“it is not misplaced to argue that all the great undertakings in the nineteenth century to write a clear and objective account of Israelite-Jewish history were over-ambitious”

In retrospect, it is not misplaced to argue that all the great undertakings in the nineteenth century to write a clear and objective account of Israelite-Jewish history were over-ambitious. At that time, much too little information existed regarding the political, cultural and religious life of the ancient Near East in which the Bible had arisen. The very aim of writing of biblical personalities as flesh and blood characters who had participated in a real history was fraught by the great lack of knowledge about the world in which they lived and its achievements. The very immensity of the range of discovery in the field of biblical archaeology in the present century shows how seriously handicapped all such writers were before this time. Inevitably, the tendency was to use the biblical material that was available and to create a background that was, in no small part, a construction of a sympathetic imagination. The materials simply were not available to do otherwise. All the great pioneer figures, therefore, including Graetz, had largely to work from the Bible itself as their only substantial source. In doing so, it was inevitable that they should portray that background as more primitive, more pagan and more crudely unethical than in reality it appears to have been. Their historical judgement and evaluations, therefore, could serve only partially as a critique and reappraisal of the biblical evidence. More often than not, they simply served to reflect the attitude of the Bible itself. Yet by pioneering the task as they did, all these historians have left us an important legacy of scholarship.

R.E. Clements, “Heinrich Graetz as Biblical Historian and Religious Apologist” in Interpreting the Hebrew Bible: Essays in Honour of E.I.J. Rosenthal, eds. J.A. Emerton and Stefan C. Reif (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 54.

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“Jumping into the boundless streams of Twitter is not very different from compulsively buying books”

Jumping into the boundless streams of Twitter is not very different from compulsively buying books in the false hope that, one day, you might read them. Of course, you won’t, but this doesn’t matter: it’s the very brief encounter with that possibility that counts. The fire hose of social media tricks us into thinking that, for a fleeting moment, we can play God and conquer every link that is dumped upon us; it gives us that mad utopian hope that, with proper training, we can emerge victorious in the war on information overload.

Evgeny Morozov, “Only Disconnect”, The New Yorker (28 October 2013), 37.

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“the poetics of the “study-hall” and pedagogy must contribute more to our understanding of orality”

What is significant for orality studies as well as the mutual understanding of the production of the Bavli and Pahlavi legal literature is that the discursive elements of these corpora do not appear to originate in the silence of the scriptorium, rather in the din of the rabbinic house of study and the Hērbedestān – the Zoroastrian school of priestly studies. While scholars have focused on the role of performance or dramatics in their research of oral transmission, this paper suggests that the poetics of the “study-hall” and pedagogy must contribute more to our understanding of orality.

Shai Secunda, “The Sasanian ‘<i>Stam</i>’: Orality and the Composition of Babylonian Rabbinic and Zoroastrian Legal Literature” in <i>The Talmud in Its Iranian Context</i>, eds. Carol Bakhos and M. Rahim Shayegan (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 160.

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“…the Jewish innovation sector would benefit from new tools, beyond logic models, to help plan, assess and evaluate the work of the innovation sector”

Logic models were first developed in the early 1970s based on engineering models that rely on quantifiable inputs and outputs. Logic models provide a managerial tool for program planning and to evaluate the effectiveness of programs. Logic models often ask people to think and plan by reverse engineering – starting from the ultimate outcomes or desired results in order to devise the best path to achieve those results.

But how can Jewish innovators and their supporters create a logic model (based on those engineering models that rely on quantifiable inputs and outputs), when so much of what Jewish innovators AND Jewish traditionalists do is largely unquantifiable, focused on producing “meaning” and “engagement,” and appears qualitatively slippery?
…
A consensus emerged from this conference: the Jewish innovation sector would benefit from new tools, beyond logic models, to help plan, assess and evaluate the work of the innovation sector. This could help innovative organizations strengthen their work as well as help funders make funding decisions. The development of new tools to engage these questions was beyond the scope of the meeting. But one clear outcome of the meeting is that coming up with new ways to capture and map the creativity, flexibility, vitality, and dynamism of the Jewish innovation sector using different visual, conceptual, and analytic tools is a challenge and opportunity.

Caryn Aviv, “Haskalah 2.0”, Jumpstart Report 2 (Summer 2010), 11-13.

