Martin Goodman reviews Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People and it isn’t pretty. (hat tip)
Why bother at all to review such a book? So far as I know, no scholar who works on Jewish history in the Roman period has deigned to pay it any attention. But such lordly disdain is dangerous. The [...]
Dr. Thamar E. Gindin has posted Hebrew summaries of a series of lectures that she gave on the historicity of the Scroll of Esther. The summaries can be found here. Also see this post (Hebrew) on the burial places of Esther and Mordechai by Orli Rahimian.
Professor Steven Fassberg will be speaking at JTS on
The Dead Sea Scrolls and Their Contribution to the Study of Hebrew and Aramaic
Date: Monday, February 8
Time: 3:40 p.m.
Place: Wingate Auditorium, JTS
Israel Radio is reporting that according to the Israeli newspaper Maariv, a decision has been made to not ship the Dead Sea Scrolls abroad for any exhibitions because of the recent legal steps taken by Jordan and the Palestinians to try and get possession of them. See here for some background.
The following is from Shlomo Avineri’s article in Haaretz on the new translation of Josephus. (hat tip)
Like every self-respecting Israeli youth movement, my Hanoar Ha’oved branch in Herzliya also held a mock trial for Josephus Flavius, aka Yosef Ben-Matityahu, under the heading “traitor or hero?” The unique thing about our particular trial was that it [...]
Martin Goodman’s article “Under the Influence: Hellenism in Ancient Jewish Life” from the latest issue of the BAR is online.
How and why and to what extent Greek culture was absorbed into the ancient Jewish world is not always clear, but that it was is undeniable. To some extent, the answers depend on whether we [...]
So far AJS 2009 is going well. Because of weather-related travel issues there seems to be a smaller crowd, with no small number of people having to cancel their presentations. I also noticed that most of the book publishers are giving pretty small discounts. A few are giving discounts of 30%, but [...]
I have been teaching a course in which we are examining two different questions relating to the lighting of shabbat candles, whether a blessing is required and if the lighting of shabbat candles is considered kabbalat shabbat, i.e. if lighting shabbat candles initiates the accepting upon oneself of shabbat prohibitions. I won’t be going [...]
Here are two new books on Talmud that have recently been published.
The first one is Marc Hirschman’s The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture, 100 C.E. -350 C.E.: Texts on Education and Their Late Antique Context. For those who aren’t familiar with Hirshman’s work, you can find a talk of his, “Jewish and Christian Battles Over [...]
The journal Zion has recently published an issue devoted to the study of Jewish history in Israel. It includes a number of very interesting historiographical studies by a number of scholars about how Israeli scholarship on certain historical periods has changed (or maybe not) over the years. One thing that I noticed was [...]
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