The Surprising After-Life of the First English Translation of the #Talmud
After all of the criticism, the minor renewed interest notwithstanding, Rodkinson remained generally neglected. Where recalled, it was more often negatively, and, concerning his translation, in a disparaging manner. Rodkinson is not mentioned in Jewish…
Isserles’ glosses signaled far more than simply the “Ashkenization” of a Sephardic text; they also heralded the beginning of an extensive commentary tradition that would grow up around Karo’s code, radically transforming its purpose and its material…
To speak of effeminacy as a gender-‘‘deviant’’ trait presumes, of course, a gender ‘‘norm’’ by which an individual’s status could be measured. Defining this norm, however, is a complicated matter, in part due to the tendency to read into the past modern…
Amos and Jeremiah argued that religious backsliding and socio-economic inequality were the fundamental causes of the political and military insecurity that haunted both Jewish states. Yet geopolitics is a not a matter of bread alone. It was certainly the…
A former senior aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed…that most Israelis considered the peace process irrelevant because they believed that the Palestinians had no interest in a deal, especially in the current Middle Eastern context of rising…
Needing to have a conversation about #Israel is “the Zionist calling of our times” -@MishZion of @BronfmanFellows
Sixty-five years in, we can no longer be sustained merely by the fumes of our own existence, or by the fumes of those who threaten us — as powerful as those realities are. We must have a painful conversation not only about our borders with our…
In pre-Israel Days, Zionism was a dynamic, world-wide movement whose goal was creation of a Jewish national homeland
In pre-Israeli Days, Zionism was a dynamic, world-wide movement whose goal was the creation of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine. In 1948, to the surprise of many leading Zionists and others, the goal was achieved. From then on, nobody could ever…
The parallels with the challenges for modern Israel are striking, for Solomon was confronting “non-state actors”
The parallels with the challenges for modern Israel are striking, for Solomon, like modern Israel, was essentially confronting “non-state actors.” For Haddad the Edomite, an indigenous resident stripped of his territory, one might substitute Hamas or…
Rabbis had a number of exegetical methods for expanding the parameters of the law while respecting the integrity of authoritative sources. Practical or inductive reasoning, or simply conjecture, could be used to reinterpret a talmudic passage,…
