Torah Personalities

Chaim Trachtman shows how a careful examination of debates between Shammai and Hillel challenge our preconceived notions about them.

Levi Morrow provides an all-new translation of Rav Elhanan Nir’s “Kavvanot for Rosh Hashanah,” and analyzes how these theological poems speak about our relationship with God and prayer on Rosh Hashanah.

  Yael Unterman   I dedicate this essay to my friend Dr. Tsippi Kauffman z”l, who passed away in the course of its writing. A wonderful educator,...

The exhaustive Talmud commentary of Provencal scholar Menachem ben Shlomo Ha-Meiri was largely disregarded by Jewish scholars for centuries. Its revived popularity in the twentieth century presents a puzzle, then, for which multiple explanations have been offered. Michael Broyde considers the approaches advanced by his teacher Dr. Haym Soloveitchik and by others, before proposing his own explanation, focusing on Meiri's unique level of access to and use of Yerushalmi texts.

Jeremy Tibbetts explores Hitbodedut in the thought of Rav Shagar and Rav Elchanan Nir, two contemporary Israeli thinkers.

In a never-before-published memoir, Rabbi Joseph H. Lookstein recalls the politics that surrounded Yeshiva University upon the death of President Bernard Revel and the search for his successor. 

Moshe Simon-Shoshan sheds new light on the Rav's approach to pluralism and academic Jewish studies.

Louis Jacobs, the controversial British rabbi and theologian, died 15 years ago. Steven Gotlib reviews Harry Freedman’s new book on Jacobs’ life, and considers how what happened to Jacobs should inform the way we draw the boundaries of Orthodoxy today.

Tzvi Sinensky As chronicled in Robert Putnam’s 2000 classic book, Bowling Alone, loneliness is one of the vexing challenges of modern life. The advent of the...

Yosef Bronstein explores the thought of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe.