What will the future mean for Jewish culture?
That’s a question international conference-slash-mini-festival Rejewvenation is out to answer. At least, they’ll entertain you while you’re thinking about how a community that just celebrated its 5766th new year could reinvent itself.
If you look at U of T calendars for the next few weeks, you’ll see that Rejewvenation has several events scheduled over the next week around downtown T.O., including many on campus, that all contribute towards the goal of rethinking and reinventing Jewish Culture through art and scholarly exchanges.
Organizer Louis Kaplan explained that the conference is not about reforming Jewish identity, but instead about thinking about where Jewish culture is heading in the 21st century. He explained that the wordplay in the title was a way of indicating this forward movement.
Of the productions staged this week, a mixture of stage shows, panel discussions, lectures, and an art exhibit about Jewish culture were featured. Each event looks at a specific area of modern culture, then examines it in a Jewish context.
It is not necessary to be a member of the Jewish community to understand the greater issues being discussed. For example, there are panels dealing with the internet’s effect on religion, some on feminism, and others dealing with a queer Jewish culture.
The art exhibit, Command J, opened last Sunday to a large crowd at X-Space which is located in Kensington Market. The works featured here provocatively pose a modern question to different aspects of traditional Jewish law.
Included in the exhibit is Helene Aylan, whose work entitled “The Digital Liberation of G-D” focuses on the problematic verses in the five books of Moses, or the Pentateuch: using computer technology, viewers are asked to express their own views on the areas of the books that have raised difficult questions for Jewish scholars over hundreds of years.
Jefferey Shaw’s “Golden Calf” used interactive 3-D imaging to show the body of the famous, golden calf that the idolatrous Jews adopted to replace Moses. The calf sits on a pedestal on a small screen.
This exhibit also showcases “The Ten Commandments/Prohibited Weapons” by Simon Glass, as well as “Gender cuts/the Jew under thee knife” by Melissa Shiff. Shiff’s project depicts the ritual of circumcision along with commentary from prominent members of the Toronto, Prague, and New York Jewish communities, engaging the viewer to critique the practice in light of new gender and religious identities.
The conference and mini-festival has so far received lots of interest from the downtown Toronto community. Saturday’s show Queer Jewish Weddings on has sold out, and a second show had to be added. Tickets are still available to that.
Command J is free and runs until November 20. All other performance dates, times and availability can be found on the Rejewvenation website along with a list of the conference events that will be taking place. To find out more, visit www.rejewvenation2005.com.
