Building Jewish Bridges is again using local theater arts to explore elements of Jewish thinking and identity. This spring we are working with Berkeley Repertory Theater using two of their productions as springboards to a discussion.
This spring playwright Nina Raine’s play, Tribes, will be produced at Berkeley Rep from April 11 to May 11. Raine is herself the daughter of a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father. In her play it is not the Jewishness of the family that her characters seek to protect, but a different form of being unique, deafness.
Class participants should plan to see the play on their own. Contact me, Dawn Kepler, to get the discount code for purchasing your ticket.
After the Play: Tribes
In April 2014 Berkeley bring to their stage Nina Raine’s Tribes. Nina Raine explained in a 2010 interview that the idea of writing the play came to her after she saw a documentary about a Deaf couple who were expecting a child, and they said that they hoped their child would be Deaf. She said that it occurred to her that a family was a tribe, whose members wanted to pass on values, beliefs and language to their children. She began to see that there were “tribes everywhere,” in groups including individual families and religious communities, with their own rituals and hierarchies that are hard to understand by “outsiders.”
Jews commonly refer to being Jewish as being ‘a member of the tribe.’ How much are we indeed a tribe? Are there core rituals and beliefs that all Jews share? How does one gain entry to a family, clan or tribe? Join us for a discussion of Jewish identity and how it works both to support a sense of confidence and belonging in a world grown so big that many feel disenfranchised, yet remains elusive to some who feel outside its boundaries.
Join Rabbi Menachem Creditor to discuss being inside and outside of the Jewish tribe.
Date: Thursday, April 24
Time: 7:30 – 9:00 pm
Place: Lehrhaus Judaica, 2736 Bancroft Way, Berkeley
Cost: $12
Questions: Contact Dawn at dawn@buildingjewishbridges.org or call 510-845-6420 x11