How do you remember things? Memories are stored in the mind, of course: we make “mental notes,” set long lists to song, use practice drills, and more. But how does it work, exactly? Where do memories reside; how are they created and retrieved when needed; and what relationship do they have to body and soul? These are questions that ancient and medieval thinkers pondered for both theoretical and practical reasons, in a tradition of ars memorativa.

The state of a nation’s press—its health or repression, its distance from or intimacy with organs of power—is a reliable bellwether of modernity. Newspapers routinely function as self-professed diagnosticians of culture and antidotes to its ills, even as they are themselves inescapably symptoms. In Daniel Amir’s essay in the summer issue of JQR, he looks at the explosion of press activity in Iran following the Allied occupation in 1941.

JQR 114.3 is now available, online and in print. 

In this issue:

Elyashiv Cherlow brings new light to the provenance of a passage of the Jerusalem Talmud based on newly identified Cairo Geniza manuscript fragments.

The Jewish Quarterly Review mourns the loss of Professor Arnold J. Band z”l, who passed away on July 7, 2024. Arnie  was a longstanding member of JQR’s editorial board, as well as a fellow of the Katz Center’s year on modern Jewish literatures in 2004–05. He was widely recognized in the United States and Israel as one of the leading scholars of modern Hebrew literature, with a particular interest in Nobel laureate Sh. Y. Agnon.

JQR 114.2 is now available, online and in print. 

In this issue:

Hanan Mazeh dissects a key passage in the Palestinian Talmud concerning land ownership that shows rabbis using the law—Jewish and Roman—to grapple with competing claims to territory. This essay is FREE to read and download without a subscription through July 15, 2024.

JQR’s archive is more than a century deep, and much of the scholarship of the decades that precede ours remains vital. This winter’s issue of JQR features a note in which Naphtali Meshel extends a conversation started by Raphael Jospe in an essay titled “Hillel’s Rule,” which ran in our pages thirty-four years ago. (JQR 81.1 [1990]: 45–57).

JQR 114.1 is now available, online* and in print. 

In this issue:

JQR debuts a new look! The journal has been redesigned inside and out, reflecting our legacy of producing the best in Jewish studies past and present. 

Rabban Gamaliel’s slave Tevi is pretty famous in rabbinic literature, not least because we know his name at all. While most of the characters peripheral to the rabbis remain only loosely sketched—Anyone know the name of Rav Sheshet’s wife? The oldest child of Shimon bar Yohai?—Tevi, by contrast, emerges in full resolution from the classical rabbinic sources.

The following is an excerpt from the published introduction.

Have you just been bitten by a rabid dog? Do you have ripe dates in your palm tree and a chicken in your yard but need to impress your dinner guests? Is your hair falling out? Has your skin lost its youthful glow? Are demons threatening your business?

There is a recipe for that.