Inclusive Judaism
A Jewish Museum required a headline image for their Inclusive Judaism program and to increase public understanding of the vibrant diversity in Judaism and the Jewish community. The challenge was to create something that also connected individuals and showed a real disruption of visual culture. The target audiences were teachers and those who never see themselves represented such as Deaf, Queer or Black Jews.
The Jewish Community of Britain consists of a variety of communities; cultural, religious, and ethnographic. Within the religious sphere there are movements for Reform, Orthodox, Masorti and Liberal, within this are the ethnographic histories of Sephardic (Spanish and Portuguese), Ashkenazi (Eastern European) and Mizrachi (Middle Eastern). The Jewish Museum London represents all these communities.
The Solution
The solution was a versatile illustration of 5 individual characters who can be used as a group or in variations. Each individual represents a disrupted stereotype and celebrates diversity within the Jewish community – enabling people to see themselves within the Museum’s work and teach inclusive Judaism:
- A woman with big Jewish hair, wearing a kippah (it’s not just men who wear religious clothes)
- An LGBTQ+ androgynous person wearing a rainbow tallit (Queer Jews are part of the community)
- A man holding a Sephardi Torah (Jews come from different ethnographic backgrounds)
- A black woman with an afro (Black Jews are part of the community)
- A Cheredi man, wearing a hearing aid (disabled Jews can lead religious activities)
The Museum’s brand colours were used, to ensure the illustration fit in with other brand materials but additional colours were used to ensure we represented different skin tones. The illsutration solved the challenge of how to represent the breadth of the community through interrupting traditional narratives.
Client: Jewish Museum London
Sector: Art & Culture
Services: Illustration, Brochure, Print & Digital Design
