The following is adapted from Anne Albert’s introduction to the forum in our pages.

The rabbis have a deep distrust of individual authority, deferring to the rabbinic collective, for example, and not the inspired prophet. Even individual rabbinic authority is rhetorically mediated in the corpus through meaning-conferring, and meaning-controlling, layers of paideia and performed deference to previous authorities, inherited wisdom, and the sacred text.

JQR 114.4 is now available, online and in print. 

In this issue:

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).