Search for Meaning with Lisa Edelstein and Robert Russell

In this episode of Search for Meaning, Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback sits down with actor and painter Lisa Edelstein and artist Robert Russell to discuss their powerful new exhibition, A Palace in Time, at the Skirball Cultural Center.

Inspired by Abraham Joshua Heschel’s timeless vision of Shabbat as “a palace in time,” the exhibition explores memory, ritual, Jewish identity, family, love, and the holiness embedded in ordinary moments. Through Russell’s luminous still lifes of ritual objects and Edelstein’s evocative paintings drawn from family photographs, the couple creates an intimate meditation on what we choose to remember—and why.

Their conversation with Rabbi Yoshi touches on the relationship between art and spirituality, the emotional impact of October 7, the role of nostalgia in Jewish life, and the experience of creating art as partners in both marriage and creativity. Together, they reflect on how beauty, ritual, and storytelling can help us navigate grief, deepen connection, and reclaim moments of sacred presence in an anxious world.

Thoughtful, moving, and deeply human, this episode is an exploration of how art can become both memory and sanctuary.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

When we ask people to enter the space of our show that way is it activates the space.

SPEAKER_01 0:05

And formally the exhibition that everyone experiences is the same. So the message there is that whatever you're bringing into it, you're we're all in the same space. Same room. We're gonna be on the walk in the other direction another day.

SPEAKER_02 0:33

Because, hey, I just full disclosure, it features my cousins, uh Lisa Edelstein and Robert Russell. And we just we'll talk about it in the context of the podcast, but we just reconnected as a family, and we've had the opportunity over the last several months to spend a lot of time together. And one of the things that was most exciting about it was learning about their art and also getting to see up close and personal some of the pieces that are gonna be in their upcoming exhibition, which is opening up at the Skurball at the end of this month. It's called A Palace in Time. And I'm really, really looking forward to seeing it. But I have seen some of the pieces. And so, first I just wanted to say welcome, cousin Lisa and cousin Robert.

SPEAKER_00 1:17

Hi.

SPEAKER_02 1:18

Hi. We were gonna do this in person because we are all in Los Angeles right now, but the technology actually made it easier for us to do it remotely. So you're joining us from your home, which is also where your studios are. And I just want to start right with this exhibit and encourage people to go and see it because uh, as I said, I haven't seen the whole exhibit, but I have seen many of the pieces, and it's extraordinary. It's called A Palace in Time. And for anybody who's ever read Heschel's The Sabbath, that's the immediate connotation. Tell me a little bit about the title and how you arrived at that and what it says about the show.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Yes, it comes directly, lifted directly from the Heschel book, The Sabbath, which I had read and was just mesmerized by. What I found most intriguing about the book is the way he talks about Judaism and the Sabbath in particular, but all Jewish ritual for that matter, as you know, the we we sanctify time rather than space. And we create meaning in these through these rituals of temporality versus uh space. And so, you know, the palace is obviously a metaphor. And so with our and I just love that, and we we were working out the works for the show, and I I thought it would just be a perfect title because that is that's the effort that we're trying to create with the show as a kind of a especially the way our our works sort of meet, where his work and my work meet, uh, and how how to develop a conversation between those two things.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

Very much about ritual and family and marks of moments in time that we mark, um, from holidays, life, death, celebrations, everything. Uh, so was it it felt like the perfect uh title for that reason, too.

SPEAKER_02 3:07

Robert, I wanted to ask you about some of the objects in uh a palace in time and their resonance for you as someone who embraces his Judaism so fully, and maybe a little bit about the journey, because you take objects like a Kiddish cup or a Yortside candle, and in some ways almost removing them from the context and just turning it into this beautiful thing, this object. So, A, a little bit about that process and how it relates to the show, and maybe how that's mirrored in your own Jewish identity or the internal journey around those objects.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

