Lecture Series – Moses and the Silver Screen

Jewish Museum and Cultural Center

Arthur Z. Steinberg Lecture Series presents:

Rabbi Michael Panitz

Moses and the Silver Screen

Dr. Michael Panitz has been the Rabbi at Temple Israel in Norfolk since 1992. Trained at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he was ordained
as a rabbi in 1982 and received a Ph.D. in Jewish history in 1989. He has taught religious studies, history, and Hebrew language at Old Dominion University and Virginia Wesleyan University.

Bible stories have been told and retold for millennia. Over the past 100 years, this enterprise has included the medium of film. This lecture examines a century of Bible movies about Moses and the Exodus.  What happens when people retell sacred stories in that medium? There is a blend of old and new. What is more, the “new” of 1923 and the “new” of 2014 are themselves different. The Bible story becomes a lens for framing the history of our
times.