Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

My guest this week is Adele Reinhartz, Professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa. We learn how work in religion and film became an interest of hers and that Adele was active and non-athletic in childhood. She grew up in a secular Jewish household and ended up majoring in Jewish Studies and by default Religious Studies. We discuss whether Judaism is a religion or should be configured as an identity. Adele talks about work on Christ-figures in the light of Judas and the Black Messiah and she looks at why we have these tropes at a time of a decline of religious literacy. She talks about her teaching approach and whether and how to screen a film to her students. Her parents loved the movies and Adele talks about how she took her own children and now her grandchildren to the cinema. She tells us about her most indelibly etched experience of going to the movies, which involves going to see The Jungle Book and we discuss why people enjoy sad movies. We learn t