Emily Shapiro Katz
VISUAL JEWISH LEARNING
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About Me
For years, I have been combining two personal passions:
Torah-study and Art-making.
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Back in college (a loooong time ago), I chose to major in Bible and minor in Art. But, even before that - in high school - I was always the one who made colorful review sheets (with bubble letters of course!) before our Judaic studies tests. Visuals simply made everything more interesting and understandable for me.
​Fast forward to when I had my own kids and spent hours coming up with crafts that corresponded to the weekly Parsha (and even blogging about it here). Some Jewish organizations (and lots of lovely Christian moms) actually found the blog and asked me to contribute my ideas which you can still find on sites like Jewish Learning Matters and Bimbam. ​​​
​When we moved to Israel and started to teach Parsha to real-live Israel kids, I tried to move away from "craft" and a little more towards "art," highlighting artistic techniques and styles. Again (mostly for myself), I documented my lessons in a weekly blog called Yetzira. Then during COVID, I produced "ParshaArt" videos for all of Sefer Bereshit for the 929 English website. The crafts page on this website is an abbreviated combination of all these various efforts and experience.
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In the summer of 2024, in preparation for a class for a group of university students, I felt overwhelmed by the diverse content of the particular parsha. I intuitively sketched out the different topics that appeared in the parsha to help me decide what I wanted to focus on. I realized that the visual summary I had created for myself might also be beneficial for others. Thanks again to the internet, I learned that what I was doing actually had a name - "sketchnoting." I was immediately hooked! I loved looking at other people's sketchnotes that summarized everything from books to conferences to physics concepts. I knew I wanted to do just that - a visual summary - of every parsha!
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I have put this website together as a way to curate these various visual projects and make them available to others. I hope that people will use and share these materials and connect back with me to collaborate on creating new resources and programs. ​​