Paper Midrash

Join us for a hands-on papercutting workshop where you’ll have the opportunity to study text and create your own visual midrash. No experience necessary — you don’t have to know how to paint or draw. We bring the knives and comic books, you bring your enthusiasm!

Instructors: Rabbi Shawna Brynjegard-Bialik and Isaac Brynjegard-Bialik

Cost: $18 per person

Husband and wife “dynamic duo” Isaac and Rabbi Shawna Brynjegard-Bialik spend a lot of their time talking about Judaism, comic books, and art — and are excited to be coming to your community to have you join their conversation, tell them about your favorite biblical or comic book hero, and make some art.

They have a powerful one-two punch, bringing deep Jewish scholarship together with a contemporary reinterpretation of the traditional art of papercutting, providing workshop participants with the opportunity and tools to make visual biblical commentary — what they call “paper midrash.” They met at Jewish camp in high school, and have three teenage daughters.

Isaac Brynjegard-Bialik cuts up comic books and reassembles them into papercuts that explore the stories of the Jewish people, connecting popular culture with sacred texts. He has shown his papercuts in galleries across the United States, and his work is in the hands of collectors around the world. Isaac regularly speaks about the intersection of art and Judaism, has written on the topic for the CCAR Journal, and maintains an annual summer residency at URJ Camp Newman.

Rabbi Shawna Brynjegard-Bialik adapts traditional Jewish concepts to a modern Reform context, and brings that synergy to students of all ages. She is an engaging teacher of Torah, bringing text to life with her unique, modern perspective. She received a Master of Hebrew Letters in 1998 from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, was ordained in 2002 as a member of HUC-JIR’s first Los Angeles class, and serves on the faculty of URJ Camp Newman every summer.

Register for classes with the form below.

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