Parshanut: An Intro to Jewish Commentary

November 3 and 10 at 6:30pm Eastern

This 2 -session, free online workshop with writer and English literature professor Aaron Kreuter is designed for writers of all levels of experience who are interested in writing from an anti- or non-Zionist worldview. Split over two weeks, the workshops will incorporate reading and discussion of Jewish anti-Zionist writing, writing prompts and exercises, and a generative writing session, where participants will have time to write fiction, non-fiction, or poetry, as well as time to share their work with the group.

Introduction to Judaism Beyond Nationalism is a broad-stroke survey of Jewish life, culture, belief and non-belief, and the major ideas that have shaped Jews and Judaism across time. The course offers participants a grounding in the practices, philosophies, and expressions of Jewish life from the ancient world to the present.

Parshanut: An Intro to Jewish Commentary

Wednesdays at 6:00-7:30 PM EST October 21st - November 25th

This six session class will introduce students to the world of Jewish Torah commentary, known as parshanut. We'll study the weekly Torah portion with some of the most foundational commentators, exploring the approaches of these medieval and early modern rabbis to interpreting Tanakh.

Join us for the book release event, in partnership with Jewish Currents, McNally-Jackson, and Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, of Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History by Benjamin Moser, in conversation with activist and writer Jasper Nathaniel. The two will discuss the history of Jewish Anti-Zionism, its current iterations, and what it means to actively involve yourself in this tradition today.

On August 7th at 2pm Eastern, Rabbi Andy Kahn sits down with Zohare for a conversation about diaspora, magic, comparative religion, and what it means to teach Judaism rooted in scholarship and love when so many mainstream institutions have collapsed it into ahistorical nationalism.

Her shop, jewitches.com, carries ethically sourced ritual goods, herbs, books, and Judaica drawn from across the diaspora. Worth a browse before or after the conversation.

What gets lost when Jewish history is told from a single root?

Devin Naar, the Isaac Alhadeff Professor in Sephardic Studies at the University of Washington, has spent two decades recovering the Ladino-speaking Jewish world that American institutional memory mostly left out. His scholarship draws on multi-rootedness, a concept describing communities that come from more than one lineage at once, rather than the familiar frame of a single homeland and a single dispersal. That idea offers a different starting point than the usual diaspora and homeland narrative, one shaped by Mediterranean Jewish socialism, Sephardic illegibility within American racial categories, and a long tradition of solidarity built sideways rather than upward.

Join Andy Kahn and Devin Naar for a conversation about Sephardic memory, Ashkenormativity in Jewish left spaces, and what new Jewish institutions can look like when they draw on more than one root.

This is a recorded, virtual conversation. Registrants will receive the Zoom link ahead of the event.

Most Americans first encounter the words "Hebrew Israelite" through a street corner encounter, a news story, or a Southern Poverty Law Center label. Rabbi Walter Isaac, PhD, has spent two decades documenting an entirely different reality: a global, centuries-old tradition with roots in the Atlantic slave trade, ties to figures from throughout United States history, and a population the Manhattan Institute conservatively estimates at 22 million in the United States alone. In this conversation, Rabbi Isaac will walk us from the foundations of the tradition through its painful entanglement with the slave and sex trade, the wide variety of people who claim Hebrew Israelite identity today, and what an honest truth-and-reconciliation process between Hebrew Israelite and predominantly white rabbinic Jewish communities could actually look like.