Marjorie Lehman

The Gendered Rhetoric of Sukkah Observance

Much feminist WORK has been done in exploring the exemption of women from positive ritual commandments governed by time as outlined in mKidd I.7.1 The history of scholarship on this mishnah runs in two familiar directions. Some scholars redeem the rabbis and interpret mKidd 1.7 as offering women religious sanction to value familial duties as fore most.2 On the other end of the spectrum are those who condemn the rabbis for being exclusionary.3 Women, they claim, are being demeaned;

Talmud: Making a Case for Talmud Pedagogy—The Talmud as an Educational Model

The Babylonian Talmud (Bavli) stands at the canonical center of Jewish tradition. Composed between the third and seventh centuries C.E., the Bavli has been and continues to be studied in a variety of contexts, ranging from religious academies (yeshivot) to modern secular universities. Its study has resulted in a long chain of commentaries, including the almost line-by-line commentary of Rabbi Solomon Yitzhaki (Rashi, 1040/1–1105) and the medieval dialogical commentaries of the Tosafists. Legal codification was also an outgrowth of Talmudic analysis and interpretation and resulted in Isaac Alfasi’s (Rif, 1013–1103) Hilkhot Ha-rif and Moses Maimonides’ (Rambam, 1135–1204) Mishneh Torah, to cite two examples.

Old Texts and New Media: Jewish Books on the Move and a Case for Collaboration

Abstract “Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place” is a database and research project designed to trace books-in-motion. It brings together acts of careful individual research with large-scale quantification and mapping: using inscriptions, owner’s marks, and catalogs of copies of early Jewish printed books. The project is a cooperative endeavor of four project directors, both faculty and librarian, from different institutions, each representing different fields of Jewish Studies. With the technical expertise of partners at a university-based center for teaching and learning, a mix of paid and volunteer student, postdoctoral, and library based researchers, the project directors have created a database that is transforming the way research on the history of the book is done. This chapter will address collaboration in three aspects: between project directors; between the project and its contributors (individual and institutional, public and private); and between contributors and users. The chapter argues for a new model of iterative projects that relies in part on networked collaboration rather than only on operations in concert by a small, bounded group.