Prooftexts and HUC Connect Present “This Is Not the National Theatre, Here We Study Talmud”: Performing the Talmud in the Television Show Shenayim Oḥazin
This event has been postponed. A new date will be posted when available.
Mira Balberg, Ph.D., Professor and David Goodblatt Endowed Chair in Ancient Jewish Civilization, University of California San Diego
Yair Lipshitz, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Theatre Arts and Head of the Cymbalista Jewish Heritage Center at Tel Aviv University
The Israeli Educational Television series Shenayim oḥazin, which aired in 1984–85, was meant to aid the instruction of Talmud in junior high school. Its creators dramatized and staged the Talmud—both its content and its form—and thereby captured, channeled, and adapted some of the performative features intrinsic to the Talmud itself. Learn how television can present a productive tension between two kinds of drama, “a drama of ideas” and “a drama of actions,” thereby reflecting a similar tension within the talmudic texts.