Tomer Persico has a posted (Hebrew) about another article by Yoav Sorek, this one was about Tisha B’av and how the historical reality of Israel behooves us to change the way the day is observed. I haven’t read Sorek’s article, but Persico posted his own response which was printed in Makor Rishon. Persico wrote that [...]
Roni Weinstein is interviewed here (Hebrew) about the 17th c. Italian sex and marriage manual Tiferet Ḥatanim. Weinstein, the author of Marriage Rituals Italian Style: A Historical Anthropological Perspective on Early Modern Italian Jews, thinks that Tiferet Ḥatanim may have been the first book of its kind. This Hebrew editions seems to have been preceded [...]
As those on the East Coast of the US are soon to see this year’s Tisha B’av exit, I thought that I would bring a text that accentuates the gap between the historical memory of ḥurban ha-bayit and what we know from the historical record. The text below is from Lee I.A. Levine, “Judaism from [...]
In December, 2009, the Van Leer Institute hosted the conference, Conservative Judaism: Halakhah, Culture, and Sociology. Videos of the conference proceedings have been posted online. I am pretty sure that most, if not all, of the sessions are in Hebrew. (hat tip and thanks)
Two friends have recently published books and I wanted to call your attention to them. Job Y. Jiindo’s Biblical Metaphor Reconsidered: A Cognitive Approach to Poetic Prophecy in Jeremiah 1-24 (Harvard Semitic Monographs) has just been published. Closer to our time, Rebecca Kobrin’s Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora is now on the shelf. Congratulations to [...]
In Tablet Adam Kirsch reviews David Ruderman’s new book Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History.
For some reading on Yom Yerushalayim, David Cook’s translation of Eliyahu Porush’s EARLY MEMORIES (Zikhronot Rishonim) is a good way to see what life was like in Jerusalem in the first half of the 20th century.
A while back I posted about the success of Avigdor Shinan’s commentary on Pirkei Avot and its place on the non-fiction best seller list in Israel. I was reading an op-ed piece in Yisrael ha-Yom and it turns out that Pirkei Avot has been overtaken by the new translation of Josephus’s Wars of the Jews. [...]
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 [...]
Eddy Portnoy has an interesting article in Tablet on Shomrei Shabbos organizations. As secular Yiddish groups like women’s rights organizations and sports clubs established themselves in the early 20th century, so too did Orthodox groups begin formalizing their unions. Chief among them was the establishment of an official Shomrei Shabbos organization. After the organization was [...]
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