The Many Faces of Chutzpah
Image credit: Joel Mesler, Untitled (Chutzpah), 2024, pigment and dye on rag paper. Artwork from Chutzpah: Spirit. Recollection. Self., Jewish Museum of Australia. Photography Simon Strong.
Chutzpah: Spirit. Recollection. Self
Jewish Museum of Australia, St Kilda | 1 May to 17 August, 2025
For many in the diaspora, Jewish identity is not fixed but an evolving, personal, and deeply ingrained part of the self. It exists in a tension between the universal and the individual, shaped by history, memory, and community.
This duality of being both one and many is at the heart of “Chutzpah: Spirit. Recollection. Self,” the Jewish Museum of Australia’s new exhibition. Through a dynamic and emotional collection of works, the show captures the layered essence of contemporary Jewish identity: bold, tender, fractured, joyful, and resilient.
The term chutzpah, which anchors the exhibition's title, is difficult to translate, and that is precisely the point. Though it carries definitions like audacity, nerve, or boldness, for many Jews and non-Jews alike, chutzpah is best understood through lived experience: a gesture, a story, a refusal to stay silent. It embodies a spirit of defiance, vulnerability, survival, and guts all at once.
From the moment you approach the museum, you are presented with this duality. The facade hums with the harmony of contradiction, a simultaneous reverence for the weight of history while embracing the exuberant pulse of life. Alison Zuckerman’s commanding hero image Day of Rest (2024), greets you even before you step inside. Already, the conversation between past and present, trauma and celebration, has begun.
Art in the Aftermath
The exhibition opens in a darkened room, quiet and contemplative. Here, we are invited to sit with recent ruptures since the events of October 7, 2023, and their reverberations around the globe.
Two works in particular encapsulate this moment of collective shock and introspection: Ori Gersht’s Pomegranate (2006) and Nina Sanadze’s October 7- Call to Peace (2023). Although created nearly two decades apart, these works communicate across time.
In Pomegranate, Gersht captures the precise moment a fruit explodes, filmed at 1,600 frames per second. The Hebrew word for pomegranate (rimon) also means grenade, and this quiet metaphor suddenly becomes literal. It’s a beautiful, violent meditation on fragility, tradition, and rupture.
Image credit: Exhibition installation view, Chutzpah: Spirit. Recollection. Self., Jewish Museum of Australia. Artworks by Ori Gersht & Amos Gersht, Inbal Nissim, Nina Sanadze and Elinor Sahm. Photography Simon Strong.
Sanadze’s sculpture, on the other hand, is made of unfired clay—deliberately impermanent. A fragile, trembling form clings together in response to the atrocities of October 7. First exhibited without explanation, it stood as a silent monument to grief and urgency. In Chutzpah, it is finally given voice: a raw, unflinching call for peace.
This section of the exhibition doesn’t offer answers but rather provides a space—one to acknowledge the dissonance, fear, grief, and resilience felt by Jews around the world in the wake of recent events. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the political context, the emotional impact is undeniable.
Chutzpah in Color and Sound
The second half of Chutzpah shifts in tone. Here, we find the vitality and resistance that animate Jewish life: food, memory, storytelling, and community. This is also where chutzpah shines as a source of nourishment and joy.
Image credit: Elinor Sahm, Ha'Layla, 2022/2025, graphite and pencil on paper, sound piece-4 channels, 21 minutes loop, recording and music production by Offir Benjaminov. Artwork from Chutzpah: Spirit. Recollection. Self., Jewish Museum of Australia. Photography Simon Strong.
Elinor Sahm’s Ha’Layla (2022/2025) invites us into a sensory archive. Through layered soundscapes and graphite drawings, she recreates the feel of a hafla, a Sephardic family gathering. Voices, music, and memories overlap in a four-channel sound piece that occupies physical chairs within the gallery space to immerse yourself in the work. Her drawings, based on family video stills, freeze gestures of joy, grief, and love, existing, as Sahm puts it, “above time.” Her work doesn’t resolve the tensions between her Sephardic and Protestant German heritage; instead, it holds them together like harmonies in a family song.
Melbourne artist Stephania Windholz Leigh’s painting How Many Kneidlach Ago? (2024–5) is a loving, humorous tribute to the rituals of Ashkenazi cuisine. A family gathers around a table; the scent of dill and chicken soup almost wafts from the canvas. This work captures not just a meal, but also care, continuity, and memory.
Dreams for the Future
Chutzpah also looks forward to dreams shaped by community, unity, and transformation.
Navot Miller’s vibrant triptych, Andy, Ale and Margit in Rykestrasse (2024), reimagines Berlin’s iconic synagogue as a site of liberated, queer joy. Naked and semi-naked men drawn from the artist’s circle occupy the space in tender, celebratory poses. Miller collapses the sacred and erotic, past and future, re-envisioning what Jewish ritual and presence might look like. “Judaism,” he says, “is a spectrum of deep and multi-layered experiences.” This work is less about return and more about reinvention.
Image credit: Navot Miller, Andy, Ale and Margit in Rykestrasse, 2024, oil on canvas. Artwork from Chutzpah: Spirit. Recollection. Self., Jewish Museum of Australia. Photography Simon Strong.
Featuring work by artists across generations and geographies—including Nina Sanadze (Australia/Georgia), Ori Gersht (Israel/UK), Inbal Nissim (Australia/Israel), Elinor Sahm (Israel/Germany), Hedy Ritterman (Australia), Stephania Windholz Leigh (Australia/Poland), Joel Mesler (USA), Allison Zuckerman (USA), Jordy Kerwick (France/Australia), and Navot Miller (Israel/Germany)—Chutzpah is a communal act of remembering, resisting, and reimagining.
It is curated by Alana Kushnir and is on view at the Jewish Museum of Australia: Gandel Centre of Judaica in St Kilda from May 1, 2025.
Chutzpah: Spirit. Recollection. Self
Jewish Museum of Australia: Gandel Centre of Judaica
1 May to 17 August 2025
