Celia Gurevitch Jewish Community Library

The brand new Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco will have an interesting event this Thursday, titled: Google’s Talmud: The Web, Jewish Culture, and the Power of Associative Thinking. Here is part of the description:

During this presentation, three cutting-edge thinkers - Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, Paul Haahr and Howard Rheingold - will discuss the connections between art, technology and Jewish culture, as seen through the new social, intellectual and spiritual implications of the idea of “search.” This will be followed by a discussion with Dan Schifrin, Museum’s Director of Public Programs and Writer in Residence.

If you are one of those people who cannot make it to the event, like me, I recommend a book that relates to the topic. The publisher describes Marc-Alain Ouaknin’s The burnt book; Reading the Talmud in a way that I believe connects its theme to that of the event,

In a profound look at what it means for new generations to read and interpret ancient religious texts, rabbi and philosopher Marc-Alain Ouaknin offers a postmodern reading of the Talmud, one of the first of its kind. Combining traditional learning and contemporary thought, Ouaknin dovetails discussions of spirituality and religious practice with such concepts as deconstruction, intertextuality, undecidability, multiple voicing, and eroticism in the Talmud. On a broader level, he establishes a dialogue between Hebrew tradition and the social sciences, which draws, for example, on the works of Lévinas, Blanchot, and Jabès as well as Derrida. The Burnt Book represents the innovative thinking that has come to be associated with a school of French Jewish studies, headed by Lévinas and dedicated to new readings of traditional texts, which is fast gaining influence in the United States.