JTS in the Berkshires: Learning Inspired by This Season’s Performances

JTS in the Berkshires: Compelling Jewish Learning Inspired by This Season’s Performances

Taking inspiration from the arts programming that enlivens summer in the Berkshires, eminent JTS scholars will explore a performance of Verdi’s Requiem in Terezin, interrogate the legacy of Richard Wagner through the lens of the Bible’s imperfect messengers, and introduce an extraordinary 16th-century Jewish play written in the style of Shakespeare’s marriage comedies.

Friday, August 9

Matchmaking and Midrash: A Hebrew Comedy From the Time of Shakespeare
Lecture and Dramatic Reading

Dr. Stefanie Siegmund will introduce you to The Comedy of Betrothal, the oldest Hebrew play in existence, and its creator, Leone de’Sommi, an Italian Jew from Mantua.  Written in the 16th century in the style of an Italian Renaissance comedy, the play will surprise you with its provocative themes and creative weaving of biblical and Talmudic texts with a plot more characteristic of Shakespeare’s marriage comedies. Dr. Siegmund will discuss the play in the context of the history and cultural lives of the Jews of Italy in the early modern period. Local actors will perform scenes from the work.

Shakespeare & Company
Elayne Bernstein Theater
70 Kemble Street
Lenox, Massachusetts

11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

Tickets: $15

Register Now

For more information, contact Lynn Feinman at (212) 678-8821 or lyfeinman@jtsa.edu

Presented in partnership with Knesset Israel and in cooperation with the Jewish Federation of the Berkshires.  Supported in part by a grant from the Harold Grinspoon Foundation and the Herald Institute for Jewish Studies of JTS.