Luckily I still have a box from who knows when… Wherefore Art Thou, Tam Tam?: “ Instead of asking ‘why is this night different from all other nights,’ many seder participants will be asking ‘where are the Tam Tams’? Manischewitz broke the tragic news today that Tam Tams, their bite-sized matzo crackers, will not be [...]
Dan Rabinowitz has written a post at Seforim about prostitutes and prostitution in Jewish literature. I didn’t wanted to make a comment which I wrote too long, so I’ll just write it below. Louis Epstein, in his book Sex Laws and Customs in Judaism, relates the following: Interesting is a legal question that arose in [...]
The Hartman Institute now has a website with lots of interesting material.
Manuscriptboy recently wrote a post about magic, and for those who didn’t know, it is alive and well. The problem with some believers in, and practitioners of magic, is that they have a hard time understanding that some people just don’t believe in it. Take the following news item. In India, a practitioner of black [...]
I am reading Saul Friedländer’s Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume I, The Years of Persecution (also see this post), and in his discussion of the infamous anti-Semetic newspaper Der Stürmer, I happen to come across this timely mention of Purim (emphasis added). In its August 1935 issue (no. 35), Streicher’s paper took up a [...]
From Machon Schechter (here in Hebrew): Faculty Forum Volume 6, Number 7 March 2008 Queen Vashti’s Costume Party By Dr. Tamar Kadari The article is part of the entry “Vashti”, written by the author for the Encyclopedia, Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, Eds. Paula E. Hyman and Dalia Ofer, Shalvi Publishing Ltd. Jerusalem 2006 [...]
In the most recent column of The Ethicist, the following question was addressed, I serve on my neighborhood homeowners’ association. Recently we discussed a woman who provides day care for 6 to 10 kids, contrary to our covenants against running a home business. Complicating matters, I, too, work from home, doing desktop publishing, but nobody [...]
See another example of Eliezer Brodt’s comprehensive treatment of a topic, this one on “Purim and Parodies”, at Seforim.
I would say that this is big news. From the JTA: University of Vienna archeologists unearthed an amulet in a third century grave bearing the Shema prayer. The find in eastern Austria represents the earliest sign of Jewish inhabitants in present-day Austria, the university said in a news release. The silver amulet contains a gold [...]
These are some curses found on Jewish graves in Asia Minor, the dating isn’t exact, but not before the second century CE. They were determined to be Jewish, or probably Jewish, based upon the content of the curses, terminology, names used, and location. “I have placed the grave and the altar for my very sweet [...]
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