I'm thinking about what you just said about removing it from context, because that is exactly what's happening. And I think that's exactly what happens in Jewish ritual too, is that these objects are meaningless in and of themselves, you know. And, you know, the particularly, like, for example, if we look at the yardside candles, you know, the Manishev, it's Yartside candle, for example, which is just a glass vessel manufactured who knows where, with a sticker on it that says Manishev, it's parv done deal. So obviously the thing is not a particularly beautiful thing, it's an utterly ordinary commercial thing. Yet when we light it, you know, and we carve out this 24-hour period to, you know, to remember a loved one, we bring so much meaning to this inert thing. And so that kind of attention that that Judaism brings to objects, to its rituals, to uh bread, the wine, everything, uh it's it's kind of similar or analog to the kind of attention that I give to my paintings, you know, that this particularly still life, you know, which are really overlooked objects. In fact, there's a beautiful book called Looking at the Overlooked by uh Norman Bryson. And uh it's just about the history of still life, and there's really nothing before or since that's come out that's like it. But it but it is about how still life reveals so much about a culture, a time, a people. So that book had a big influence on me many years ago when I read it in grad school. And, you know, I think of my painting practice as a kind of a ritual, as a sanctification. And so it's it it's parallel to the rituals that I'm either, I don't want to say depicting, but that I'm borrowing from, let's say. And then the objects, the paintings themselves, and the objects that are depicted in the paintings are kind of a witness to a people or a time or an experience. So that's a lot of what you'll see in this show from me.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

Well, it's funny because he takes, you know, the the the act that people use that create take this mass-produced object and make it into a sacred moment, he freezes that in time with these paintings. Uh it's really interesting because a lot of people who who've come through the studio who are in mourning have to really stop and breathe when they look at these paintings of yurt site candles. They're not even the yurt site candles that they lit, but it embodies them with so much more. It it takes that the moment of actively remembering and then memorializes it.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

It's uh it's all of our attention that's sacred. Yeah, yeah. That's the thing. And you know, what are my paintings, but just a record of a lot of attention paid to something very small.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

And that's kind of what we discovered with it. His paintings were taking these objects that very tactile objects. Most of the things he chooses are things that are touched a lot. And mine are really similar in the sense that they're it's family scenes. It's messy, it's we we can feel it, we can smell it like nobody's perfect. Um, it's not about containing the picture we wish we could remember, but like the messiness that we do remember, and like, and that that was where our work sort of intertwined in a really beautiful way.

SPEAKER_02 6:57

And Lisa, I wanted to ask you about your paintings, which uh I've I've so enjoyed seeing, in part because some of them have a very personal resonance. One of the first pieces that you shared with me includes my great uncle Fred, who I actually didn't get to know personally, but I know stories of him. He was my grandfather's baby brother who died young, and he crashed uh an Edelstein family wedding and ends up in a family photograph that you ended up painting along with uh with his wife Gladys. And it was just really beautiful to see that.

SPEAKER_00 7:35

I was working on that painting when you introduced yourself to me, because we were on uh we were on a WhatsApp group together and and you introduced yourself to me, and I at first immediately thought you were crazy, and so I had to write my mom and say, who is this person that's saying they're my cousin? And then um, and then found out you were indeed my cousin and not crazy.

SPEAKER_02 7:55

Well, Terry's out, I mean it the cousin part is uh objectively true, and the crazy part is we're Jewish. I mean, there's a lot of epigenetic trauma that we have experienced, so we can blame it on that. But I want to talk about this practice of taking a family photograph. Many of them seem to be 1970-ish.

SPEAKER_00 8:16

They span a hundred years, but they but I I I flatten them with the palette.

SPEAKER_02 8:22

Well, and maybe those are some of the ones that have that strike me the most because the colors and the clothing and the collars and the hairstyles take me to my childhood growing up in the 1970s. So I'd love to hear a little bit about that process of taking these photographs and painting. And I know you started with markers and then you went to watercolors, but tell us a little bit about that process because again, hopefully people will come and get to see it with their own eyes if they're here in Southern California and really enjoy it.

SPEAKER_00 8:50

Well, I think because I started, I am, I'm I've been primarily an actress this whole time and a filmmaker. Um, I think it really is uh an extension of that practice in the sense that most of the images that I'm looking for are very narrative. So either somebody's in the middle of something, somebody's being caught at something, there's an unintended revelation, or there's just something about the picture that feels really universal to me. Uh so I I inherited all these photographs from my parents when they moved to Los Angeles because they were downsizing. And even though there was so many of them, there weren't, there was maybe 10% of them were images that I was interested in painting. It's not any, so that's really what I'm looking for, just sort of expanding on a narrative practice.

SPEAKER_02 9:42

Have you gotten that reaction in other places where you've shown them where people say, That's my family, you painted my family?

