As Bruce Thornton notes in his study of erōs in Greek literature, the romanticized chubby little love-master of our Hallmark traditions fails to capture the fundamentally chaotic and destructive power of erotic desire: erōs was a[…]
The original post-1948 Israeli policy of relying on an “outer circle” of friendships—Iran, Turkey, Ethiopia—to counter the hostility of neighboring Arab states proved modestly useful for a time. It came apart when Israel signed a[…]
Whether or not the challenger literally stood on one foot, and whether or not Hillel had a regula (measuring rod) in his hand as Shammai did, Shammai’s regula was used to reject the challenger, whereas[…]
The idea of gender as a cultural system rather than a biological given has led to the recognition that the modern binary model of gender, rooted in a taxonomy of permanent, anatomically determined opposite sexes,[…]
The location and date are both of enormous significance, as was the material form the book actually took. Venice was the capital of Hebrew printing for much of the sixteenth century. So much of early[…]
After all of the criticism, the minor renewed interest notwithstanding, Rodkinson remained generally neglected. Where recalled, it was more often negatively, and, concerning his translation, in a disparaging manner. Rodkinson is not mentioned in Jewish[…]
Isserles’ glosses signaled far more than simply the “Ashkenization” of a Sephardic text; they also heralded the beginning of an extensive commentary tradition that would grow up around Karo’s code, radically transforming its purpose and[…]
To speak of effeminacy as a gender-‘‘deviant’’ trait presumes, of course, a gender ‘‘norm’’ by which an individual’s status could be measured. Defining this norm, however, is a complicated matter, in part due to the[…]
Amos and Jeremiah argued that religious backsliding and socio-economic inequality were the fundamental causes of the political and military insecurity that haunted both Jewish states. Yet geopolitics is a not a matter of bread alone.[…]
A former senior aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed…that most Israelis considered the peace process irrelevant because they believed that the Palestinians had no interest in a deal, especially in the current Middle Eastern[…]