LABA Live: NAME

Presented by LABA BAY AREA and the Magnes.

Over the past year, the 2026 LABA BAY AREA fellows have collectively engaged with ancient Jewish texts on the subject of NAME in LABA’s open-minded and free-spirited house of study. They encountered old stories and ideas and then created new art and culture in response.

Join us for LABA LIVE, an intimate experience of these creative works, and a teaching of some of the texts that inspired them.

Sunday, November 15, 2026 | 11:00 am – 5:00 pm

In person at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA

The Berkeley Half Marathon takes place on the same day. We encourage guests to take BART or allow extra time for traffic and parking. Learn more about road closures, detours, and time impacts.

If you have any questions about accessibility or require accommodations to participate in this event, please contact us at magnes@berkeley.edu or call us at (510) 643-2526 with as much advance notice as possible.

11:00 am – 11:30 am: Open gallery hours to see art by Annalisa Chasan, Molly Almeida and Alex Asher Daniel. Gallery will remain open all day, including during breaks between performances. Ticket required.

11:30 am – 12:30 pm: Readings and performances by Kevin Smokler, Camille Angel, and Amy Kurzweil. Ticket required.

1:30 pm – 2:30 pm: Dance from Maia Welbel and Tai Lum. LABA-style text teaching from Tova Birnbaum. Ticket required.

3:00-4:00 pm: Film from Emily Cohen Ibañez and music from Dan Wolf. Ticket required.

4:15 pm – 4:45 pm: Artist talk featuring Annalisa Chasan, Molly Almeida and Alex Asher Daniel. No ticket required.

*100% of ticket sales go to supporting local Bay Area Jewish culture.

About the 2026 theme NAME
This year at LABA, we will be jumping headlong into the potency and mystery behind names, considering how language both makes and distorts reality.

We will explore the act of naming, the act of being named, and humanity’s strange relationship with language overall. These fellows will create new work inspired by this exploration, which will be presented during our LABAlive in the fall.

For thousands of years, Jews have been obsessed with names, interrogating the relationship between language, existence, and consciousness. Assigning language to a particular person, place, thing, or feeling has never been, and will never be, a neutral act. To NAME is to give power, and to NAME is to give limits. According to some Jewish mystics, the world was created through the naming of things. “By means of the twenty-two letters, by giving them a form and shape, by mixing them and combining them in different ways, God made the soul of all that which has been created and all that which will be,” says the Sefer Yetsirah.

In the Torah, one’s name is often synonymous with one’s destiny, and a change of name can represent a profound shift. In the Talmud, we are warned against calling people bad names, which is seen as equivalent to the sins of murder and idolatry and is subject to divine prosecution. We are also forbidden from saying God’s presumed actual name, while one of the things we are allowed to call God is, evocatively, “The Name.” Meanwhile, Maimonides believed there is, and never will be, an adequate name or language to describe God.

About LABA BAY AREA
LABA BAY AREA is a laboratory for Jewish culture and a program of the Firehouse. It is part of an international collective of LABAs, all of which use classic Jewish texts to inspire the creation of art, culture, conversation, and community. The program began in 2007 at the 14th Street Y in New York City (LABA NY), and now has hubs in Buenos Aires (LABA BA), the Bay Area (LABA BAY), and Berlin (LABA BE). LABA BAY AREA was formerly LABA East Bay, and a program of the JCC East Bay. LABA presents Judaism’s rich literary and intellectual tradition in a free and creative setting, so that these fertile stories and ideas spark new thought and creative work. The output from our laboratory hubs push the boundaries of what Jewish culture can be and what Jewish texts can teach.