Sunday, March 7th at 11am.

Facilitated by Professor Shai Secunda

In his second novel, Homeland Elegies, playwright and novelist Ayad Akhtar offers us a sweeping, paradoxically fictive memoir about America, immigrant families, and the possibilities and impossibilities of finding oneself in a big story. For the next installment of 929’s Book Salon & Beit Midrash, Akhtar’s novel invites us to revisit our own textual tradition and explore the movements of individuals in and out of the incredible, impossible, Jewish story.

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.