The Eighth & After 

“כִּ֣י שֶׁ֧בַע יִפֹּ֣ל צַדִּ֣יק וָקָ֑ם ” Proverbs 24:16 “For a righteous man falls seven times, and rises again.” If one falls seven times and gets back up again, he must be righteous. What about the unrighteous man? Does he still qualify? The work “The Eighth and After” examines the overlaps in language between Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Hamas’s Charter, and Trump’s Project 2025, through sculptural Hebrew letters formed from their paper-mâché fragments. Each letter carries the physical weight of language historically mobilized to define, exclude, and control. By reconstituting them into a sacred phrase about resilience, the work stages a confrontation between righteousness and its relationship to endurance.

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Certain words, such as nation, leader(ship), system, ideology, security, power, stand out in red where they recur across all three documents. Their repetition underscores an unsettling continuity: despite vast differences in context and time, the rhetoric of authority and domination relies on a shared vocabulary. In the piece, these words surface like wounds within the letters, interrupting the sanctity of the text and calling attention to how language itself becomes a tool of both violence and survival.

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The material manifestos reflect a contemporary Jewish and American identity shaped by the paradoxes of belonging and exclusion, safety and threat, inheritance and reinvention. The work holds that tension without resolving it, insisting that resilience is an ongoing act of reassembly within a fractured linguistic and cultural landscape.

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15 Hebrew letter sculptures, paper mache