Scholarship

  Aton M. Holzer The fifteenth of Av – among the most minor of minor festivals on the Jewish calendar – is marked in the diaspora...

In the wake of recent painful times for the Jewish people, Batsheva Leah Weinstein discusses the ways halakha guides emotion through pain and joy.

Yaakov Jaffe examines the anti-Christian polemic in Maharam of Rottenberg's Kinnah about the burning of the Talmud.

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.

Max Hollander analyzes the Talmudic narrative of Pardes and the four rabbis who entered it.

The death of Nadav and Avihu is difficult to explain, perhaps even impossible to approach through the medium of language. In a composition crossing the boundaries of original drashah, Breslov thought, poetry, visual art, and historical fiction, Akiva Weisinger renders the tragedy of Nadav and Avihu as a reflection of the Vacated Space beyond human language.

Ron Ennis explores the similarities and differences between Rambam, Maharal, and Rema, in their approaches to conflicts between science and Torah.

  Hershey H. Friedman & Linda Weiser Friedman Some scholars, such as Alfred North Whitehead, have argued that the Hebrew Bible lacks humor. However, a counter-argument...

The masters of hasidut and psychoanalysis both arrived at a counterintuitive understanding of human nature, according to which narcissism is a reflection of self-hate rather than self-love. Admiel Kosman traces this idea as it appears in the works of Erich Fromm, the Rebbe of Warka, and Martin Buber, focusing on the commandment to love one's neighbor as a behaviorist correction.

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."