Page - 107 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

Review: Movies and Midrash | 107www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 107–109 Stefanie Knauss Book Review Wendy I. Zierler, Movies and Midrash Popular Film and Jewish Religious Conversation. Foreword by Eugene B. Borowitz. Albany: State University of New York, 2017, xiii + 309 pp., ISBN 978-1-4384-6615-6. With Movies and Midrash, Wendy I. Zierler makes a very welcome and important contribution to the field of film and theology by adding a Jewish voice to a (so far) mostly Christian conversation. In eleven chapters and a conclusion, each focusing on a different film, the author shows how the analysis of popular film can enrich and deepen the understanding of central aspects of Jewish theol- ogy, using a method she calls “inverted midrash” (14). The book emerged from a course taught by Zierler, a professor of literature and feminist studies at He- brew Union College-Jewish Institute, together with the late Rabbi Dr. Eugene Borowitz, with the goal of “combining close analysis of film narrative and visual- ity with a study of an array of classical and modern text […] as a means of deep textual engagement and Jewish religious return” (12). Out of these commitments grows Zierler’s particular approach to contem- porary film, inspired by Franz Rosenzweig’s “learning in reverse order”, that moves from non-Jewish knowledge back to the Torah as a means to overcome the modern alienation from Jewish tradition (14). Consequently, in their course (and in this book), Zierler and Borowitz “begin [their] learning with the pro- found matters that are raised by thoughtful, artistically rendered novels and movies and seek to show how they are analogous to or intersect with one or another aspects of Jewish thought, text study, practice, memory, and knowl- edge” (14). This approach is rooted in the midrashic tradition of biblical exegesis in which parables are used to contextualize the biblical text and make it rel- evant to a different context. In this book, the secular narratives and images of the films are understood as a mashal (parable) that finds its application (nim- shal) in Jewish text study and theology, deepening the understanding of Torah (18). Thus the chapters move from film to Torah, and sometimes back again to the film, enabling an enriched interpretation of the film after the theological re- flection it inspired. Drawing on Brent S. Plate, Zierler understands her stance in this endeavor of “Jewish Reel Theology” as one of “re-creative alienation” that DOI: 10.25364/05.4:2018.1.8