At Hirsch University, Reuven's Talmud teacher, Rav Kalman, is a rigidly religious Holocaust survivor who vehemently disapproves of Reuven's father's secular method of Talmudic study, which proposes that passages of Talmud contain scribal errors that can be deduced through critical reading of the relevant medieval commentaries and the study of variant readings. During Talmud class, Reuven and his fellow classmates listen to Rav Kalman's regular tirades about how the modern world is destroying Jewish life. One day, he directs one of his tirades at the Zecharias Frankel Seminary, where Abraham Gordon serves as a professor. He later tells Reuven that he is not allowed to enter the Zechariah Frankel Seminary; Reuven had been seen there checking variant readings for his father's book on the critical method.