Then and Now
Recovering the actual religious practices of Jewish women in antiquity – or, really, of almost all non-elite/non-rabbinic Jews – is at best a tricky business. Our main sources are rabbinic texts, which are so insular, academic, and either … [Continue reading] about “The Fear of the Husband”
For many years, we have incorporated a children's drama into our Passover Seder. During the Magid (telling of the Passover story) we send the children out of the room to prepare a drama relating to the story of the Exodus from Egypt. They return a … [Continue reading] about Israelite or Egyptian? A Personal Reflection from the Seder
In academic circles, "tradition" has long taken a beating. Scholars have correctly pointed out that "tradition" or "traditions" are often quite malleable as Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger put it in the title of their edited volume, The Invention … [Continue reading] about Tradition!
Over the last year I have been experimenting with "concept mapping" in my classes. In my latest experiment I had my undergraduate students use a software package called CMap to "map" or outline a passage of Talmud that we have been studying this … [Continue reading] about Mapping the Talmud
Over the past few months, as noted earlier, with the help of research assistants I have been compiling a spreadsheet that records each occurrence of a biblical verse cited in the Bavli. The purpose of this data is not so much to ask qualitative … [Continue reading] about The Bible in the Bavli: Some First Numbers