Tiptoe Through the Talmud with Miriam Anzovin

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Hello, everyone, it's Takuya here.

SPEAKER_2 (0:02)

And I'm Gabby.

SPEAKER_1 (0:03)

And we are the hosts of History of Everything, a podcast which you can probably guess by the name is, well, I mean, it's about everything. Do you want to know why people thought potatoes were evil and would give you syphilis? Are you curious about all the stories of the terrible and stupid ways that people have kicked the bucket over the years?

Do you want to hear tales about all of the different badasses of history and the lives that they had brought to life? Well, if so, then look no further.

History of Everything is just the right podcast for you. It's available on Spotify, Pandora, and anywhere else that you get your podcast from. Join us for some fun and just see how weird and wacky history can be.

Miriam Anzovin (0:42)

Rabbinic Judaism has an oral tradition of teachings, traditions, rules, laws, however you want to put it, that were transmitted, at least this is how it's explained, transmitted generation to generation verbally.

And then what happened is the Roman Empire, unfortunately, for everybody. And I don't care that they make nice roads. I don't care. What about the aqueduct? I don't care. What else have they done for us? What have they done? They stole our menorah. That was the least of what they did. And am I going to the Vatican to get it out of the basement?

For anyone who wants to join me on that highly illegal heist.

Daniel McClellan (1:23)

Hey, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan.

Daniel Beecher (1:29)

And I'm Dan Beecher.

Daniel McClellan (1:30)

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we try to increase the public's access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Daniel Beecher (1:44)

Man, I'm excited. We got a great guest today. I'm very pleased. I'm going to learn a lot of words that I don't actually know and figure out what the heck they mean, because they're not in my language.

So, Dan, why don't you introduce our guest?

Daniel McClellan (1:59)

Happily. Today we're going to be talking with Miriam Anzovin, who is on TikTok, is on social media, is an artist, is a creator across a number of different channels and in a number of different media.

I know her from her very popular Daf Reaction videos on TikTok, but she does so much more than that. So, welcome to the show, Miriam. How are you doing today?

Miriam Anzovin (2:22)

I am so delighted to be here, Shalom, friends, to anybody listening who might be my follower, but to everybody else who is a fan of these two wonderful dance and dance TikTok accounts.

I am just delighted to be here as a fellow fan. So thank you so much for having me.

Daniel McClellan (2:41)

Well, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it. We were very excited to have the opportunity to talk to you a little bit today about things like the Talmud and the representation of women within the Talmud.

But I think before we get into that, we want to hear a little bit more about your backstory so we can understand how you're coming at the Talmud and its representation of women and your experience on social media. And you were mentioning before we got started here that you were producing, editing, hosting a podcast for a community, a Jewish community in the Boston area before they decided to corporatize and kick things over to a CEO, and you were left in the wind, which then led to what?

Miriam Anzovin (3:32)

It led to me having all of this creative Jewish energy and nowhere to put it, because in addition to hosting that podcast, the vibe of the tribe, rest in peace, I also did a lot of graphic design. I designed Hagadot. I did infographics about Jewish ideas and holidays and anything that I found fascinating about Jewishness, Jewish culture, I was able to create. I also wrote a series of comedic articles which were sort of the forebearer, if you will, of what I do now in video format in Daf Reactions and the other funny yet heartfelt Jewish content I create for social media.

But yes, so what happened was I had all this energy and I had nowhere to put it, nowhere to put all these Jewish thoughts in my head.

And I had been lurking on TikTok for two years over the course of the pandemic. I'm talking right now about like December 2021, you know, about two years. And I had been doing Learning the Talmud. I had been doing Daf Yomi since January 5th of 2020 So again, you know, been almost two years of that.