New Issue of the Jewish Quarterly Review: Winter 2024
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.
Tevi: Amelia Bedelia avant la lettre
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.
Stews, Soaps, Spells, and Salves
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.
New Issue of the Jewish Quarterly Review: Fall 2023
JQR 113.4 is now available, online and in print.
In this issue:
A “Metropolitan Miniature”: Hebrew Modernism in a Local Key
In their essay “Hebrew Gomel: Space, Genre, Modernity” (JQR 113.3) Natasha Gordinsky and Rafi Tsirkin-Sadan focus our gaze on fin de siècle Gomel, a small majority-Jewish city in the Pale of Settlement that produced an outsized share of literary genius.
New Science in Old Yiddish
In an essay in the current issue of JQR, Magdaléna Jánošíková and Iris Idelson-Shein explore new territory in the landscape of early modern Yiddish writing.
On “The Most Anti-Zionist Text”
There is a good deal of heated discussion today about what is and isn’t anti-Zionism. Much of it surrounds the question of whether harsh forms of criticism of the state of Israel can be deemed antisemitic. What is rarely recalled in those debates is that one of the most prominent anti-Zionists of the twentieth century was a Jew, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum (1887–1979), the founding Satmar Rebbe, who formulated a detailed theological rationale for his opposition to the state of Israel.
New Issue of the Jewish Quarterly Review: Summer 2023
JQR 113.3 is now available, online and in print.
In this issue:
Barry Wimpfheimer shows that the Mishnah stacks legal couplets like building blocks to produce ever-richer conceptual understandings and train the reader to mine it for such meaning.
Rabbis, Neighbors, and Political Autonomy
The city serves as the stage for much of Jewish history. For a host of historical, demographic, and economic reasons, Jews have often been city-dwellers, and even when not, the association of the Jewish with the urban has kept a hold on the imagination of Jews and gentiles alike. The city looms large as part of the horizon of Jewishness, beginning even from the urbanization of the early rabbinic movement in Roman Palestine.