Browsed by
Language: English

Review of Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits, Jewish Women in Time and Torah

Review of Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits, Jewish Women in Time and Torah

Comments 6 comments

Ross Singer received rabbinic ordination from Professor Rabbi David Weiss Halivni, Rabbi Shear Yashuv Cohen, and Rabbi David Bigman. He has an MA in Talmud and Rabbinics from the Jewish Theological Seminary and is a graduate of the Mandel Jerusalem Fellows. He has published articles in The Edah Journal, The JOFA Journal, Amudim, Lehrhaus, The Jerusalem Post, and The Times of Israel. He is the translator of Gideon Katz’s In Silence and Out Loud: Yeshayahu Leibowitz in Israeli Context. Ross…

Read More Read More

Purim in Tehran: The Symbolic Devaluation of the Ahrimanic Republic

Purim in Tehran: The Symbolic Devaluation of the Ahrimanic Republic

Comments 1 comment

Dan (or, Dan D.Y.) Shapira is an Orientalist and grows more than fifty trees on the edge of the Judaean Desert. He’s a Full Professor at Bar-Ilan University. Some fifty years ago, my father brought home a small glass bottle of Iranian Coca Cola, no idea where from. I sat hypnotized looking at the bottle, with its Persian (well Arabic) letters, so beautiful. It was easy to understand that two letters stand for k, one for l, one for o…

Read More Read More

“I Do Not Understand a Single Word of What I Wrote in My Book”: Rav Kook, Saul Lieberman, and a Literary Mishlo’aḥ Manot Exchange

“I Do Not Understand a Single Word of What I Wrote in My Book”: Rav Kook, Saul Lieberman, and a Literary Mishlo’aḥ Manot Exchange

Comments 7 comments

The festival of Purim, with its customs and traditions, has long constituted a broad and fertile field for a vast body of research, folklore, and ritual practice associated with the “Jewish carnival.” The drinking of wine, the wearing of costumes (which have no foundation in early sources and, in the view of many scholars, were influenced by the Venetian carnival), the use of noisemakers for the purpose of “blotting out Amalek,” and the practice of mishlo’aḥ manot have all added…

Read More Read More

Ba-Yamim ha-Hem Ba-Zeman ha-Zeh: Were Jews Involved in Iran’s First Political Upheaval?

Ba-Yamim ha-Hem Ba-Zeman ha-Zeh: Were Jews Involved in Iran’s First Political Upheaval?

Comments 2 comments

The Persian Empire was founded via the conquests of Cyrus II following his rise to the Anshan throne in 559 BCE. Cyrus, celebrated in the Hebrew Bible as the liberator whose decree permitted the Return to Zion, was succeeded by his son Cambyses, who is not mentioned in the Bible. Cambyses was followed for a brief period by his brother [or someone claiming to be] Bardiya (known in Greek sources as Smerdis or Tanyoxarces), until Darius I overthrew him. The…

Read More Read More

S.Y. Agnon’s Forgotten Purim Parody

S.Y. Agnon’s Forgotten Purim Parody

Comments 1 comment

“Those Who Err All Their Days, and One Man Who Erred Not At All”—A Tale in Honor of Purim They were both mistaken in a matter of halakhah. Such is the way of the world: shrewd men commonly have ugly wives, while the wives of fools are fair. When the husband looked at his wife and saw how repulsive a creature she was—how ugly her countenance, how displeasing her face—he said in his heart: this proves that there is no…

Read More Read More

Beyond the Masthead of the Beys Yaakov Journal, 1923-1980 – Part 2: ‘Abomination’ or Scandal? Mistranslation, Journalism, and the Halivni Controversy

Beyond the Masthead of the Beys Yaakov Journal, 1923-1980 – Part 2: ‘Abomination’ or Scandal? Mistranslation, Journalism, and the Halivni Controversy

Comments 12 comments

In Part 1 of this study, it was argued that the Beys Yaakov Journal cannot be understood simply as an ideological mouthpiece of Agudath Israel, nor as an instrument of Orthodox withdrawal. Across decades, its editors repeatedly confronted intellectual challenges in public, publishing voices and materials that lay beyond the formal boundaries of Agudah authority and resisting the impulse toward protective silence. That does not mean it adopted liberal positions; rather, its conclusions fit squarely within the traditions of Ultra-Orthodox…

Read More Read More

Disenchantment with Zionism? Leon Roth and Yeshayahu Leibowitz on the Qibyā Raid

Disenchantment with Zionism? Leon Roth and Yeshayahu Leibowitz on the Qibyā Raid

Comments 16 comments

The infamous Qibyā reprisal raid (peʿulat tagmul), led by Major Ariel Sharon, later to become Israel’s Prime Minister, was the first military operation for which the young State of Israel was severely condemned by the UN, major nations, and the world Jewish community. It was carried out on the night of October 14, 1953, in response to many terror attacks by Arab fidāʾiyūn who had infiltrated Israel from Jordan, from the vicinity of the village of Qibyā. In particular, the…

Read More Read More

Do you recall Hrubieszow? Hrubieszow, Home to an Active Early Nineteenth Century Hebrew Press

Do you recall Hrubieszow? Hrubieszow, Home to an Active Early Nineteenth Century Hebrew Press

