LABA Live: Change
Nov 16 @ 11:00 am - 4:00 pm
Presented by LABA BAY AREA and the Magnes.
Over the past year, the 2025 LABA BAY AREA fellows have collectively engaged with ancient Jewish texts on the subject of CHANGE in LABA’s open-minded and free-spirited house of study. Inspired by a yearlong journey into the ancient Jewish imagination, the fellows 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 the include visual art, dance, theater, film, and music, with a teaching of some of the texts that inspired them.
Sunday, November 16, 2025 | 11:00 am – 4:00 pm
In person at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA
*100% of ticket sales go to supporting events for, and work by, local LABA artists.
If you have any questions about accessibility or require accommodations to participate in this event, please contact us at magnesprograms@berkeley.edu or call us at (510) 643-2526 with as much advance notice as possible.
11:00 am – 12:00 pm: Open gallery hours to see the visual and site-specific art installations. Featuring the work of Hila Amram, Michelle Brenner, Samantha Grant, Ronit Shalem, and Ari Salomon. The artists will be present and leading short, casual discussions about their work. No ticket required.
12:30 pm – 2:00 pm: Live performances and teaching featuring theater from Maya De La Rosa-Cohen, film from Chel Mandell, music from Chance Reiniesch, dance from Liv Schaffer, and learning with LABA scholar Sam Shonkoff. Paid ticket required.*
2:30 pm – 3:00 pm: Interactive “theater midrash” text study with LABA scholar Tova Birnbaum. Dive into an ancient text through improvisation and creative storytelling. No ticket required. (Though note that there is limited capacity in the space so entry is not guaranteed without a paid ticket).
3:00 pm – 4:00 pm: Gallery show open to the public. No ticket required.
LABA LIVE Event Website
About the 2025 theme CHANGE
Our relationship with change reaches in two, oppositional directions. We fear change, loathe change, long to keep things as they are or reverse things to how they used to be. We desire to return to mythical homelands, to gardens, our childhoods, to the people and communities and places we knew before change happened. And yet, what is our lives if not constant change, or the pursuit of constant change? The, to borrow from our Buddhist friends, permanence of impermanence? Changes in our moods, changes in our bodies, changes in our levels of enlightenment, sometimes premeditated, sometimes sought out through the embrace of new experiences. We subject ourselves to unpredictability with the hope that we will be changed, if only for this moment, if only forever.
As culture-makers, we simultaneously pursue change of words, materials, musical notes, ideas, sensibilities, and warn others of easy, shallow change. Change, real change, is never so simple. In Jewish culture, we also toggle between a resistance to change and embrace of constant flux – laws, ideas, customs, feelings are simultaneously fixed and malleable, altered through careful deliberations as well as dreams and intuitions. Medieval scholar Maimonides believed the Torah was immutable. Meanwhile, Spanish Jewish mystics believed that truth was mutable, and every era demands a new approach to the Torah.
This year at LABA we will dive into the paradoxes of change in our collective souls and individual creative practices. Most importantly, we’ll have a great time talking, eating, drinking, learning, and laughing in the lush, fertile, free-flowing, romantic, super-serious, and endlessly playful environment of LABA: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture.
We invite you to look within, or without, be still, or be active, and interrogate change in your minds and your work.
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.