SPEAKER_00 9:48

Yeah, and even not Jews. A lot of times it's people who have immigrant families. Um, I think there's something about that a lot of the people on painting are first or second generation. So that has an impact no matter what world you came from and brought it here. But then I have also made paintings of my cousins in the diaspora in South America. There is a painting in my show in New York that's up right now that, or that would have just come down when this comes out. Um that's I think from the old world. Um, when nobody remembers who they are. And that's the other thing. It's like a lot of these people are just that nobody can claim them anymore. They're anonymous, even though we know they're in our family somewhere. And so it it does feel like a really beautiful exercise of bringing them back.

SPEAKER_02 10:34

Yeah, and those sort of layers of memory too. Sometimes I go back to family photographs and I don't know if I'm remembering that moment or if I'm remembering the photograph.

SPEAKER_00 10:43

I deal with that because sometimes people want me to make a painting for them. Um, and they hand me photographs that I don't think will make interesting paintings because when they look at that photograph, there's so much in there that isn't in the photograph. It's the memories of that person or the idea of what they're looking at rather than what's actually there. It's not necessarily an interesting image. So it does, it does impact the way we remember things.

SPEAKER_02 11:08

You mentioned earlier this WhatsApp chain that we're a part of, and it's a group that came into being after October 7th, 2023. And I think so many of the people in the group now it's grown to there's hundreds of people there, but lots of storytellers and artists and actors and writers and producers. And uh I I see in the chat so much of uh struggle with and engagement with and a developing Jewish identity. How has October 7th shaped you in terms of your Jewish identity and how has it shaped your art? It's been a real challenge.

SPEAKER_01 11:46

And uh, you know, certainly the art world that I've been involved with for, as you said, decades, which really landed, um has been an inhospitable place, inhospitable place. Well, I'll just say it for Jews, frankly. Um Jews who are who don't pass, I think, the litmus test, whatever it may be on any given day, given any particular outrage that Israel may or may not have perpetrated. And so it's a moving target, and being outwardly Jewish or expressing any kind of Jewish identity or sensibility is pretty fraught, um, and particularly now. So I think on the one hand, I I personally wanted to kind of dig into that and and and challenge that. Actually, it started before October 7th. I did the series of the Alec series, which I landed on by accident because I had uh I had painted all those porcelain teacups. Uh this was during COVID, and the teacups were certainly not about my Judaism or anything like that necessarily. But uh within that study of porcelain, I found this this bizarre ALAC story, which I can say here just so it's uh in the in the record. Alac was a company founded by Himmler in 1935-ish, uh in order to in order to create porcelain figurines, which depicted sort of Aryan ideals and notions of labens round animals and pastoral uh creatures.

SPEAKER_02 13:32

You can see just keeping peeking just peeking over Robert's shoulder, you can see one of those exactly.

SPEAKER_01 13:38

There's one from that series. Anyway, so I discovered this thing, and then he, after a couple of years of production in the in the town of Alak, which is why it's called Alak porcelain, he relocated the factory to Dachau subcamp and had prisoners Dachau producing figurines of sweet little animals to give his gifts to SS soldiers. It's the most grotesque and bizarre story. So he made these like so I made these enormous paintings of these tiny of these sweet little figures. And it was a kind of a reclamation effort. It was a way to it was a way. I think the gesture that I talk about is it was a way to make some try to make something really beautiful. And the more beautiful I made it, the more effective the gesture was politically. Or uh so I thought that was an interesting challenge to make. And as a Jewish artist, it it felt like a subject that I could sort of take on.

SPEAKER_00 14:31

Anyway, I want to say one thing about that. Up until that time, watching his career and his journey as an artist, it was really the first time he allowed himself because of where the kind of education that he has in the art world, which is sort of leans away from meaning. It's more conceptual than it is about meaning driven.

SPEAKER_01 14:59

I mean, this was the first time I'd seen you do work that had a deep meaning to you in a way that um it felt like a very it felt like a very precise project, as did the teacups that came before it. But this almost felt like the inevitable outcome of that project. Yeah, this was personal. This I felt in my body. And it's some something shifted for sure.

SPEAKER_00 15:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

Something shifted dramatically.

SPEAKER_00 15:25

For me, I was um already painting Jewish stuff. I was painting Jewish my Jewish family, and I remember the first time I had a show, she was worried that I only had white people in my show. I was like, well, they're all Jews. That helps you. It's my family. Um, so that became a conversation in a funny way. Like, does that count? Um, and we had actually had a whole pan uh like a panel with really great artists and interesting people that have since become our friends to talk about what is Jewish representation. This was before October 7th. And then after October 7th, um it became even more important to me to have like recognizably Jewish uh um like yarmutas, candles, candlesticks, um, whatever it is that in my paintings, making sure that that was known that that was the story I was telling. And and it was crazy because you you pose, I'd posted a painting, for example, of my grandfather arguing with his friends on Shabbat, and they all had yamukas on, and somebody, the picture is clearly from the 70s. They're outfits, and somebody decided it was Netanyahu, and it was like an entire run of death threats. Um and that was at that point in time, I was I was hiding or erasing or blocking people who would do that, and then I eventually stopped doing that because I thought I think it's important for the record to have that kind of ugliness be present forever for all time. I still don't think it's gonna look good.

