Celia Gurevitch Jewish Community Library

Thank you all 20-25 of you who came out last night to hear Maggie Anton’s lecture. The small crowd (see picture at the end of this post) was enthusiastic enough to hear Maggie’s fascination stories about Rashi, how she got interested in the topic, the future of Talmud scholarship and 12th century renaissance. These were just some of the topics she covered with her energetic and funny talk. I hope we can get her to come back when the last installment of her Rashi’s daughter trilogy will be out next summer.

Maggie talked about the importance of studying Talmud. Tomorrow I will post a message intended to support you to do so. I am also planning to post a short video on YouTube from her talk. Finally, her latest book, the Secret Scholar will be available in the library after I catalog it next week.

As usual I would like to recount some of the lessons I learned:

• The Bohemian’s deadline is Friday noon before the week of publications and add run for two weeks.
• Every detail needs to be fixed in advance, nothing should be left assumed. In our case we had a slight miscommunication about Maggie’s lodging, but thankfully an old friend of hers volunteered to host her just in the nick of time.
• I need to be familiar with the layout of the meeting location, i.e. check out in advance if I am not familiar with it. Case in point Golden Gate transit’s bus stop it Maple @ Brookwood, is not actually on either of those streets and the salespeople at the nearby shops had no idea where the stop might be. Similarly, the same bus downtown does not actually drop you off at the main Transit Mall, where the sign is. The bus stop is on the crossroad.
  Put on the kettle early enough so people could have tea/coffee in case the room gets chilly.
• If I want to invite people to dine with our guest I need to ask them in advance whether they are interested and/or available.
  Need to find a way to reach Shomrei Torah members.
• Get someone to take pictures. I did not manage to make any good ones; the one below is the best.