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“The challenge for intermarried men raising Jewish children is the tenacity of traditional gender roles”

The challenge for intermarried men raising Jewish children is the tenacity of traditional gender roles. For the most part, men continue to be the main breadwinners for their families while women continue to be the information gatherers and social organizers, maintaining greater influence than their husbands over children’s ethnic and religious upbringing. Women’s hands rock the cradle, so to speak. As a result, men’s presence where Jewish identity is nurtured (at home, the community center, the school, the synagogue) is more limited. Gender will persist in influencing the disproportionately low transmission rate of Jewish identity to children of intermarried men compared to intermarried Jewish women so long as “men’s work” outside the home continues to be more valued than “women’s work” inside it.

Keren McGinity, “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle: How the Gender of the Jewish Parent Influences Intermarriage”, AJS Perspectives (Spring 2013), 42-43.

“If introductory formulas are not particular to a story but occur repeatedly, they are probably editorial”

If introductory formulas are not particular to a story but occur repeatedly, they are probably editorial. If their usage is limited to a particular sugya (logical unit of Talmud discussion) or tractate and they fit in with the general editorial strategies of a particular sugya or tractate, one may assume that the editors of that particular portion of text are responsible for their formulation. If such formulas appear in many different tractates or even different documents, it is likely that they were part of the tradition at a stage prior to its “final” redaction and inclusion into the present literary context.

Catherine Hezser, “Form-Criticism of Rabbinic Literature”, in The New Testament and Rabbinic Literature, eds. Reimund Bieringer, Florentino García Martinez, Dider Pollefeyt and Peter J. Tomson (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2010), 99.

“…the reason metadata so perfectly personifies our present age”

…the reason metadata so perfectly personifies our present age: meta(data) has neither the ability nor the need to listen in on our conversations. Similarly, public dialogue has devolved. People are “communicating” more and more via Twitter and Instagram, text and e-mail, all the while complaining about the fact that these very modes of communication don’t allow for nuance, humor or subtlety.

It’s as if the air quotes people have so often hung around everything they do and say, alerting others to our mutual knowier-than-thou attitude, have run out of air. The quotes no longer have any sarcastic lightness to them. The quotation marks that once seemed like bookends on otherwise benign commentary have become hooks emphasizing the heaviness of what’s contained between them.

Devon McCann Jackson, “‘Welcome to the Age of Heavy Meta’”, The New York Times Magazine (6 October 2013), 53.

“If we look at Jewish literature as an object of edition, the situation is…rather exceedingly complicated”

If we look at Jewish literature as an object of edition, the situation is certainly not easier than in other branches, but rather exceedingly complicated. Looking first at literature by and ascribed to a single author, so-called authored literature, we have to face not only the question of different manuscripts and fragments, but also that of different text versions, perhaps consciously created by the author, or at least by scribes and schools on the basis of reasons difficult to reconstruct. Furthermore, centuries of Church censorship, of voluntary or forced expurgation of allegedly anti-Christian variant readings and texts, of public burning of manuscripts and prints of Talmud and Midrash as well as authored tractates, render modern edition-making no easier.

Giuseppe Veltri, “From The Best Text To The Pragmatic Edition: On Editing Rabbinic Texts”, in The New Testament and Rabbinic Literature, eds. Reimund Bieringer, Florentino García Martínez, Didier Pollefeyt, Peter Tomson (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2010), 66.

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Gender Differences Amongst Jews Marrying Gentiles Affect Their Jewish Identities

Among the intermarried Jewish women I have interviewed, having children made them decidedly proactive about making Jewish connections, about observance, and about Jewish education. The experience of having children also forced women to come to terms with the inadequacies of their own Jewish upbringing and to look for creative ways to teach their children (and themselves) about Jewish heritage.

Men may also experience an awakening of their Jewish identity when they marry and become parents, regardless of whether they intermarry or in-marry, due to greater communal opportunities. Historically and at present, the organized Jewish community directs much of its programming toward family units rather than to single Jewish men or women. Still it appears that intermarriage influenced a deepening of men’s Jewish identities in relation to their Gentile-born spouses and through becoming fathers.

Keren McGinity, “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle: How the Gender of the Jewish Parent Influences Intermarriage”, AJS Perspectives (Spring 2013), 42.

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“the structuralist approach to literary texts has been replaced by the post-modern approach…”

In recent years, the structuralist approach to literary texts has been replaced by the post-modern approach which focuses on intertextuality and indeterminacy. Such approaches have been applied to midrash, but have not been sufficiently exploited in the study of legal texts. In addition, rabbinic legal literature and hermeneutics may be compared with the forms and rhetorics of Graeco-Roman and other Ancient Near Eastern legal traditions in order to determine shared forms and styles.

Catherine Hezser, “Form-Criticism of Rabbinic Literature”, in The New Testament and Rabbinic Literature, eds. Reimund Bieringer, Florentino García Martinez, Dider Pollefeyt and Peter J. Tomson (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2010), 104.