Tel-Aviv University maintains a wonderful web site, Historical Jewish Press. This web site contains older issues of many Jewish and Hebrew newspapers. Here are a few examples of some fun things that I found: -A review of Zuckermandel’s edition of the Tosefta (here) -An interview with Hanock Albeck when his commentary on the Mishnah was [...]
Prof. Shamma Friedman will be giving a lecture at JTS on October 4, 2010 at 4:00 p.m. This lecture is to mark the publication of a collection of Prof. Friedman’s writings. “Now You See it, Now You Don’t: Can Source-Criticism Perform Magic on Talmudic Passages about Sorcery?” Monday, October 4 4:00 p.m. Stein Chapel
From a recent interview with Daniel Sperber. (hat tip) “If these women are really stringently trained, knowledgeable and understand their own limitations on what they can do in a congregational context,” then there’s no reason they ought not work in congregational settings, he said. “There will be gvulot, or limitations. They won’t be able to [...]
From Jacob Neusner in the Forward. It is the Jewish-sponsored institutions that will produce the next generation of rabbis and Jewish educators — not merely the knowledgeable people turned out by the secular academy’s Jewish studies curricula. Students in the Jewish-sponsored academies gain knowledge through the concrete experience of learning in the model of their [...]
Charles Liebman was one of the most important sociologists of American Judaism. In 1980 he wrote The Future of Conservative Judaism in the United States. Here are some of his words from thirty years ago. The Conservative movement will confront serious membership declines in the next decade or two. I know of no survey which [...]
Tsur Ehrlich has posted an interview (Hebrew) that he conducted with the author Haim Beer. They talked about Beer’s new book, Rav Goren, God, Religious Zionism, and a number of other topics.
NRG is reporting on an interesting study by the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies. Here are a some of the numbers from this study: 1. Twenty-seven percent of the secular adult population in Jerualem grew up in religious households that weren’t ultra-orthodox. 2. Thirty-five percent of the ultra-orthodox adult population in Israel did not grow [...]
Shmuel Rosner has an interesting post at Slate on the lack of rabbinic leadership, especially in America, that he describes as having acquired “greatness” and possessing a devoted following. It’s worth a read, but I’ll let sociologists and followers of Max Weber argue about whether he’s correct or not.
Recently I received the book Postcards from the Holy Land: A Pictorial History of the Ottoman Era, 1880-1918 by Salo Aizenberg. I am a collector of stamps and postcards, and this book is a beautiful collection and presentation of postcards. The author takes the reader on a tour of the history of the Holy Land [...]
1. The Text of Tractate Sukkah in the Babylonian Talmud (Hebrew), Rabin Shushtri. 2. A Hermeneutic Study of the Interpretive Aspect in the Babylonian Talmud (Hebrew), Itamar Brenner 3. Women’s Torah Study and the Role of Functionaries in the Halakhic System (Hebrew), Ilan Fuchs
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