The world of Jewish learning has traditionally been dominated by the elite male practice of text study. Gashmius understands itself it be in the lineage of those who are attempting to expand our conceptions of "Jewish knowledge" to include non-textual sources. Taking our cue from Jericho Vincent's piece, we think of our featured art not as mere adornment to written content, but as genuine neo-Hasidic content in and of itself.

Etai Rogers-Fett
Etai Rogers-Fett (he/him) is a printmaker and book artist drawing on archival research, speculative imagining, and collaborative practice in order to craft visual narratives about Yiddish cultural transmission. You can find Etai printing under the name “tsukunst,” a portmanteau reflecting a foundational belief in art as a vessel for future-making.
He is currently working on a series of prints engaging with the social history of tuberculosis sanatoriums for Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants in the Southwestern United States.
See more at www.tsukunst.com

Daniel Toretsky
Daniel Toretsky is a visual artist, exhibit designer, and licensed architect based in Brooklyn, NY. He graduated from Cornell University’s architecture program in 2016 and recently completed an MFA in Design and Technology at Parsons, The New School, focused on interactive media art. He now teaches exhibit design and fabrication at Parsons.
Daniel’s practice bridges ecological storytelling, Jewish ritual, and speculative design. Raised in the Yiddish revival scene, he draws on portable and ephemeral spatial traditions to create immersive installations and performative architectures that explore collective memory, ecological grief, and diasporic imagination. Through sculpture, sound, and environments, his work blends ritual and technology to navigate climate crisis.
His work has been presented internationally, including a 2025 guerrilla installation in Venice with the Yiddishland Pavilion, and exhibitions in Toronto, Montreal, New York, and Miami. He is a 2025–26 participant in the Object Movement Puppetry Residency at the Center at West Park.
To see learn more about Shtetl Walks, the project that the images that appear in Gashmius are pulled from click here.
Or see more at www.danieltoretsky.com

Jeffrey Abt
Jeffrey Abt is Professor Emeritus in the James Pearson Duffy Department of Art, Art History, and Design at Wayne State
University. He earned BFA and MFA degrees in painting at Drake University, where he worked with Jules Kirschenbaum; and he
subsequently studied at the Jerusalem campus of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Prior to Wayne State,
he worked at the Wichita Art Museum; the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago; and Chicago’s Smart
Museum of Art. An artist and writer, he has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad; and his artwork is in several
museum and corporate collections. Abt’s scholarship, supported with numerous grants and fellowships, has focused on museum
history and criticism. His books include American Egyptologist: The Life of James Henry Breasted and the Creation of His
Oriental Institute (University of Chicago Press, 2012), Valuing Detroit's Art Museum: A History of Fiscal Abandonment and
Rescue (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and Too Jewish or Not Jewish Enough: Ritual Objects and Avant-Garde Art at the Jewish
Museum of New York (Berghahn, 2024).
The Traveling homeland series consists of oil paintings on linen that can be folded into small packets which can readily be
packed and transported to other places. They began by combining images in the central panels with traditional patterns from
various parts of the world and faith traditions, partly to explore ethnic heterogeneity. The central panels of several paintings
feature figures based on those in the early fourteenth-century Birds Head Haggadah.
Read more at www.jeffreyabt.net


