Learning to Read Talmud is the first book-length study of how teachers teach and how students learn to read Talmud. Through a series of studies conducted by scholars of Talmud in classrooms that range from seminaries to secular universities and with students from novice to advanced, this book elucidates a broad range of ideas about what it means to learn to read Talmud and tools for how to achieve that goal. Bridging the study of Talmud and the study of pedagogy, this book is an essential resource for scholars, curriculum writers, and classroom teachers of Talmud.

After his expulsion from Spain in 1492, Jacob ibn Habib created the En Yaaqov, a collection of Talmudic aggadah (non-legal material), by removing the majority of the Talmud's legal portions but preserving the chapter order of the remaining material and adding his own introduction and running commentary. In The En Yaaqov: Jacob ibn Habib's Search for Faith in the Talmudic Corpus author Marjorie Lehman argues that the En Yaaqov's anthologizer, Jacob ibn Habib, purposely sought to create a Talmud "look-alike" in order to prove that Judaism's foundational legal tract could also be seen as a theological document. By considering the factors that influenced ibn Habib, Lehman argues that his En Yaaqov was a reaction to the way that the Talmud was perceived and studied during the late medieval period among Spanish Jewry.

In an effort to disentangle motherhood from idealized notions of the Jewish family, Motherhood in the Jewish Cultural Imagination presents new perspectives on Jewish mothers by examining them in an array of time periods and social, religious, literary and historical contexts. This collection of articles also grants mothers a more prominent analytical place in the narration of Jewishness by exploring the ways that Jews have used motherhood to construct and sustain Jewish culture. Each contribution exposes the complexities of the place that mothers occupy in our understanding of Jewish culture and identity. Utilizing methodologies from literature, folklore, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and religion, the essays in this volume locate mothers, motherhood, and mothering in a societal context organized by gender and show how these images interact with, support, and contest prevailing gender belief systems. The book include examinations of childless women warriors of the Bible; childrearing and custodial care in ancient Israel; analyses of the power of God in relationship to the power of mothers in rabbinic literature; depictions of pregnant mothers; descriptions of rabbinic mothers in mourning; images of motherhood in the Zohar; constructions of mothers in medieval piyut; analyses of medieval stories about mothers; perspectives on biblical mothers in modern Jewish literature; mothers in the Hebrew revival movement; mothers in Jewish women's prayer books; mothers in Jewish children's literature; Ottoman Jewish mothers; Afghani Jewish mothers; mothers in Israeli film; and the impact of mothering on American Jewish women activists.

Learning to Read Talmud is the first book-length study of how teachers teach and how students learn to read Talmud. Through a series of studies conducted by scholars of Talmud in classrooms that range from seminaries to secular universities and with students from novice to advanced, this book elucidates a broad range of ideas about what it means to learn to read Talmud and tools for how to achieve that goal. Bridging the study of Talmud and the study of pedagogy, this book is an essential resource for scholars, curriculum writers, and classroom teachers of Talmud.

A feminist project that privileges the Babylonian Talmudic tractate as culturally significant. While the use of feminist analysis as a methodological lens is not new to the study of Talmudic literature or to the study of individual tractates, this book demonstrates that such an intervention with the Babylonian Talmud reveals new perspectives on the rabbis' relationship with the temple and its priesthood. More specifically, through the relationships most commonly associated with home, such as those of husband-wife, father-son, mother-son, and brother-brother, the rabbis destabilize the temple bayit (or temple house). Moving beyond the view that the temple was replaced by the rabbinic home, and that rabbinic rites reappropriate temple practices, a feminist approach highlights the inextricable link between kinship, gender, and the body, calling attention to the ways the rabbis deconstruct the priesthood so as to reconstruct themselves.

A feminist project that privileges the Babylonian Talmudic tractate as culturally significant. While the use of feminist analysis as a methodological lens is not new to the study of Talmudic literature or to the study of individual tractates, this book demonstrates that such an intervention with the Babylonian Talmud reveals new perspectives on the rabbis' relationship with the temple and its priesthood. More specifically, through the relationships most commonly associated with home, such as those of husband-wife, father-son, mother-son, and brother-brother, the rabbis destabilize the temple bayit (or temple house). Moving beyond the view that the temple was replaced by the rabbinic home, and that rabbinic rites reappropriate temple practices, a feminist approach highlights the inextricable link between kinship, gender, and the body, calling attention to the ways the rabbis deconstruct the priesthood so as to reconstruct themselves.