Rabbinic Categories (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism, #101)
by Professor of Religion Jacob Neusner
This three-part anthology presents Classical Judaism in accord with its native categories, Torah, learning, and virtue. These correspond to the categories that a religious system will define for itself: world view, way of life, and theory of the social order that maintains the view and realizes it in its shared existence. By presenting substantial samples of the writings of that Judaism, the three volumes afford direct access to the way in which, in its own words, that Judaism makes its statemen...
Turn it and Turn it Again (Jewish Identity in Post-Modern Society)
The study of classical Jewish texts is flourishing in day schools and adult education, synagogues and summer camps, universities and yeshivot. But serious inquiry into the practices and purposes of such study is far rarer. In this book, a diverse collection of empirical and conceptual studies illuminates particular aspects of the teaching of Bible and rabbinic literature to, and the learning of, children and adults. In addition to providing specific insights into the pedagogy of Jewish texts, th...
Carmi Sheli (Touro College Press Books)
This volume contains fifteen articles, many in Hebrew, by leading scholars. The articles cover a broad range of subjects, from an analysis of biblical narratives as expounded in the midrash and by medieval commentators, through a discussion of Maimonides' attitude towards midrash and an analysis of talmudic aggadah as expounded by oriental scholars, to polemics concerning the attitude to aggadah in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, and culminating with an analysis of interpretation of agga...
Levirate Marriage and the Family in Ancient Judaism (HBI Series on Jewish Women)
by Dvora E. Weisberg
In this study, Weisberg uses levirate marriage (an institution that involves the union of a man and the widow of his childless brother) as described in biblical law and explicated in rabbinic Judaism as a lens to examine the status of women and attitudes toward marriage, sexuality, and reproduction in early Jewish society. While marriage generally marks the beginning of a new family unit, levirate comes into play when a family's life is cut short. As such, it offers an opportunity to study the f...