Scholarship

Many synagogue goers found the abbreviated High Holiday services we recently concluded quite appealing. Need we eventually go back to the way it was before coronavirus? Not really, argues Moshe Kurtz, surveying the substantial halakhic support for shortening the services every year.

Yonah Lavery-Yisraeli offers a careful examination of an enigmatic discussion in the Shulhan Arukh’s laws on neighborly relations. She demonstrates how “radical presence” and attention to sensory details is an essential strategy for halakhic decision-making.

As Daf Yomi learners begin studying Shekalim, Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg offers an erudite answer to the question: What is Yerushalmi Shekalim doing in the Babylonian Talmud?

Batya Hefter traces Joseph's character development through the eyes of the Ishbitz-Radzyn masters.

Before modern medicine, how did Jews combat outbreaks such as the coronavirus? Jeremy Brown introduces us to a long-forgotten wedding ceremony that was used as an antidote.

  Warren Zev Harvey Review of Shai Held, Judaism is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). Originally...

Jeffrey Woolf contributes to the Lehrhaus Symposium on the recent OU statement regarding female clergy.

Tzvi Sinensky explores the hidden world of Esther with the help of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Jonathan Ziring comments on the "Jewishness" of religious tolerance.

In its opening verses, Parshat Shoftim describes a judicial system that enshrines pursuing Tzedek, or justice, as a core value. Benjamin Barer unpacks a Gemara in Sanhedrin that provides three distinct conceptions of the obligation to pursue justice, suggesting how we might build a more sacred society.