Loyola Marymount University (LMU) Professor Dana Resnick’s class, “Jewish Spirit in Drama,” suggests a sentimentalism familiar to anyone reared on Jewish shows like “Fiddler on the Roof” or “Funny Girl.” For her students, however, the class is less a deep dive into the work of Streisand and Topol and more a study in Jewish innovation, artistryand renewal.
The course, which Resnick took over this semester, is informed by her background in live theater and directing. In practical terms, this translates to the students taking inspiration not only from Yiddish playwrights and American-Jewish screenwriters, but from somewhat more unconventional sources.
“I approached the class from less of a historian’s perspective and more as a question of where Jewish spirit and performance intersect,” Resnick, who has taught at LMU for 13 years, said.
“For the first half of the semester, we read some plays and watched some films where Judaism in different contexts was the subject matter. Then, for the two projects we did this semester, we found material not already dramatized in a performance, and asked [ourselves] how we could reinterpret the traditional stories or contemporary articles in dramatic pieces.”
The traditional stories and contemporary articles in question refer to PJ Jewish children’s books and articles from The Jewish Journal’s Oct. 25 issue, “My Letter to Candice Owens” by Dennis Prager and “The Art of Jewish Resilience” by Monica Osborne. Students congregated in groups of twos and threes to choose a story from both the magazine and the children’s storybooks, ranging from the fable of Yosef Mokir Shabbos, a poor man who finds a pearl in a fish’s belly, to the true story of the American girl who in 1922 became the first girl be a bat mitzvah. Over four classes, the students reimagined the source material into performances that would feel timely and pertinent, changing placenames and dates but keeping the themes intact and exploring their deeper meanings.
For this semester’s two major projects, some groups created short films, while others performed live in front of the class. One notable project was a filmed dating show, based on an article in The Journal about matchmaking. Each took inspiration from a wide swath of sources, from the story about a children’s blanket which, over time, gets replaced with so many patches it becomes something else entirely (a dramatization of Theseus’ Paradox), to a Jewish ghost story that Resnick’s students reimagined as a play about a family camping trip in California, incorporating the original story as a spooky campfire tale.
“Jewish Spirit in Drama” is itself part of a wider series of classes LMU — a Jesuit college — offers about how different cultures’ interpret drama. For some of Resnick’s students, who come from various religious and ethnic backgrounds, this is the first time they are interacting with Jewish texts and fables.
“The students are really learning about the culture of Judaism through the storytelling, from The Jewish Journal and the children’s books to the variety of plays,” Resnick said. “They figure out where they connect and how the stories resonate with their own lives, morals, and ethics. They respond really well to this approach.”
Louise Lipsey, a Senior Theatre major and LMU Hillel President, concurred.
“Taking this class has been such a rewarding and eye-opening experience,” she said. “Before, I had only read one Jewish play in my life, so being able to explore and learn from so many different Jewish stories across diverse forms of media has been transformative. I also love seeing my classmates build a genuine connection with Judaism in a fun and engaging way. Humanizing and learning about Judaism feels especially important in today’s climate.”
The students are not the only ones engaging meaningfully with Jewish culture through the course. Resnick created The Jewish Journal and children’s fables’ assignments after finding articles at temple and in her children’s own library collection. Throughout the semester, she’s been revisiting old stories from her childhood and unearthing new ones through both her students and her son and daughter, age 7 and 10 respectively, who are beginning to explore their Jewish identity. After her daughter decided she wanted to have a bat mitzvah, the Resnicks joined a synagogue — where Resnick first spotted The Jewish Journal issue she would later put on her syllabus.
Resnick said the inspiration for the course comes not merely from events in her own life, but also from LMU’s academic mission.
“The school, she said, “really centers around education of the whole self and a deeper understanding of who you are and where you come from, but also of the world and where other people come from. So we can have open discourse in classes and deep conversations from an academic and pedagogical perspective.”
Resnick is presenting a new play, “E=MC2: The Einsteins Meet Charlie Chaplin, by Boise Thomas, at the Electric Lodge in Venice. The play centers on the historic dinner between Albert and Elsa Einstein and Charlie Chaplin in 1933, when Einstein was marked for assassination by the newly elected Adolf Hitler, and Chaplin and Elsa joined forces to convince him to leave Germany. The timing is pertinent: In the wake of a volatile election cycle and a sharp uptick in antisemitism and other racially charged crimes, Resnick feels it is important now more than ever to find the common thread running between history and contemporary events.
“I think things happen for a reason,” Resnick said. “I think there was a reason why I was asked to teach this class and to direct this play at the same time that my children are exploring their own relationship with Judaism, which also encourages me to take a deeper look at my own culture and faith. Things happen like this, and it feels like it was meant to be.”
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