Meet The Feminist Artist Bringing Talmud to Instagram

THE FORWARD
By Irene Connelly

Jacqueline Nicholls's The caption for this drawing, created for Kiddushin 9, reads in part “pay first - then sleep with her any way that you want. you’re the buyer.”

One afternoon on the London Underground, Jacqueline Nicholls found her eye drawn to a mother and teenage daughter sitting across from her. It also reminded her of a Talmud passage she’d read that morning, Eruvin 82, which posed the kind of odd question typical of Talmudic debate: When can a child be considered independent of its mother? Across the Atlantic, Nicholls — an artist, Jewish educator, and self-described “maverick” Talmud scholar — will host her own, slightly more intimate celebration. When she embarked on Daf Yomi in 2012, she didn’t just commit to reading the entire Talmud; she also decided to create artistic interpretations of each page and share them on social media each day. 2,711 artworks later, she’s exhibiting the fruits of this mammoth endeavor, which she calls “Draw Yomi,” at JW3, London’s leading Jewish arts venue. [More]