Saturday, November 14 @ 7pm
Tickets: $15
Location disclosed upon registration
With Special Guest Dr Michael Swartz, Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Religious Studies at OSU
Dir David Tauber, Israel, Hebrew, 104 min, 2025
Weeks after giving birth to her first child, a young religious woman arrives at her Rabbi’s wife’s home, claiming her husband has been replaced. He looks identical, but she insists he’s a double.
The Rabbi’s wife believes she needs psychiatric care, but the Rabbi interprets it as taking a Midrash too literally, expecting it to resolve itself. From there, everything spirals. This mind-bending, genre-hopping mystery drama explores how people change in relationships, the difference between falling in love and staying in love, and what must be endured between them.
Michael D. Swartz (Ph.D., New York University) is Academy Professor of Hebrew and Religious Studies Emeritus in the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the Ohio State University. His research focuses on the cultural history of Judaism in late antiquity, early Jewish mysticism and magic, and ritual studies. He is the author of The Mechanics of Providence: The Workings of Ancient Jewish Magic and Mysticism (2018); The Signifying Creator: Non-Textual Sources of Meaning in Ancient Judaism (2012); Scholastic Magic: Ritual and Revelation in Early Jewish Mysticism (1996), and Mystical Prayer in Ancient Judaism (1992); and co-author, with Joseph Yahalom, of Avodah: Ancient Poems for Yom Kippur (2005) and Hebrew and Aramaic Incantation Texts from the Cairo Genizah (1992), with Lawrence H. Schiffman. He also served as the Associate Editor for Judaica for the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Religion (2005).