Most research has a preliminary story embedded in earlier writings, which raise questions and spawn new inquiries conducive to new findings. The present study was born of other circumstances: I was asked by the directors of the early music group Ensemble Lucidarium if, for purposes of performance, I knew of a translation of Samuel Archivolti's Hebrew wedding ode “Keḥi kinnor” (Take a lyre). I had run across the ode in various listings, but was unfamiliar with any translation, so I suggested doing my own. That is where the problems began. To establish a clean reading for the poem, I consulted its manuscript and printed sources; to confront its verbal obscurities, and pinpoint its meanings, I traced its references to biblical and rabbinical literature; and to satisfy my own curiosity about how it was sung, I looked into the few recorded examples of its melodies. It follows that in this article, I shall be concerned mainly with semantics and music. Yet, to begin, I shall present some information about the author, sources, and prosody of the poem; and, to conclude, I shall compare it with other wedding odes of his and his contemporaries, and, in an epilogue, appraise its singularity.

Sefer miẓvot gadol (Semag) by the French Tosefist R. Moses of Coucy was a most influential halakhic work in medieval times. Originally titled Sefer ha-miẓvot (The Book of Commandments), it was written in northern France in the first half of the thirteenth century and in many ways reveals the influence of Maimonides' Mishneh Torah. Indeed, to understand R. Moses of Coucy's legal project properly, it is important to comprehend the availability of Mishneh Torah in Europe at the time. Whereas Maimonides completed his Mishneh Torah circa 1180, the work seems not to have reached the study halls of the French Tosefists before 1200. In this article, I explain R. Moses' purpose and program in writing his Sefer ha-miẓvot, examine the format he chose, and clarify who his presumptive reader, or readers, may have been.

The second century CE has long been recognized as a time of intense preoccupation with medicine and health in the Graeco-Roman world. Medicine had always been a part of the Greek paideia, and acquaintance with it was traditionally required of every aristocrat, but it was during the second Sophistic period that a new form of medical self-presentation emerged in which the knowledge of medicine was hailed not only as one of the apices of the intellectual habitus, but also as indispensable to everyday life. As Michel Foucault observed, the literature of this period placed an enormous emphasis on the body not just as a tool to be used but also as an end in itself, and the classic philosophical ideal of “caring for the Self” (epimeleia heautou) came to entail unrelenting attention to one's health and physical well-being. In this setting, the doctor—the bearer of medical knowledge and the ultimate caretaker of the Self—was seen as offering more than physical relief: The doctor was both a healer and a mentor, and functioned as a watchperson and a guide to right living. Indeed, it is in this period that we first come across the appellations iatrophilosophos (doctor-philosopher) and iatrosophistes (doctor-sophist). Medical knowledge had thus become a most esteemed form of knowledge during the Antonine period of the Roman Empire, and doctors, as its guardians, interpreters, and practitioners, were invested with substantial power and authority.

Starting with its opening scene, A Serious Man offers a complex, provocative engagement with the role of storytelling in Jewish life, past and present. Many viewers have wondered how the film's “shtetl” prologue relates to its main story, set in Minneapolis in 1967. They have often speculated that there is some plot-driven relationship that they somehow missed. But the connection, by the filmmakers' own assertion, is not diegetic; rather, it is thematic, and storytelling figures strategically in articulating this link.

The opening scene of Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man has baffled many. What does an unsettling tale of an encounter with what may or may not be a dybbuk, set in the mid-nineteenth century in a Polish shtetl, and played out entirely in Yiddish, have to do with the story of a Jewish professor of physics and his family in suburban Minnesota in the summer of 1967, related in English? Is the scene to be viewed as a warm-up of sorts before the main attraction, akin, if you will, to the short-subject films—newsreels, animated cartoons, and live-action comedies and documentaries—that movie houses of old used to play before the main feature? If so, what is the significance of presenting an odd Yiddish scene to an American audience notorious for turning a cold shoulder to non-English-speaking cinema? Or is the scene to be viewed as a prologue to the movie? If so, in what sense could it be said to impart to the audience either the “state of suspense of the plot produced by the previous history” or, alternatively, the argument of the drama?

