…while Jewish organizations should be allowed to exercise caution about their overt structural partnerships with those protesting them outside, the quick mapping of that caution onto the tarring of individuals is a dangerous and insidious[…]
…a larger political phenomenon in the Jewish community…on the disincentivizing of all forms of “courageous leadership” by relatively small numbers of individuals who can drive a community agenda because of the flattening of power structures,[…]
There are really important arenas – ideological trends like the rise of nationalism and shifts in how democracy is valued and understood, and political alliances like the dangerous dalliance between Trump and Netanyahu – where[…]
…the Korean Talmud, in some ways, is an inversion of the Babylonian Talmud – a radical example of “reception”. Classical rabbinic texts from late antiquity (Mishnah, Tosefta, the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds) were composed as[…]
I think a schism in American Modern Orthodoxy will have grave consequences both practically AND ideologically for both conservative and liberal sides of the community. Not only because we’re already enmeshed in the same schools[…]
The basic political theory behind organized Jewish communal (read: establishment) politics in America since World War II has been to applaud and appreciate public gestures of support for gestures that are seen in the collective[…]
As both a scholar and an academic politician, Neusner moved the study of Judaism from Near Eastern Language or History departments into Religious Studies. This move allowed for the study of Judaism as a religious[…]
Neusner was a rabbinic historian. He can be credited with reinventing rabbinic historiography in the modern period. Prior rabbinic historians were either completely naïve in accepting traditional histories or, if they were critically-oriented, prioritized the[…]
The field of rabbinics is peopled by two types of scholars—literary scholars and historians. Literary scholars produce scholarship on small quantities of text read very closely and squeezed with various methodologies to maximize the potential[…]
A comparison between Avot and Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists underscores striking similarities and differences between the compositions and thereby functions as a natural springboard into the analysis of Avot in light of the Second[…]