Scholarship

Malka Simkovich on the Hasmonean victories and the truth behind the Hanukkah miracle.

Through analyses of Rashi's commentaries on Song of Songs, Lamentations, and Hosea, Devorah Schoenfeld explores narratives of the Jewish nation's relationship to God.

Jacob is described in Rabbinic thought as a pursuer of truth, but many have questioned whether this aligns with the simple reading of the text. Gavriel Lakser argues that a close reading shows that it does, even if he made some mistakes along the way.

Was the Mishnah intended to serve as a legal text? This traditional assumption, which forms a central premise of the halakhic process, has been challenged by more recent scholarship. Dovid Campbell engages with this scholarship and performs his own close reading of some of the Mishnah's more enigmatic digressions to propose his conception of the Mishnah as a corpus of "found philosophy."

Why do Orthodox Jews vote the way they do? Zev Eleff builds a case, using some unconventional data. 

Historian Jonathan Sarna places a recent decision by an Orthodox synagogue to modify the "prayer for the government" into sharp historical focus.

Marina Zilbergerts presents the philosophical questions posed by Chaim Grade's “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” and compares his arguments to those of other major thinkers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche.

Michael Broyde offers a new theory for why halakhah obligates women in some time-bound positive mitzvot and exempts them from others.

In advance of the kabbalist R. Shalom Sharabi's 244th yahrtzeit, which falls out this Shabbat, Jeremy Tibbetts offers a primer on Rashash's kabbalistic kavanot and the underappreciated art of concrete poetry.

Steven Gotlib reviews Eugene Korn’s book on the future of Jewish-Christian relations.