A San Francisco woman has launched a Web site that turns each week’s Torah portion into a thought-provoking four-minute cartoon.
Sarah Lefton, former Camp Tawonga staffer and creator of the infamous “Yo Semite” T-shirts, this month started G-dcast, an animated series available for free online.
G-dcast brings the Torah to life in a wholly original way. The animated series seeks to raise basic Jewish literacy among teens and adults by retelling Torah portions through animated images and diverse voices.
Last week, just in time for Simchat Torah, G-dcast went live with the story of creation as told by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, scholar-in-residence at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco. A new animated short film about the week’s Torah portion will be added to the Web site (www.g-dcast.com) every Monday.
A different person will narrate all 54 Torah portions. So far, Lefton has secured 15 narrators from cities such as San Francisco, New York, London and Melbourne. They are artists, rabbis, musicians and teachers; they are secular, Orthodox and everything in between.
“I was really flattered and honored to be associated with an attempt to make Jewish learning so technologically cutting-edge,” Kushner said.
Once the narrators record the story of a Torah portion — in four minutes or less — the animator, Nick Fox-Gieg, a former San Francisco resident who now lives in Toronto, creates the pictures to go along with the audio portion. Some episodes will be straightforward storytelling, while other parshahs will be told as country or hip-hop songs.
Each short film comes with a curriculum guide, so that Jewish educators can use G-dcast to facilitate discussion in their classrooms.
“The whole point of Sarah’s G-dcast is not to teach you the obvious things, but to open your eyes and help you find the often overlooked” elements of the Torah portions, said Evan Wolkenstein, a Tanach teacher at San Francisco’s Jewish Community High School of the Bay and a narrator for G-dcast.
Since G-dcast is pluralistic, Lefton hopes Orthodox as well as secular teens and adults view the videos, though her intended audience is those who do not lead much of a Jewish life.
“What I really want is the girl in the suburbs of South Carolina to know the story of Jacob, because this one didn’t,” Lefton said, pointing a finger to her chest.
Matthue Roth, an Orthodox Jew and former Bay Area resident who now lives in Brooklyn, is the education director for G-dcast. After the narrators draft their stories and Fox-Gieg creates the accompanying images, Roth designs the curriculum guides. He also works with narrators if they need help interpreting Torah portions.
“I want to show the Torah not as this dry book filled with ‘thees’ and ‘thous,’ but as a living thing full of stories we can relate to and take away something from,” Roth said.
Lefton is no stranger to new Jewish ideas. She was the founder of Jewish Fashion Conspiracy, which manufactured irreverent screen-printed items such as the “Yo Semite” T-shirts and underwear that read “A great miracle happened here.”
She has tabled Jewish Fashion Conspiracy to focus her energies on G-dcast, which she said “is a better expression of who I am. It’s serious, engaging and accessible. That’s my brand.”
G-dcast episodes and curriculum guides are available at www.g-dcast.com.