A Radically Inclusive Vision of the Jewish Tzitzit

Often referred to as tzitzit after the name of the fringes that are attached to its four corners, the tallit katan is a garment traditionally worn by Orthodox Jewish men under their clothes, a constant reminder of their connection to God. In November 2021, Los Angeles-based artists Julie Weitz and Jill Spector launched the Tzitzit Project with the goal of making tzitzit for a wide spectrum of gender identities, body types, and spiritual practices, offering the “opportunity to reclaim the divine in the everyday.”

The roots of the project lie in My Golem (2017–2020), Julie Weitz’s reinterpretation of the sculpted figure that is brought to life to protect the Jews of 16th-century Prague from persecution, according to Jewish folklore. Weitz’s Golem tackles contemporary issues, from rising Fascism and intolerance to ecological collapse. In her 2021 film project Prayer for Burnt Forests, Weitz appears as a firefighting Golem confronting the devastating Southern California wildfires. Her character wears tzitzit, which she co-designed with Spector, a self-taught textile artist. In the video, Weitz removes her tzitzit and wraps it around a burnt tree trunk, as though covering a dead body, in a kind of mourning ritual. In doing so, she came to appreciate how “this garment has real power, it’s not just a costume,” she told Hyperallergic. She began thinking about what it would mean to wear tzitzit outside of a performative context.

Read more here: https://hyperallergic.com/799492/a-radically-inclusive-vision-of-the-jewish-tzitzit/