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.

JQR 113.4 is now available, online and in print. 

In this issue:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the current issue of JQR (113.2), Adam Ferziger makes exciting use of archival audio footage of David Ben-Gurion speaking live on university campuses in the United States in 1960. He uses the footage alongside contemporaneous first-hand accounts to offer new insight into the way the legendary prime minister approached the relationship between American Jews and Israel at a late stage in his career.

JQR 113.2 is now available, online and in print. 

In this issue:

Jonathan Kaplan’s research note suggests that tannaitic legends about Serah, the long-lived daughter of the patriarch Asher, derive from much earlier tradition, likely Second Temple–era in origin.