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This class will combine interactive Torah study and personal narrative to share key insights from Professor Ziva Hassenfeld's book, The Second Conversation. She started as a high school teacher, left the classroom to earn her doctorate at Stanford University, and then, with academic training, returned to the middle school classroom to teach and study her own Bible classroom. Her goal was to create the ideal interpretive community. There were ups and down and through it, she learned a few deep truths about how textual interpretation unfolds between people. This class will use biblical texts to engage in the first and second conversation to explore how textual interpretation happens and why this process matters profoundly in order to understand our world.

Led by Professor Ziva Hassenfeld.

Ziva R. Hassenfeld is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Assistant Professor in Jewish Education at Brandeis University, and Assistant Director of Research for the Mandel Center. She studies reading comprehension from a sociocultural perspective, focusing on how children develop interpretations of the Hebrew Bible as a case of student reading development. In addition to her research, Ziva is a passionate educator. She has taught Hebrew Bible in a variety of settings, including at JCDS, Gann Academy, Genesis/BIMA at Brandeis, Silicon Valley Beit Midrash, Stanford Hillel, Congregation Beth Jacobs, and Congregation Emek Beracha. She is a Wexner Fellow and Davidson Scholar, Class 25.