Scholarship “Neusner was a rabbinic historian. He can be credited with reinventing rabbinic historiography in the modern period” Author Drew Kaplan Date 5 February 2019 Neusner was a rabbinic historian. He can be credited with reinventing rabbinic historiography in...
Scholarship “The field of rabbinics is peopled by two types of scholars—literary scholars and historians” Author Drew Kaplan Date 5 February 2019 The field of rabbinics is peopled by two types of scholars—literary scholars and historians....
Late Antiquity, Mishnah, Tannaitic Literature “A comparison between Avot and Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists underscores striking similarities and differences between the compositions…” Author Drew Kaplan Date 3 February 2019 A comparison between Avot and Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists underscores striking similarities and...
Internet, Journalism, News Media, Newspapers, Websites “…journalism, as a field, is as addled as an addict, gaunt, wasted, and twitchy, its pockets as empty as its nights are sleepless” Author Drew Kaplan Date 3 February 2019 In the past half century, and especially in the past two decades, journalism itself—the...
Bible, Esther, Wine The Phrase משתה in the Book of Esther Author Drew Kaplan Date 31 January 2019 Many English versions translate משתה generally as either “feast” (e.g., ESV, KJV, NKJV) or...
Babylonian Talmud, Mishnah, Rabbinic Literature, Talmud of the Land of Israel “Philologists can sometimes forget that texts are not themselves autonomous subjects that move here and there, or chameleons that change color to fit the scenery” Author Drew Kaplan Date 8 January 2019 Philologists can sometimes forget that texts are not themselves autonomous subjects that move here...
Babylonian Talmud, South Korea “The Korean Talmud and its outsized popularity can thus also be understood as a form of Occidentalism” Author Drew Kaplan Date 8 January 2019 The turn to the Talmud as a book of Western wisdom in Japan, Korea,...
Hanukah, Judaism “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” Author Drew Kaplan Date 4 December 2018 A mature adult faith demands that we take in difficult, painful facts and allow...
Modern Orthodoxy “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” Author Drew Kaplan Date 26 November 2018 To understand modern Orthodoxy, we must view “Orthodoxy” within its larger social, economic, and...
Art “There is something admirable about a society whose highest values include such works of daring and imagination” Author Drew Kaplan Date 4 November 2018 Pressed to an extreme, inequities, both visible and symbolic, become a source of social...