SPEAKER_02 16:57

Well, back to the the show itself. First of all, all of that is so poignant and painful, and I can only imagine what it's like to be inside of that fully because obviously, uh, you know, my world as a synagogue rabbi, yes, every now and again I confront this personally. More often I'm supporting people who are confronting it. But obviously, in my world, like of my fellow Zionist rabbis and in a community that is deeply Israel connected, this isn't something I have to explain ever, but I certainly have to support people like yourselves who find themselves in settings where they they very much do have to explain that. But I was thinking about back to the exhibition that it is a dialogue. You know, you describe this as a dialogue. And your works, you know, for people who've seen works of Robert Russell and works of Lita Elstein, you wouldn't necessarily look at them and and see them. You you wouldn't necessarily, especially if you're someone who's untrained, you wouldn't understand. Well, tell me more about this dialogue. How how are they in dialogue with each other? So um, beyond the fact that you're married and you painted these in your home that you share together that has your you know, your your various studios, how are these works in dialogue with each other?

SPEAKER_01 18:16

I mean, we've sort of been talking around a little bit, but I feel like my objects are kind of the detritus from the from the rowdy scenes in Lisa's paintings in in many ways, or the the residue, you know, the stains on the tablecloth of those parties um from Lisa's paintings. So they're they're you know, the camera zooms in a bit more, um, they're a little slower, they're a little quieter, uh, but they're all in the same world. They're all parts of celebrations or rituals or morning rituals or whatever they may be, but they're but they're all you know, it's the stuff. It's the it's like Lisa was saying, you know, I I do tend to, I'm really drawn to objects that the body interacts with, so vessels, drinking vessels, eating utensils, things where we physically interact uh with objects in in in very physical ways, intimate ways. So, you know, it you know, my my paintings are the my paintings are the lipsticks on the mugs, you know. The in terms of the show itself, when you see it, I think of my my works being these kind of exhales in between. Um, and and we we thought of them uh in that way as as these kind of brakes. Because we did the installation sort of 18th century salon style, meaning the works are sort of floor to ceiling, jammed up one against one another, because we really wanted that sort of that excess, you know, or as my my grandmother would say, that ungepotski quality, you know.

SPEAKER_00 19:48

Yeah, because even when he does, he has a few figurative paintings in there as well, but when he does his figurative paintings, they're almost all of them one color.

SPEAKER_01 20:00

Yeah, they're pretty stoking. He that basically went. Yeah, so mine are like uh and his are like this super quiet, stoic.

SPEAKER_00 20:10

Let's let's keep moving.

SPEAKER_01 20:13

Yeah, so that and that you know, the show is really it's it really is collapsing time in the sense of you know, we're all always mourning and rejoicing. You know, it's all happening at the same time. Our hearts holding all this complexity all at the same time. So that chaos is is part of uh what I hope what we think will be part of the takeaway of the show. You know, we we invite you to choose a path as you enter, mimicking the the path that you would enter the old temple grounds, whether you were graving or otherwise.

SPEAKER_00 20:46

If you everybody would walk into the ancient temple to the right, they would circle the grounds going to the right. There's a whole Mishnah about this. They come in, they always circle to the right, unless they've been, unless they're in mourning or they've been uh they've been um excommunicated or whatever the word is. Um they the the people who are feeling uh alone in mourning or for whatever reason walk to the left. And so what it does is when we ask people to enter the space of our show that way is it activates the space and it creates it creates community and acknowledgement. An acknowledgement, like you suddenly are paying attention not to other bodies in space, which we especially nowadays do not stop and do much. We're on our phones or we're doing our task.

SPEAKER_01 21:34

Um but then formally the exhibition that everyone experiences is the same. So the message there is that whatever you're bringing into it, you're we're all in the same state. Same room. We're gonna be on the walk in the other direction another day.

