This past year, Brian Tamanaha published a book that has caused a bit of a stir in the legal theory world. In his book, Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide: The Role of Politics in Judging, Tamanaha discusses the state of Formalist and Realist schools of jurisprudence in nineteenth century America. The book has been discussed quite [...]
In Tablet Adam Kirsch reviews David Ruderman’s new book Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History.
Zondervan has published the Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary Set: Old Testament. A review of it can be found here. A sample text can be found here. Below is a description. Many today find the Old Testament a closed book. The cultural issues seem insurmountable and we are easily baffled by that which seems obscure. [...]
I have three book recommendations for this week. The first is 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris. I can’t think of any other book that gives such a blow-by-blow description of the battle fought to establish the State of Israel. For reviews of Morris’s book see here and here. Another [...]
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. [...]
H-Levant has published a review of Matthias B. Lehmann’s Ladino Rabbinic Literature and Ottoman Sephardic Culture. Below are some excerpts. Beginning in the eighteenth century, a number of Ottoman rabbis had undertaken the task of fighting the ignorance they believed was plaguing their communities by producing works of Jewish ethics (musar) in Judeo-Spanish (also known [...]
Crooked Timber writes about someone who is suing over a harsh review of their book…in a journal devoted to law. So you don’t think that it’s some litigious American at work here, it’s almost all Euro. You can read more about it here at Opinio Juris.
The Jewish Review of Books is about to hit the stands. If both Shmuel Rosner and Azzan Yadin have articles in it, who wouldn’t want to subscribe.
Alan Brill discusses Sarah Stroumsa’s new book Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker.
From Hillel Halkin’s review of Shlomo Sand’s book The Invention of the Jewish People in the New Republic. By the books an age reads and respects ye shall know it. What, then, shall we say of an age in which a book so intellectually shoddy that once, not very long ago, it would have been [...]
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