In an interesting article in the Jerusalem Post, Stephen Gabriel Rosenberg wrote that the connection between Shavuot and the giving of the Torah is a post-destruction reinterpretation by the rabbis at Yavneh. But today, for some reason Shavuot is no longer the end of the barley harvest. It is no longer anything agricultural, it is [...]
There has been much talk about how Sonia Sotomayor, if appointed, will be the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice. A number of commentators were quick to point out that the first Hispanic Justice may have been Benjamin Cardozo who was of Portugese-Jewish ancestry. The problems lies in how narrowly or broadly you define “Hispanic.” Does [...]
Around the time when my grandfather left Poland (app. 1920), three of his uncles made their way to Palestine, eventually settling there. A number of years later, his grandparents also immigrated to Palestine. With the exception of a brother who came with him to America, his parents and the rest of his family were killed [...]
Joshua Schwartz reviews A Feminist Commentary on the Babylonian Talmud: Introduction and Studies Ilan, Tal, Tamara Or, Dorothea Salzer, Christiane Steuer and Irina Wandrey, editors.
My Wednesday afternoon very quickly went from sunny to near-disaster. It was one of the rare days when I drive into Manhattan instead of taking the subway. When I went to my car to go home with a stop for some food shopping along the way, I realized that someone else was parked in the [...]
From Jaroslav Pelikan (also see this post), ‘‘To the Christian disciples of the first century the conception of Jesus as a rabbi was self-evident, to the Christian disciples of the second century it was embarrassing, to the Christian disciples of the third century and beyond it was obscure.’’ Jesus through the Centuries: His Place in [...]
It starts at around 2:15. Max Weinberg, the drummer, actually played the bar-mitzvah circuit at numerous times in his life. Jeffrey Goldberg on the concert. I saw him at the Spectrum in Philadelphia a few weeks ago. It was great as always, although the next night he did play London Calling.
Hebrew Books has their usual impressive additions to their online offerings. These are a few that stood out. 1. Samuel Krauss, Kadmoniyot Ha-Talmud, part I, part II. 2. Solomon Zucrow, Sifrut Ha-Halakhah. Zucrow also published a number of other books on rabbinic literature and Jewish law. All I know about him is that he taught [...]
The Jerusalem Post has two posts about the Hebrew adaptation/translation of the Tanakh which I discussed here and here. Both of these posts discuss the relationship between modern Israeli Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew. For a recent book on the history of Hebrew see Joel Hoffman’s In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language [...]
Rabbi Leonard Levin has inaugurated a new blog on Jewish philosophy, Reblen. From the blog’s description, Topics of this blog will vary. For starters: (1) What does it mean to affirm God in our vision of reality? (Answering the Apikoros); (2) What have the Hebrew and Greek traditions contributed to our mental tool-kit that we [...]
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