SPEAKER_00 21:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:47

Yeah, I was thinking about the journey from the kiddish cup to the yortside candle and and all the color and life in between, you know. So the kiddish cup at the baby naming, which is the ritual object that you know we associate with bringing that child into the covenant. Obviously for for boys, there's you know there's there's other ritual objects that accompany that, but for both boys and girls, it's the kiddish cup. And uh and we use it all sorts of other places in our lives. And then the Yartseit candle at the end of that journey, you know, and then all the color and all the life and all the scenes and everything in between. It really is beautiful. I can't wait to see it in person. I want to just close with something that you're working on right now that excites you. Obviously putting these shows on is a different muscle and a different skill set. And you have people you collaborate with who help you figure out how does it all go together and which pieces are in the show and how will we hang it and all of the collateral that surrounds it in terms of the descriptions, et cetera. There's a lot of creative work that goes into that. And along the way, I know from a couple of texts with Lisa, you know, you you were sharing that that painting you were working on that featured my mom and grandma and grandpa. So you're still you're still painting, you're still working on things. What's something more recently that's really captured you, excited you part of your creative energy right now?

SPEAKER_01 23:09

Well I I started something called the Archive of Nothing. It's archiveofnothing.org and I think of it as a digital secular Geniza. In short what it is is you know I've been using eBay for many years as source material for still life paintings and I've just been drawn to you know how people will take these very unself-conscious photographs of objects that are utterly neutral, you know, little teacups, little benign objects for a few bucks um that they can't seem to get rid of and so I think they've they've created the ritual through eBay of finding people out in the world to kind of become the custodian of these objects. So I indirectly took that call and made still like paintings of these objects. But then I wanted to be intentional so I just created a website myself archive of nothing and it it is just that it's a place for people to upload images of things that they can't get rid of nor can they keep necessarily but and they have no value and I have yeah they have no value but like your father's uh digital clock. Any number of things and um at some point I might want to have a physical but no my wife is not thrilled with this idea. Do not send your things. Sharon Browse when I spoke to her about it she said do you want to do Archiza? And and that sent me into full scale panic. But so right now it just exists in digital form and from those uploads that I get I'm making select paintings. And it's a way to just kind of hold attention hold these objects.

SPEAKER_02 24:41

Now again I'm thinking of all those layers like God forbid anyone would ever take a Robert Russell painting and put it in a Geniza someday but we're all we're all eventually going to the Geniza like it's it's it's for for all of us it's going to happen. And so you know so there's this object that then someone digitized and uploaded and then you painted it and in some some in the multiverse you know some some story in the future that gets recycled too it's like everything else in the universe.

SPEAKER_00 25:10

Lisa what about you what's uh what's something that that's exciting you right now creatively well creatively I just this is so in the in the weeds but I just flipped over some canvas and started working on the wrong side and love it. The painting that I made of your mom is just that and I just I'm very excited about how that looks to paint on raw canvas with watercolor which is strange use of materials but I I just love the way it looks and uh and then working on an indie film that I'm gonna start shooting not long after this this show opens um and getting ready for season two of Long Story Short, which is a cartoon I'm on on Netflix. So it's a busy time it's really beautiful. It's uh we're sort of weakly kind of stressed out but then it's actually like all of all great things even if it's great things sometimes the pace is I don't know why everything decides to happen all at the same time but that seems to be the way things go. There's a time for your for your fields to be fallow and a time for them to to sprout.

SPEAKER_02 26:21

Well Lisa and Robert thank you so much for your time I'm so excited to see the show and I'll put in the episode notes all the information about the upcoming Skirball show and places that people can access your art digitally if they're not able to show up in person. I'm really really incredibly I feel I feel so grateful and so lucky that we connected and it was nice because you've gotten to meet my brother and my sister and my dad and our new world of family it's so awesome a whole new world of family and you know sometimes people can probably relate you know sometimes you do connect with long lost family and you're like ooh and I hope you're not I hope you're not feeling that way about us. We're certainly not feeling that way about you. This is all bonus thank you so much everybody thank you bye Yosh well that's our episode thanks for listening to Search for Meaning if you enjoyed today's conversation please like subscribe and leave a review it really helps others discover the podcast and consider sharing Search for Meaning with a friend. They might appreciate the insights and inspiration found here. Special thanks to our producer Amy Shelby our editor Josh Sterling and our production coordinator Raz Husseini. Our theme song was composed by Maestro David Cates and myself produced by Kenley Mathis and features a vocal by cantor Josh Goldberg stay healthy, stay hopeful and stay tuned