Join us for an afternoon of interfaith text study, and open dialogue co-facilitated by Dr. Leyla Ozgur Alhassen, scholar of Qur’anic narrative, and Arielle Tonkin, visual artist and specialist in Jewish text. We will explore text as an intellectual and artistic pursuit in the Jewish and Islamic traditions, focusing on the stories in the Qur'an and the Torah that explore the character of Musa/Moshe's sister. We look forward to learning, creating, and building community with you! Hosted at the Graduate Theological Union, this event is open to the public and to people of all faiths. A light dinner will be served.
Sunday, April 17th, 4:30pm
GTU Dinner Board Room
2400 Ridge Road
Berkeley, CA 94709
Co-sponsored by:
The Center for Jewish Studies
The Center for Islamic Studies
The Muslim Jewish Arts Fellowship
With support from:
The Walter and Elise Haas Fund
The Vesper Society
The Muslim Jewish Arts Fellowship brings together Muslims and Jews in artistic, academic, communal and religious spaces for regular events which include lectures, text studies, interactive arts projects and artistic presentations. We have a vibrant website that provides resources for educators and leaders and includes original artistic content.
Arielle Tonkin is an artist and an educator. She holds a combined B.A. in Conflict Studies and Visual Arts from Boston University, and a 2012 fellowship from Yeshivat Hadar in NYC, studying Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic legal texts. Her research explores the role of community arts programming as a mediation tool in cities of ethno-religious conflict. Arielle is currently pursuing her MFA in Studio Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and working as a Museum Educator at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. Prior, she managed Public Programs at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley, and before that acted as Creative Content Manager for a Boston-based web startup. Arielle has years of museum administration and education experience from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University and the Haifa Museum of Art.
Leyla Ozgur Alhassen is a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Near Eastern Studies and was previously a Sultan Fellow in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research revolves around Qur’anic narrative technique and Qur’anic stories. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, where she specialized in Arabic literature. She received her B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles with a major in English literature, a concentration in creative writing and a minor in Arabic. She has also studied Arabic in Egypt in the CASA I and II programs.