“Who ever heard of the Coen brothers anyway?” asked a Minneapolis woman with whom I was seated at a small party shortly after the opening of A Serious Man, in 2009. An accomplished and striking woman in her early seventies, Ms. S had lived in St. Louis Park, a first-ring suburb of Minneapolis, and the hometown of Joel and Ethan Coen. In fact, all of the women at the table where I was seated were likewise: affluent, politically and culturally active, philanthropic, and residents of St. Louis Park in the 1960s. On that December night, what they also shared was contempt for the film, and the filmmakers, whom they resented as inaccurate narrators of their shared place and time. Nothing could dissuade them from their conviction that the film was awful, not even the arguments of the Minneapolis Star Tribune film critic, Colin Colvert, who was also seated at our table.

Among the many themes to which Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man speaks so richly and suggestively, I will focus here on three that seem especially pertinent to our understandings of American Jewish identity, as well as to the academic practice of Jewish studies, and that exhibit the film's blend of complexity, clarity, and opacity. All three are closely related aspects of a larger question about the possibility of communication and, hence, of relation, but it should be useful to articulate them separately here. Each may be said to present, through the characters' interactions and the things they read and hear, its own question for judgment, but in no case does A Serious Man indicate how the viewer is to rule on that question.

Like many of their films, the Coen brothers' A Serious Man at once portrays a society dominated by men and calls into question what it is to be a man, especially but not exclusively a Jewish man. Indeed, while Larry Gopnik's wife is the source of much of his trouble, she, like her unmanageable daughter and the seductress-neighbor—the only women characters in the film—occupies minimal space in the narrative. But the role of the female, or the characteristics that differentiate men from women, occupy maximal space in the narrative: They are incorporated throughout the film in Gopnik's behaviors, in parodies of those behaviors, and in stereotypes of Jewish men, and non-Jewish men for that matter, that have a lengthy history in American television and film and in Western, Christian culture more generally. And so we find the central irony of A Serious Man, which is the presence of the female restricted to an indirect “male” presence that articulates the problem of male Jewish identity as it is construed and challenged in the context of American suburban life.

When Menachem Friedman and I resolved to write what became The Rebbe: The Life and the Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, we did so because as sociologists we were puzzled, as we put it in our preface, by how a “a small Hasidic group that seemed on the verge of collapse in 1950 with the death of their sixth leader” had replanted itself in America and in less than a generation “gained fame and influence throughout the world in ways no one could have imagined” at the time their next and thus far last rebbe, Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, took over the reins of leadership in 1951. More than that, we were quite amazed that this group, which at its height during the twentieth century was never among the largest hasidic sects and probably numbered at most about 100,000 worldwide, had managed to become among the most well-known hasidim in the world. We were no less struck that they had found ways to make their Jewish outreach efforts, as well as their extraordinarily parochial belief that the contemporary world had entered messianic times (and that only Lubavitchers and their rebbe knew how to hasten his coming), both newsworthy and known far beyond the borders of the hasidic world. Through a series of directed campaigns that aimed to transform Jewry and the world, many, if not most Lubavitchers had also tried to convince the world that their leader, who had reigned over them from Brooklyn for forty-three years, was the Messiah incarnate, even as he lay dying at Beth Israel Hospital in New York.

Much scholarly and popular attention has been centered on whether or not Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh rebbe of the Ḥabad-Lubavitch dynasty, identified himself as the Messiah. While this interest is surely understandable, both doctrinally and anthropologically, in my judgment, it obscures the central question concerning the nature of the messianism he propagated. This line of inquiry might seem gratuitous for two reasons. First, his writings, discourses, and actions are replete with references to a personal Messiah, and since there is no evidence that he ever deviated from the strictures of rabbinic orthodoxy, there should be no reason to cast doubt on his explicit assertions. Second, a distinguishing feature of Ḥabad ideology, in consonance with the general drift of Ḥasidism, is the ostensible commitment to divulging mystical secrets, penimiyyut ha-torah, the spreading of the wellsprings outward (hafaṣat ma‘yanot ḥuṣah) to broadcast the mysteries that impart knowledge of divinity mandatory for proper worship. Prima facie, it would appear that Ḥabad breaks the code of esotericism upheld (in theory if not unfailingly in practice) by kabbalists through the centuries. This is surely the self-understanding sanctioned by the seventh rebbe, and it can be justifiably argued that he went to greater lengths than his predecessor and father-in-law, Yosef Yiṣḥaq Schneersohn—availing himself of the socioeconomic opportunities of the postwar American environment and making use of the instruments of technology—to accomplish the diffusion of the inwardness of the Torah.