In Genesis 26, one of the so-called wife–sister stories, Abimelech King of Gerar catches Isaac “playing” with the woman he had introduced as his sister, namely, Rebekah his wife. He immediately confronts the trickster, rebuking him for presenting his wife as a single and therefore sexually available woman: “What is this you have done to us? One of the people could easily have lain with your wife, and you would have brought guilt upon us” (Genesis 26:10). Abimelech's remarks ought to give one pause. He apparently suggests that sexual contact with this Hebrew woman is as easy as brushing elbows with a stranger in a crowded street, which is to say, he fails to consider or even acknowledge the possibility that Rebekah might have just said “No!” Furthermore, the narrowly avoided “guilt” he refers to consists not of this woman's rape by some local sexual predator—in which case her secret identity as Isaac's wife would be irrelevant—but of an otherwise innocent man's unwitting violation, consensual or nonconsensual, it matters not, of her treacherously concealed marital obligations. In other words, the underlying legal reasoning here conceives of Rebekah not as an autonomous subject whose rights (i.e., the right to refuse a sexual advance) must be protected, but as an object within the domain of her husband, whose prior claims—namely, to sexual exclusivity—must be respected. Abimelech's at-first puzzling remarks, then, provide us with a glimpse into a wholly foreign legal episteme or discursive formation.

A central concern in the study of gender in Judaism is the status of women and the relationship between partners in a marriage. In this article I explore a concealed dialogue, or perhaps more accurately, a dialogue that has been condemned to silence, on that subject.

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.

In the last weeks of 1523, a colorful traveler arrived in Venice from Alexandria: “Dark in aspect, short in stature, gaunt, his language Hagarish [Arabic] and a little Jewish. … He wore striped silk according to the custom of the Ishmaelites, and on his head a white scarf, with which he covered his head and most of himself.” The traveler presented himself to local Jews and community leaders as “David,” the ambassador of an independent Jewish state on the Arabian peninsula, where he claimed that his brother, King Joseph, ruled over the tribes of Reuven, Gad, and half the tribe of Menashe. The “Jewish ambassador” announced that he was on his way to Rome to hold a state meeting with the Pope, as an emissary of the Seventy Elders, the advisers of his brother the king. He added, of course, that he needed money.

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.

According to a ninth-century midrash, God asks the wicked of the world why they did not come closer to God. Each person responds, “I was so steeped in my wickedness that I was ashamed.” Too ashamed, it seems, to muster sufficient courage to admit failures, change behaviors, and move closer—ritually if not spiritually—to God, and so they wallowed deeper into wickedness. Had these people not been so wicked, their shame might have spurred a return to God. A few centuries later, Moses Maimonides prefaces his introductory remarks to the Mishneh Torah with a quotation from Psalms: “Then I would not be ashamed when I regard all Your commandments.” This verse, coming after and completing the psalmist's prayer, “Would that my ways were firm in keeping your laws,” suggests that between action and complete lawfulness shamefulness exists. It is unclear whether the shamefulness Maimonides speaks of inspires fidelity to the law or impinges it. Either way, shame precedes (seeing) the law both lexicographically and phenomenologically. Before lawfulness, shame facilitates both regard of self as well as regard of notions of uprightness and of wickedness. At least according to these two sources, shame intertwines self-consciousness with self-evaluation; it mixes a sense of dark depths with a notion of ascent toward righteousness. Shame breeds inwardness and otherness, and can debilitate as well as empower. In short, shame simultaneously damns and redeems.

King Herod ruled Judea from 37 to 4 bce. His life and achievements are described in detail in the writings of Flavius Josephus and have been explored in numerous historical studies. In rabbinic literature, however, mention of Herod's image and achievements is scarce. The few sources that do exist are very brief, with the exception of one significant source in the Babylonian Talmud (henceforth: BT), which will be discussed in this article.

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.

Michael Fagenblat's A Covenant of Creatures is a bold and powerful book. Given the nuanced nature of its arguments, no sooner did I think I captured his thought than I discovered that Fagenblat might also have made the opposite point. Nonetheless, a central line of argument does run through the book. My task will be to present it and also to challenge it. The best tribute to this fine work is to engage in vigorous debate about its claims.

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?

My reading of Levinas's magnificent philosophical works, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being is based on two primary convictions. The first is that Levinas's philosophical works, in which he addresses and enjoins people without regard for identity (without regard for peoplehood and law), were produced out of strong readings of the Judaic tradition. Samuel Moyn showed how deeply Levinas was nurtured by interwar Protestant philosophical theology, and I sought to show that it was also possible to read Levinas's philosophy through the rabbinic tradition. Whereas Moyn's outstanding work shrugged off Levinas's Judaism as an “invention,” I regard Levinas as a midrashic philosopher whose account of ethics amounts to a non-Jewish Judaism—non-Jewish since it is addressed to anyone, yet Judaism since, in my view, it is midrashically determined from the ground up. Most of the book attempts to show how Levinas's philosophy works as a reading of core concepts from the Judaic tradition and thereby as a phenomenological midrash of biblical, rabbinic, and Maimonidean texts, all of which Levinas knew well.

Bialik may have protested in “halakhah and aggadah” that aggadah had become too dominant in his day, but for countless generations it was halakhah that possessed greater gravitas, thanks to the geonim and their successors. Bialik was onto something, however, since even he succumbed to the power of aggadah—his most popular work was Sefer Ha-Aggadah. In the contemporary academy, aggadah continues to flourish. The encounter between midrash and literary theory in the 1980s, and between talmudic aggadah and stam-oriented source criticism in the 1990s and today, have firmly secured aggadah's territory on the academic map. Some aggadot have been scrutinized by so many scholarly eyes—the oven of Akhnai, the heresy of Elisha ben Abuya, the partnership of Rabbi Yoḥanan and Resh Lakish—that they seem to constitute a new Jewish core curriculum.

“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.

Commemoration of the Holocaust, scholar Halina Taborska recently argued, has entered a new stage in Poland. For more than a decade after communist rule ended in 1989, politicized slogans remained on many Holocaust memorials and other forms of commemoration, remnants of the period “when politicians and ideologues, the ruling powers and the ruled, artists and administrators accepted a definitive version of events as true and obligatory,” she wrote in a collection of articles. Only in recent years has Holocaust commemoration sought to grapple with the “falsified semantic expressions” of Holocaust memory and to depoliticize commemoration in the public sphere.

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.