From the THE BLOG OF THE CENTER FOR JEWISH LAW Review of Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Demonic Desires: ‘Yetzer Hara’ and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. 264 pages. $69.95 By Jason Rubenstein jasonbassirubenstein-at-gmail.com Ishay Rosen-Zvi’s Demonic Desires: ‘Yetzer Hara’ and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity is an [...]
Haym Soloveitchik reviewed Talia Fishman’s book Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures in the Jewish Review of Books. Fishman’s response and Soloveitchik’s rejoinder can be found here. See a more detailed rejoinder by Soloveitchik here. It ain’t pretty.
At H-Judaic Richard J. Hidary reviews Marjorie Lehman’s The En Yaaqov: Jacob Ibn Habib’s Search for Faith in the Talmudic Corpus. Rabbi Jacob ibn Habib was born in Castile sometime in the 1440s and taught in the academy at Salamanca until his expulsion in 1492. After moving to Lisbon, where there was another decree of [...]
From a review at H-Judaic of Michael Cohen’s The Birth of Conservative Judaism: Solomon Schechter’s Disciples and the Creation of an American Religious Movement. Cohen’s initial task is to overturn several persistent theories regarding Conservative Judaism’s origins. Most accounts of the movement locate its beginnings in the nineteenth century, either with Zecharias Frankel’s “positive-historical school” [...]
In Haaretz, Admiel Kosman reviews a new collection of Rav Shagar’s writings: If anything can be said clearly about Rabbi Shagar, it is that nothing about him was clear. The fact that the man was a strict adherent to halakha (religious law ) during his lifetime, although deep in his heart there was also something [...]
The New Yorker has a review of T.M. Luhrmann’s new book, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. Luhrmann spend time in two congregations affiliated with the Vineyard Christian Fellowship and described the following steps that allow a person to build a relationship with God who can “become your intimate, someone [...]
In Law and History Review there is a review (hat tip) of Tayla Fishman’s Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures (Jewish Culture and Contexts). I don’t access to the full article, so if someone does I would be interested in knowing what the review wrote. [Update: [...]
Rachel Adelman’s book The Return of the Repressed: Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer and the Pseudepigrapha is reviewed here. This study analyzes mythic narratives, found in the 8th century midrashic text Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer (PRE), that were excluded, or ‘repressed’, from the rabbinic canon, while preserved in the Pseudepigrapha of the Second Temple period. Examples include the [...]
Nel Marius reviews Hindy Najman’s Past Renewals: Interpretative Authority, Renewed Revelation and the Quest for Perfection in Jewish Antiquity. Info about the book: How did ancient Jewish authors claim authority for their interpretations? How, after the “end of prophecy”, could they claim the authority of revelation? Whom did one have to be, or aspire to [...]
Tzvee Zahavy was kind enough to send me a copy of his new book, God’s Favorite Prayers, to review. On the first page Tzvee wrote the following: My thesis in this book is simple. Jews pray every day in holy synagogues and in ordinary places throughout the world. When they do so, they engage in [...]
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