Lee I. Levine is giving a series of lectures at JTS during July. Lee is a fantastic speaker and if you have any remote interest in the topic I highly recommend attending the lectures. More information as well as how to RSVP can be found here.
Rebecca Lesses has posted some nice pictures of her recent trip to the Galilee on her blog Mystical Politics. They include good ones of Beit Shearim and Sepphoris (Tzippori).
Rabbi Akiva is one of the most well-known rabbis of the Tannaitic period. He was the subject of the well-known book by Louis Finkelstein, Akiba: Scholar, Saint, and Martyr, a good example of a genre of writing about rabbis that is not practiced anymore by most scholars. See this article for a discussion of rabbinic [...]
Next Monday there will be a conference in honor of Prof. Daniel Sperber at Bar-Ilan University. The details are below.
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 [...]
One of this year’s new books on rabbinic Judaism is Jordan D. Rosenblum’s Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism. From the publisher’s website: Food often defines societies and even civilizations. Through particular commensality restrictions, groups form distinct identities: those with whom ‘we’ eat (‘us’) and those with whom ‘we’ cannot eat (‘them’). This identity [...]
In a blog post (here) that brings a wide variety of artistic representations of the Last Supper, David Assaf wrote that some people either don’t know, or forget, that the Last Supper was a Passover Seder. לפעמים אנו שוכחים – או שמא פשוט לא יודעים – שהסעודה האחרונה של ישו היתה סעודת ליל הסדר. The [...]
Michael Satlow has summarized Monday’s symposium at Harvard, The Rabbinic Revolution and the Invention of Jewish Law. The symposium featured Shaye Cohen, Moshe Halbertal, Aharon Shemesh, and Vered Noam. Also see this review of Aharon Shemesh’s book Halakhah in the Making: The Development of Jewish Law from Qumran to the Rabbis. Update: A video of [...]
The important scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Ancient Judaism, Ben Zion Wacholder, has passed away. יהי זכרו ברוך.
Michael Satlow has posted some reflections about the conference on Archaeology and Rabbinic texts whose proceedings he summarized here and here. It was striking that almost every paper followed a similar pattern: it usually began with some piece of puzzling evidence, either textual (in the vast majority of cases) or material, and used the other [...]
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