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.
During the 2022–23 fellowship year, the Katz Center turned its attention to the study of law between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, an age of transition from a world of empires to the modern age of the nation-state and international law.
In March of 2023, the Katz Center was honored to inaugurate a new series in memory of Katz Center Board of Advisors member Howard Jay Reiter.
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.
Steven Weitzman (SW): Can you tell us about your research on ultra-Orthodox Judaism and philosophy?
Steven Weitzman (SW): Elisabeth, thank you for contributing so much to our fellowship program this last semester. You came to the Katz Center to do research on something that you refer to as the “New York Black Book of 1946.” Can you tell us a bit about what this text is and what led you to investigate it?
The study of Jewish law has deep roots in Jewish history. With due respect to philosophers and mystics, halakhists assumed a position of millennial dominance in Jewish intellectual culture from the destruction of the Second Temple to the Paris Sanhedrin in 1808. The study of Jewish law did not disappear but became a subsidiary field of the larger project of modern Jewish studies—from the Wissenschaft scholars Zecharias Frankel, I. H. Weiss, and D. Z.
Steve Weitzman (SW): Emmanuel, it has been great to have you as a fellow. Your research has opened my eyes to how halakhah, Jewish law, is developing is the twenty-first century. First of all, is "Jewish law" the right translation for halakhah? How would you explain what halakhah is for those who do not study it?
In curating and presenting lectures in Jewish studies to audiences beyond academia, the Katz Center fulfills several aims. One crucial one is to showcase the vibrancy of current research and the inherent interest of the areas of culture and history in which Jewish studies scholars are expert. In an era of diminishing support for humanities scholarship, the warm reception our talks—accessible but not simplified—have received speaks to a real appetite outside of the university for knowledge and ideas at a high level.
