Join us on Tuesday March 9th, 2021 at 12:30 PM PST/ 3:30 PM EST for a conversation between Rabbi Elie Spitz and Etgar Keret, an internationally acclaimed Israeli writer and filmmaker, about Keret’s writing and film projects, his approach to storytelling and his penchant for the absurd. Equal parts Franz Kafka and Kurt Vonnegut, and suffused with inimitable and absurdist hilarity, Israeli writer Etgar Keret is a singular voice in contemporary literature. His masterful short stories, at once dark and delightfully comedic, capture human experience in all of its inspiring beauty and perplexing shortcomings and bewitch readers with their surreal worlds.

About Etgar Keret. Known for his short stories, rarely extending beyond three or four pages, Keret fuses the bizarre with the banal, and offers a window on a surreal world that is both dark and comic. Keret’s books have been published in over 45 languages and are bestsellers in Israel. His books include The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God, Missing Kissinger, The Nimrod Flipout, The Girl on the Fridge, Suddenly a Knock on the Door, and Fly Already, which won the prestigious Sapir Prize. Keret is also the author of a memoir, The Seven Good Years, in which he contemplates moments of his life against a backdrop of constant conflict, casting an absurd light on both the monumental and mundane. More than 60 short movies have been based on his stories. Keret’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and the Paris Review, among many other publications. He is a regular contributor to This American Life. In 2016 Keret was awarded The Charles Bronfman Prize, recognizing his work as inspiring Jewish Values and having global impact. Keret has also received the Book Publishers Association`s Platinum Prize several times, the Chevalier medallion of France’s Order of Arts and Letters, and has been awarded the Prime Minister`s Prize and the Ministry of Culture`s Cinema Prize. Keret’s stories have inspired Polish architect Jakub Szczesny to build the narrowest house in the world (38 inches wide) in Warsaw. As a filmmaker, Keret is the writer of several feature screenplays, including Skin Deep (1996), which won First Prize at several international film festivals and was awarded the Israeli Oscar. Wrist Cutters, featuring Tom Waits, was based on Keret’s story Kneller’s Happy Campers. Jellyfish, his first movie as a director along with his wife Shira Geffen, won the coveted Camera d’Or prize for best first feature at the Cannes Film Festival 2007.

Rabbi Elie Kaplan Spitz approaches the familiar in unfamiliar ways. A spiritual leader and scholar specializing in topics of spirituality and Judaism, he teaches, writes and speaks to a wide range of audiences. He has served as the rabbi of Congregation B’nai Israel in Tustin, California, for almost three decades and is a member of the Rabbinical Assembly Committee on Law and Standards. Rabbi Spitz is author of Healing from Despair: Choosing Wholeness in a Broken World; Does the Soul Survive? A Jewish Journey to Belief in Afterlife, Past Lives & Living with Purpose and Increasing Wholeness: Jewish Wisdom and Guided Meditations to Strengthen and Calm Body, Heart, Mind and Spirit (all Jewish Lights) and many articles dealing with spirituality and Jewish law. Rabbi Spitz has spent COVID quarantine teaching the Psalms with half-hour presentations for each Psalm (now up to 101), which is accessible at this LINK.