Featured Author Talk
Malkah’s Notebook
Mira Z Amiras, PhD in conversation with Rabbi Peretz Wolf-Prusan about Malkah’s Notebook, Seymour Fromer, and the Magnes
1:00pm | Seminar Room
Jewish Arts and Bookfest
Sunday, May 4, 2025
at UC Berkeley’s Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA
Mira Z. Amiras’s father is known for being the founder and director of the Magnes, and he spent his very last days and hours bringing the museum to its current safe haven under the wing of the Bancroft Library at UC, Berkeley. But his job—his job job for decades—was Director of Jewish Education for Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. And for him, the Magnes Museum began (as it is now, once more) as a pedagogical tool-embracing all ages, traditions, and backgrounds. It was, in its way, an adjunct to the classroom, dedicated to learning through art, music, film, and scholarship. Her father’s approach was transgressive at times, stepping out of bounds in order to see more clearly the varieties of the Jewish experience.
Malkah’s Notebook (and its accompanying film, The Day before Creation), is about his influence, and the doors that can open when questions are posed without judgment, prejudice, or fear. It’s a beautiful tale of, yes, a father and a daughter in a lifelong conversation about the nature of Torah, the aleph-bet, history, science, archaeology, and God. It’s seamlessly interwoven across the generations, time, and space simply by posing a question and following its lead-ultimately to the roots of ancient Judaism.
About the Book: Malkah’s Notebook
But they don’t get very far. As Malkah studies, her questions multiply. She discovers an earlier, hidden story of creation within the Hebrew Aleph-Bet letters in the first line of Genesis.
And a door opens. Malkah’s discovery takes her on a lifelong journey in search of her beginnings—into Jewish mystical texts, far-off places, archaeological digs, ancient gods, and ultimately into the nature of existence itself.
Part bedtime story, part poem, part journal, and coupled with highly evocative illustrations, Malkah’s Notebook is a love letter to the Hebrew alphabet that unlocks life’s greatest mysteries.
The 72nd National Jewish Book Awards —Visual Arts Award Finalist (2022)
Foreward Indies Finalist —Religion, Adult Nonfiction (2022)
About Mira Z. Amiras
Mira Z. Amiras is an anthropologist, author, and award-winning filmmaker. She was raised on her mother’s accounts of the Inquisition and Holocaust, her father’s tales of the creation and beauty of the universe, and her grandparents’ foods, folklore and music of ancient Sefarad. Mira has lived, studied, and traveled throughout the Middle East and North Africa, camped out 7,000 miles through Africa, and traveled overland from her home in Brussels to the Nepalese border. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and is Professor Emerita of Comparative Religion and Middle East Studies at San Jose State University. She is author of Development and Disenchantment in Rural Tunisia (1992), and other works on North Africa and Jewish Studies. For more see the links below. Mira is past president of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness, and was a member of the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association. She lives in San Francisco with her family.
About Rabbi Peretz Wolf-Prusan
In 1973 Rabbi Peretz Wolf-Prusan came to the Bay Area to be the Art Director at UAHC Camp Swig (also a studio assistant to Helen Burke) and to study printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the Center for Experimental and Interdisciplinary Arts at San Francisco State University (1985). From 1974-1984 He was a Hebrew scribe and printmaker. His love of Hebrew letters led to a passion for Hebrew literature and he changed course, closed his studio and studied to become a Rabbi at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (1990). Before retiring he was a Senior Educator at Lehrhaus Judaica. He has returned to studio work in printmaking and Hebrew lettering.