Scholarship

In honor of the yahrtzeit of Dolce, the wife of Rabbi Eleazar of Worms, Chaya Sima Koenigsberg explores Rabbi Eleazar's moving elegy for his wife and reflects upon Dolce's character as a model for Koenigsberg's own life and the lives of Jewish women today.

Shmuel Hain Reviews Chaim Saiman's Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law.

In time for Tisha Be-Av, Marc Eichenbaum offers a meaningful new reading of Eikha using modern psychological concepts like grief, trauma, and narrative construction.

  Zach Truboff In 1933, as the month of Elul approached, the Jewish people faced a frightening array of dangers. That year, Hitler consolidated power as...

Two letters to the editor provide alternative perspectives on the question of what Jewish law wants American abortion law to be.

Yakov Nagen's Soul of the Mishna contains a wealth of readings that combine academic, literary, and spiritual perspectives on the Mishnah, writes Richard Hidary. Read the full review of the book, now accessible to an English-speaking audience, in our latest at the Lehrhaus.

In a rare piece of Lehrhaus Purim Torah, Mark Glass explores—with surprising halakhic rigor—whether the Pokémon named Bulbasaur’s use of a Solar Beam attack would constitute cooking on Shabbat.

In our saturated environment, can any contemporary work on hilkhot Shabbat break new ground? Ezra Schwartz explains that Rav Rimon's newest work does precisely this.

Did Rabbeinu Bahya mention a lightning rod centuries before it was discovered? Yaakov Taubes takes us on a journey through science, magic, and religion to help explain this medieval commentator’s cryptic comment about the Tower of Babel.

Ben Rothke takes a sober look at a new book that tries to square Orthodox Judaism with New Age Medicine.