Comments 0 Comment

A barely remembered Hebrew press, one credited with as many as forty books, although that number is uncertain, was active in Hrubieszow (Hrubyesho), Lublin district, in southeastern, Poland from 1816 to1821 and then intermittently until 1827. The variance in the number of titles printed may be attributed to the manner in which books are recorded, some titles being a composite of three works. In some instances, the town or the printers’ names are omitted from the title-page due to censorship…

Read More Read More

A Footnote on What the Chasam Sofer Did Not Say

A Footnote on What the Chasam Sofer Did Not Say

Comments 24 comments

The Problem. I’m the proud owner of a copy of Rabbi Shimon Finkelman’s Rav Pam: The Life and Ideals of Rabbi Avrohom Yaakov HaKohen Pam (second edition, seventh impression, June 2023, ArtScroll History Series, Mesorah Publications, Rahway, N.J.). It is a magnificently written and produced biography of Rav Pam, a close friend of my father, who like Rav Pam was a disciple of both Rav Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz and Rav Dovid Leibowitz. The biography captures Rav Pam as our family…

Read More Read More

Lecture at Young Israel Beth El of Borough Park featuring Rabbi Dr. Eliezer Brodt

Lecture at Young Israel Beth El of Borough Park featuring Rabbi Dr. Eliezer Brodt

Comments 5 comments

The event details are: Topic: “The Vilna Gaon in Fact and Fiction: Kol HaTor and Beyond.” Date: Wednesday, February 4. Time: 8:00 PM (doors open at 7:30 PM). Location: Downstairs in the social hall, 4802 15th Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11219. Entry: Men use the front door; women use the rear door. Program: Lecture followed by Maariv. Contact: 718-435-9020 | yibethel.org. (sign up for future events)

Saul Lieberman and his Ketubah, Driving on Shabbat, an Unusual Marriage Practice, Girls born on Friday, and More

Saul Lieberman and his Ketubah, Driving on Shabbat, an Unusual Marriage Practice, Girls born on Friday, and More

Comments 48 comments

For a long time, I have had an interest in Saul Lieberman. It has been almost twenty years since my book Saul Lieberman and the Orthodox appeared. I have also dealt with Lieberman in many Seforim Blog posts. A few years ago, I did a series of eighteen classes on Lieberman on Torah in Motion. You can watch the classes on Youtube here or listen to the podcasts here. A letter from Lieberman that has recently come into my hands…

Read More Read More

Tracing the “Footsteps of the Messiah”: From Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor to Maamrei ha-Rayah

Tracing the “Footsteps of the Messiah”: From Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor to Maamrei ha-Rayah

Comments 3 comments

Longtime readers of Seforim Blog probably remember the leak in 2010 of Rav Kook’s Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor (“For the Perplexed of the Generation”) onto the internet, and the publication of a censored version by Makhon ha-Rav Zvi Yehuda shortly thereafter. This was a previously unseen work of Rav Kook, written during his time as a communal rabbi in Boisk, Latvia, around 1903-1904. It contains a fairly clear and thorough philosophical presentation of a pre-aliyah Rav Kook attempting to respond to the…

Read More Read More

A New Halakhic Compendium of Jewish Belief

A New Halakhic Compendium of Jewish Belief

Comments 10 comments

Professor Y. Tzvi Langermann is Professor Emeritus of Arabic at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. He has published widely on science, religion, and philosophy in medieval Jewish and Islamic cultures. Over the past thirty-plus years Rabbi Eliezer Melammed (b. 1961) has been issuing volumes of up-to-date rulings on halakhah. The series, called Peninei Halakha (“Pearls of Halakhah”) is very popular; on sale in most Israeli bookstores, it is also now freely available online, translated (in part at least)…

Read More Read More

Sixty Years Since Rabbi Dr. Yechiel Yacov Weinberg, the Seridei Eish: A Fire the World Still Needs

Sixty Years Since Rabbi Dr. Yechiel Yacov Weinberg, the Seridei Eish: A Fire the World Still Needs

Comments 9 comments

This week marks sixty years since the passing of Rabbi Dr. Yechiel Yacov Weinberg, the Seridei Eish. He left this world on the 4th of Shevat in 1966, well before I was born, yet his presence has never felt distant to me – because it lived, vividly and lovingly, in my mother’s voice. “Shema b’ni musar avicha, v’al titosh Torat imecha” – “Hear, my child, the instruction of your father, and do not forsake the Torah of your mother.” For…

Read More Read More

Book Review: ‘After Revelation: The Rabbinic Past in the Medieval Islamic World’, by Marc D. Herman

Book Review: ‘After Revelation: The Rabbinic Past in the Medieval Islamic World’, by Marc D. Herman

Comments 1 comment

Dr. Marc Herman’s After Revelation: The Rabbinic Past in the Medieval Islamic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) examines shifting conceptions of Torah she-beʿal peh within the Judeo-Islamic world from the geonic period through the time of Maimonides. Beginning with Rav Saadya Gaon and concluding with the Rambam, Herman traces a gradual reorientation away from the geonic understanding of Torah she-beʿal peh as wholly revealed toward the Maimonidean position, in which human interpretation plays a constitutive role in the formation…

Read More Read More