One of the most well-known Israeli songs ever is Yerushalayim shel Zahav, Jerusalem of Gold. Naomi Shemer wrote the song and it was originally sung by Shuli Natan at a song festival in Jerusalem a few weeks before the Six-Day War. An interview with Shuli Natan about the song can be found here. Here is [...]
Reading for Jerusalem Day: David Golinkin, “Jerusalem in Jewish law and Custom: A Preliminary Typology” (here) An expanded version of this article can be found in Lee Levine, ed., Jerusalem: its Centrality to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Continuum Press, New York, 1999, pp. 408-423.
Today is Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday, so below is a video of Dylan singing one of his most famous songs, Like a Rolling Stone. I also included a few of the dozens of covers of the song done by other artists. For those who really want to read up on the song and its influence, [...]
Talya Fishman’s book Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures has been published. From the publisher’s web site: What were the historical circumstances that led to the inscription of Oral Torah in medieval Europe? How did this body of ancient rabbinic traditions, replete with legal controversies and [...]
Mika Karni (bio on Hebrew Wikipedia) is a popular Israeli singer who has recently become involved with teaching music to groups of Israeli religious women. Below are two videos. The first is from this article about the religious music school Mizmor. The second (in Hebrew) is from this Ynet article about a female a cappela [...]
New York City’s law that bans smoking in parks and pedestrian plazas goes into affect tomorrow. See this post at the blog Jewish and American Law for a discussion of the law from the perspective of Jewish law.
On Sanhedrin 17b there is a discussion about the עיר הנידחת (“an idolatrous city”) that was to be destroyed. The Talmud addresses how many cities can be destroyed within a specific time period and geographic area. One of the reasons given for limiting the number of cities was to minimize the desolation of the Land [...]
A new book from David Hartman, The God Who Hates Lies. In this deeply personal look at the struggle between commitment to Jewish religious tradition and personal morality, Dr. David Hartman, the world’s leading Modern Orthodox Jewish theologian, probes the deepest questions at the heart of what it means to be a human being and [...]
MK, a reader of this blog, was able to fill in some background about the letter from American Jewish leaders that I posted here. On September 10, 1963 there were a number of violent demonstrations against Christian missionaries in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa. The demonstrations resulted in damaged and destroyed property and over one [...]
From the Legal Theory Blog: Barak D. Richman (Duke University – School of Law) has posted Saving the First Amendment from Itself: Relief from the Sherman Act Against the Rabbinic Cartels on SSRN. Here is the abstract: America’s rabbis currently structure their employment market with rules that flagrantly violate the Sherman Act. The consequences of [...]
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