Scholarship

In honor of Father's Day, Yosef Bronstein shares thoughts about the Talmud's perspective on the relationship between fathers and children.

Chaim Trachtman offers some concluding thoughts on Judaism and racisim, and responds to Elli Fischer.

In honor of the yahrtzeits of Rabbis Jonathan Sacks and Abraham Joshua Heschel, we present Steven Gotlib's study of Rabbi Sacks's complicated engagement with the scholarship and religious worldview of Rabbi Heschel.

Tzvi Goldstein responds to letters from Chaim Goldberg and Yaakov Resnik on his piece on the differences between Centrist and Haredi Orthodoxy, unpacking the view of Rav Hayyim Volozhin’s Nefesh Ha-Hayyim.

Francis Nataf explores Malbim’s sophisticated engagement with Kantian ethics.

What theological language can we use to describe our current pandemic moment? In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Jeremy Brown takes scope of the ancient and modern notions of plague theodicy and reviews some ideas from the 2021 National Jewish Book Award Winner Torah in a Time of Plague.

In his latest for the Lehrhaus, Steven Gotlib reviews the recently published collection of essays, Strauss, Spinoza, and Sinai: Orthodox Judaism and Modern Questions of Faith, which tries to answer: is there a philosophical defense of Orthodoxy in the modern world?

Ariel Evan Mayse considers the neo-Hasidic approaches of Shlomo Carlebach and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.

No two Orthodox rabbis think exactly the same way, particularly on the matter of Darwinism in the wake of the Scopes Trial. 

Jeffrey Saks concludes The Lehrhaus series, mapping out the intellectual biography of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik