Making Talmud TikTok friendly

Combining Talmud study with bawdy wit and feminist insights has made MIRIAM ANZOVIN an internet sensation. She talks to ELANA SZTOKMAN.

“Today’s Daf covers a lot of issues and all of them suck.” So begins one of Miriam Anzovin’s pithy TikTok videos offering contemporary commentary on a page of Talmud.

Anzovin is a Jewish influencer, artist, social media whiz, creative, cultural commentator, and Talmud student.

Her TikTok videos offer original, witty, incisive, and often quite serious interpretations of the Daf Yomi (Daily Page), a daily study of the Talmud practiced by thousands of people around the world.

I just love TikTok, especially the way it makes people laugh. And I thought about the ways in which my side commentary on the Daf would often make people laugh.  I used to host a podcast The Vibe of the Tribe for JewishBoston.com. Once on an episode of the podcast, we invited two rabbis on to talk about the Talmud page Shabbat 110, which has a very funny sequence involving what happens to the snake accidentally gets in a woman's vagina, how do you get it out. (The secret is barbecue tongs.) And I gave my interpretation, and I looked up and I saw on the screen tears were streaming down the faces of these rabbis because they were laughing so hard.  So, I thought, maybe I have something here.

When I filmed my first video, Tractate Ta’anit. I thought, maybe five people will watch.

WATCH TIK TOK HERE

How is it going?

MA: Right now on TikTok, I have 17,000 followers, I crossed the 120,000 likes,  on Instagram I have 14,000+ followers, Twitter I’m almost at 10,000, and then YouTube I just have a few thousand because that's not my primary place to engage with my audience. My primary space is TikTok and to a lesser extent, Instagram.  

It takes like six to seven hours to do a 3-minute video. There's the learning part, script, hair and makeup, the takes, then edit, add special effects, and add captions for accessibility, and then, writing up the descriptions, posting it on the different platforms and then engaging with commenters. Every piece of every video is just me.   

If something sparks the Daf Muse as I put it, if there's something that speaks to me, that has made me have an emotional reaction or connect with something I've experienced in my own life, something in pop culture, something in current events, or things have a personal effect on me – that's the moment where I know exactly how I would talk about this with my friends.

I try to do them every few days. I don't know until that morning. It’s whether there is something that I want to talk about in the Daf. For example, right now, we're in a section of Yevamot which is just the worst. It's been days and days of talking about rape and I'm so done with this topic.

I was so nervous to do that video. I try to bring my authentic self to the learning. And that meant in this case, briefly mentioning that that I, too, am a survivor of sexual assault, as so many people are. I was terrified to release that, but the response I got after was overwhelmingly positive. People were writing to me privately and telling me their own stories and thanking me for making them feel like they could tell theirs.

After that video, some people wrote to me and were like, “I never actually thought about it that way because I've never learned it with a person who is a survivor.” Which is why one reason I believe that the more viewpoints we have and Talmudic learning and discourse, the better our understanding of the text will be. 

MA: Obviously some people are mad. I anger people on like a daily basis. Some people because of how I dress. Some people because of how I look. Some people because of the words that I say. Some people by the fact that I'm talking about the Talmud publicly at all in an online way.  Some people because they disagree with my reactions to the text.

Some people are very protective of Talmudic learning should only be done in such at such a way by such and such a type of person in such it's such a time and place. And I don't fit in that those demographics, for sure. And so sometimes it's my very being that is angering to some people.

Although, on the flip side, those are the very things for which other people like me. And I think if you make people angry that's usually a good sign that you're out there. If I hadn't made people angry nobody would be watching these videos.  

I was raised in a baal teshuva-ish (newly religious) family. We became Orthodox as a family. My mom became really interested in what it meant to be Jewish when she was in college. So, she went on this path of learning and continued observance or increasing religious observance.

I remember going to Reform temple when I was little and then we went to a Conservative congregation and then by the time I was 10 or 11 we stopped driving on Shabbat. And from grades six through eight I went to a Chabad Lubavich day school. And then after that point, I did homeschool until college.

Because my mum's love of learning or Jewish learning was ongoing, our home was the place full of Jewish books. She gave me in my DNA, essentially, a love of Judaism, and a lot of it is self-directed and self-motivated. I can still learn now in very similar ways. I do it because I want to learn it because I'm interested in it because it pulls to me It calls to me.

After I got my degree in Judaic studies, early 20s, I stopped being able to believe in a god anymore and you can't force that you can't force that. So, I am currently a secular Jew and the way I express my Jewishness, and my place in Jewish peoplehood is through Jewish learning.

This is my life now. I left my job to pursue this because this is where clearly, I'm supposed to be in my life.

I want to give a message of encouragement to people who maybe don't think that they can do Jewish learning, that they weren't taught in a yeshiva or rabbinical school. It's never too late to start learning something Jewish or anything that's meaningful to you. It doesn't matter your age, gender, religious affiliation identity. If you want to learn Jewish texts, like the Talmud, you should do it. That is your birthright, too.

Photo: Miriam Anzovin