Hebrew school was fine when you were 10. Ready for an adult look at Judaism?
The Grad Network, the Collaborative, and Birthright Israel NEXT are proud to team up to offer sessions just for the 20s and 30s crowd two Tuesday nights a month. There will be two relevant, informal, Jewish topics to choose from each night and plenty of time for schmoozing afterwards over drinks and a snack.
Cost is $5/session or $20 for unlimited sessions throughout the semester.
This week's topics:
Jewish World Making: An interactive writing workshop (part 2 - continued from 9/23, though if you didn't attend the first one, you're still welcome to come tonight! *see below for a complete description of this workshop), led by Rachel Howe
Love, Sex, and Marriage (part 1), led by Rabbi Howard Alpert
Rachel Howe is earning her Master's in fiction writing at Temple University, where she also teaches writing. She is the author of numerous articles and audio stories.
Rabbi Howard Alpert is the Executive Director of Hillel of Greater Philadelphia.
Tuesday Topics dates for the fall semester:
October 28 at Steinhardt Hall
November 11 at the Gershman Y
November 25 at Steinhardt Hall
December 9 at the Gershman Y
*From scholars to soldiers, almost all Jewish people at some point ask themselves what it is exactly that makes us Jewish. Some have said Jewishness is an ethnicity while others feel its religious aspect dominates. Some people identify culturally, others spiritually, some with a sense of history and others with a sense of kinship. Many of us feel it is some combination of these intangibles that compose the essence of our Jewishness.
It's very hard to explicate intangibles, which is why so many of us turn to narrative. Narrative captures that moment, that flicker, that unsaid understanding that cannot be explained or described exactly, but can more easily be hinted at, implied, shown. To write our Jewishness then, we can turn to narrative. To write narrative, we turn to personal experience. To write a narrative of Jewishness, we turn to our personal experiences of Judaism, be they cultural, religious, spiritual, material, be they tender, violent, mind-blowing, or uncomfortable.
The term "world making" refers to the way in which a writer illuminates an unknown world to a reader, making a Jewish tale very different from an Irish or other tale, even if they share a similar plot or theme. This is done by including the specific details, symbols, dialogue, and tone, and language needed to create the specific culture, in a way, using words as the bricks and mortar of a textual city.
Like Proust's madeleine cookie, the taste of the past will rocket us to the roots of our personal Judaism. We will discuss ways of uncovering memory and talk about how to use memory to fuel accounts of ourselves both past and present. We will undertake several experiments, using the bits of dragged up memory like broken shells to create poems and vignettes. We will discuss the basics of language improvement techniques to create one revision.
The workshop will include tasting and describing Jewish foods and music. Discussion will center on personal memories. Readings will include Proust, autobiographical poetry, and selections from Angela's Ashes and A Walker in the City. Our focus will be Jewish world making.
