The seminar dives into a vast topic of crucial importance for Jewish culture that also helps us understand their enduring appeal: the surprising diversity of classical Jewish religious traditions and the creative transformation of these traditions in early and modern times. Though, in modernity (as in the present day), many Jewish intellectuals in Eastern Europe opted for secularity and a cultural rather than religious self-expression, they creatively echoed and remodeled inherited religious templates. In our meetings, we will analyze carefully matched pairs of modern artistic products (novellas, poems, plays, and visual works) and classical Jewish writings; these pairings illustrate the depth of the new works—how they evoke and sometimes subvert the tradition—even as they surprise us with the humor or insightfulness of the ancient sources. The pairings enable us ask questions including: How, when, for what reasons and for what audience were Jewish traditions transformed in literature, art, theater, and film? We address these questions using the tools of religious studies, theology, gender analysis, and literary studies, and grounded in Slavic and Jewish cultural studies. We will organize the course by examining the range of emotions evoked in these works—including anger, nostalgia, grief, humility, and humor (sometimes mixed together)—to see how these universal experiences with which we can all relate are shaped by individual sources and authors into memorable, distinctive works, ancient and modern.