Sunday, January 17th at 11am.

Facilitated by Professor Shai Secunda.

“A brilliant short novel that serves as a brave, sharp-toothed brief against letting the past devour the present” (New York Times Book Review), Yishai Sarid’s recently published Memory Monster invites us to consider the dangers of the sacred obligation to remember, while reminding us of the existential need to forget. In particular, Memory Monster encourages us to revisit the book of Deuteronomy’s exhortation to “remember what Amalek did to you,” and its paradoxical obligation to “blot out the memory of Amalek.”

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.