Boston creative Jewish ecosystem is robust and JSP looks forward to working collaboratively with Hebrew College, the other co-located organizations on campus, regional partners, and more. With generous investments from the Philip and Bernice Krupp Foundation, the Beker Foundation and Combined Jewish Philanthropies, over the next two years JSP will create a hub in Boston led by its new Regional Director and centered around a physical studio space.

Co-Founder and Executive Director Jeff Kasowitz reflects, “Boston is where JSP’s ideas and methods were born – in the beit midrash at Hebrew College, in the classrooms of Tufts University, in the offices of City Year, in fellowships at CJP, in the sacred space of Nehar Shalom and creative backyards of Jamaica Plain. It has been such a joy to collaborate over the past nine years with Hebrew College faculty, students and alumni in all sorts of ways. And we feel so at home within Hebrew College’s values of innovation and curiosity and the deep belief that Judaism can offer something healing and transformative to the world. We are thrilled to be embarking on this more formal studio partnership now and our greatest hope is that it can increase a sense of joy, possibility and belonging here in Boston.”

Hebrew College President, and JSP teacher and mentor, Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld shares her excitement and hopes for this partnership. “We are honored and inspired to partner with JSP and to launch a new Boston studio here on the Hebrew College shared campus. Faithful creativity is at the heart of our shared work. In a time of narrowing imagination, JSP invites us to explore the untapped possibilities that live within us, to experience the sheer joy of creativity, and to listen deeply for the layered resonance of ancient words. We are excited to see the ways in which this JSP-Hebrew College partnership opens new doors of possibility for our community.”

Meet Rabbi Adina Allen on September 11 from 7-8:30 p.m. at Hummingbird Books in Newton, where she will discuss her new book The Place of All Possibility with President Anisfeld, followed by Q+A. Learn more and purchase tickets here.

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