“The Korean Talmud and its outsized popularity can thus also be understood as a form of Occidentalism”
The turn to the Talmud as a book of Western wisdom in Japan, Korea,...
Author Archives: Drew Kaplan
“A mature adult faith demands that we take in difficult, painful facts and allow them to become part of our understandings of God, our language of faith and connection”
A mature adult faith demands that we take in difficult, painful facts and allow...
“Material affluence, and the anxiety (and feelings of precarity) that surround that affluence, in the modern Orthodox world are not specific phenomena of a particular religious subgroup”
To understand modern Orthodoxy, we must view “Orthodoxy” within its larger social, economic, and...
“There is something admirable about a society whose highest values include such works of daring and imagination”
Pressed to an extreme, inequities, both visible and symbolic, become a source of social...
“The Middle East has gone from an addiction to a distraction”
And too often we forget that the people in these countries are not just...
“more Americans have been added to the population of Mexico over the past few years than Mexicans have been added to the population of the United States”
Americans now make up more than three-quarters of Mexico’s roughly one million documented foreigners,...
“The ability of an individual halakhist to bring about a change depends…on one’s ability to foresee the opposition of one’s peers to one’s innovation”
…the ability of an individual halakhist to bring about a change depends, to a...
“recycling…is the likely explanation for the relative scarcity of metal finds at major urban centres at opposite ends of the Sasanian empire…”
It should be remembered that recycling is not a modern Western concept, but is...
Cultivated Crops during the Time of the Babylonian Talmud
As in earlier periods, the staple crops were wheat, barley and dates. A daily...
“The way to rectify corrupt sexual mores is by replacing them with a healthy code of sexuality, not by advocating asexuality”
The way to rectify corrupt sexual mores is by replacing them with a healthy...