After I posted the Table of Contents to the latest volume of the Torah u-Madda Journal, no. 14 (2006/2007), at the Michtavim blog last week — note, this post has been updated with the links to the PDFs, hosted at YUTorah.org — I received some very harsh criticisms for my laxity in providing links to the PDFs, including one noteworthy email.

To add insult to injury, the accuser sent me criticisms via an anonymous email address! See here [PDF].

ManuscriptBoy:

Moritz Steinschneider’s online presence has been significantly augmented by the Jewish National Library’s Digitized Book Repository. They seem to have scanned all of his German books, as well as the Hebrew translation of his general work ‘Sifrut Yisrael’.

And also includes an interesting anecdote that

someone once told me how Prof. Moshe Bar Asher shut himself in a room for a couple of days, and emerged having taught himself Ugaritic.

Published several weeks ago, Rabbi Hillel Goldberg, Executive Editor of both the Intermountain Jewish News and of Tradition, has written a ‘Review Essay‘ (“Discontinuities: The Case of Saul Lieberman,” reviewing Elijah J. Schochet and Solomon Spiro’s Saul Lieberman: The Man and His Work), in Tradition 40:3 (Fall 2007): 69-75. A PDF of this article is only available to subscribers to TraditionOnline and/or members of the Rabbinical Council of America.

While the aim of a “Review Essay” is usually focused on broadening the perspective of a particular topic with the author making use of the most recent contributions from within the extant scholarly literature, “Discontinuities: The Case of Saul Lieberman” lacks any such focus.

Continue reading this post (“Rabbi Hillel Goldberg on Prof. Saul Lieberman”) at the Michtavim blog.

In addition to my work that will continue at the Seforim blog — we’ve got some great posts going up soon — I have recently started a new blog, the Michtavim blog, an affiliate of the Seforim blog, where I hope to provide interested readers with up-to-date references and discussions of the latest scholarship from the world of academic Jewish studies and Orthodox Judaism.

Over the next weeks, in addition to posting my musings on a daily basis, I will be adapting a selection of my previous posts from my AJHistory blog (a”h) and the Seforim blog and placing them at the Michtavim blog.

For now, see the following few links for my new posts at the Michtavim blog.

— “From the Archives of the Royal Library in Metz” (link)
— “305th yahrzeit of R. Yair Hayyim Bacharach (1638-1702)” (link)
— “The Sermons and Yeshivot of R. Aharon Kotler” (link)
— “When a Rabbi is Accused of Heresy: The Latest in the Emden-Eybeschütz Controversy” (link)

I hope that you enjoy and I appreciate your feedback.

In honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Professor Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, the Jewish Quarterly Review published a special forum with articles by David N. Myers, Moshe Idel, Peter N. Miller, Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi and Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, in the latest issue of Jewish Quarterly Review 97.4 (Fall 2007).

Jewish Quarterly Review, established in 1889 and currently the oldest English-language journal in the field of Jewish studies, is published by the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. Elliott Horowitz of Bar Ilan University and David N. Myers of UCLA are the editors of Jewish Quarterly Review. (Full disclosure: I am the Editorial Intern of Jewish Quarterly Review).

For those who have not seen the obituary notice in the New York Times (Aug 14, 2007; B6), the Seforim blog records the passing of Rabbi Dr. Noah Rosenbloom, a pulpit rabbi for over fifty years and longtime faculty member at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women.

He was the author of Luzzatto’s Ethico-Psychological Interpretation of Judaism: A Study in the Religious Philosophy of Samuel David Luzzatto (New York: Yeshiva University, 1965); Tradition in an Age of Reform: The Religious Philosophy of Samson Raphael Hirsch (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1976); Malbim: Exegesis, Philosophy, Science and Mysticism in the Writings of Rabbi Meir Lebush Malbim (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1988), among other scholarly articles and books.

Noah Rosenbloom received his rabbinic ordination from RIETS and his graduate dissertations were entitled: “The God-Ideas of the Leading Hebrew Poets During the Period 1933-1948” (PhD, New York University, 1958) and “The ‘Taz’ and Its Author: A Study of the Life and Work of Rabbi David Halevi, author of the ‘Turei Zahav'” (DHL, Yeshiva University, 1948).