Wonders to Behold: the Ten Plagues as Art and Protest

Tuesday August 18  |  6:30 - 7:30 PM                                              Online 

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One of the most dramatic and memorable stories from the Bible is the story of how God liberated the Israelites from slavery by sending a series of disasters--the ten plagues--to force their Egyptian taskmasters to let them go. People have been telling and retelling this story for centuries through ritual, sermons, poetry, painting, movies, and even as protest theater. This talk will follow this tradition of retelling the ten plagues into the present, exploring how various modern artists have reimagined the signs and wonders of the biblical story in response to the calamities and injustices of their own day.

Steven Weitzman serves as the Ella Darivoff Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania as well as the Abraham M. Ellis Professor of Semitic Languages and Literatures in the Department of Religious Studies. His books include Solomon: the Lure of Wisdom, a volume in the Jewish Lives series from Yale University Press; The Origin of the Jews: the Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age, winner of a National Book Award; the co-edited Princeton Companion to Jewish Studies; and most recently, Disasters of Biblical Proportions: the Ten Plagues Then, Now, and at the End of the World, the book he will be drawing on for this program.