Mishnah & Talmud

Rejoice When Your Enemy Falters?

Proverbs says, "When your enemy falters do not rejoice and when he stumbles do not feel glee."  Does that apply even if your enemy is really, really evil? 

A Pillar with a Past

Gil S. Perl’s The Pillar of Volozhin sheds light on the Netziv, one of Lithuanian Jewry's greatest leaders, whose own intellectual development is reflected throughout the yeshiva world today.

Clothes Make the Man

The recent daf yomi Shabbat 63 appears to present just the technicalities of what can and cannot be transported on Shabbat.  Yet it is simultaneously an exploration of war, peace, and the nature of manhood.

The Brain Death Wars

When does a human life end? A 2010 monograph by a rabbinic body, a recent book by an independent scholar, and a forthcoming book by another rabbinic organization are the most recent entries in what is among the most discussed halakhic debates of recent times.

Yeshiva Revolution

Shaul Stampfer, one of Israel's foremost experts on Eastern European Jewry, is the most unlikely of iconoclasts.  A thin, quiet, unassuming man, he gives the impression that he would have been happy as a simple melamed (elementary school teacher) in the shtetls he describes.

Sifting the Cairo Genizah

Everyone knows about the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered over 60 years ago, and about the new light they shed on the sectarian Judaism of late antiquity, the beginnings of rabbinic Judaism, and possibly the prehistory of Christianity. Fifty years before that, the Cairo Genizah similarly revolutionized the picture of the Jewish Middle Ages.