Book Salon & Beit Midrash - Muck: A Novel

Facilitated by Professor Shai Secunda

Co-sponsored by 929 English and IDRA

We are living through extraordinary times, where disorienting disturbances come at us fast, where talking-heads and pontificators preach their frightening predictions, and where stories and other literary forms still retain great power, even while taking on new forms.

In his novel Muck, award-winning Israeli novelist, Dror Burstein, vividly retells the Jeremiah story in a tale for the ages - though especially for today. Join us as we discuss Muck and put it in dialogue with the classical Jewish texts (especially the book of Jeremiah) that inspired it and which it inspires us to reread.

Shai Secunda occupies the Jacob Neusner chair in Judaism at Bard College, where he directs the Interdisciplinary Study of Religions program. He is the author of The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in Sasanian Iran (Philadelphia, 2014), and The Talmud’s Red Fence: Menstruation and Difference in Babylonian Judaism and its Sasanian Context (Oxford, 2020), and writes regularly for the Jewish Review of Books on Jewish scholarship and culture.

Free of Charge, Suggested donation $15