American Talmud

Looks at the role of Jewish American fiction in the larger context of American culture.

Looks at the role of Jewish American fiction in the larger context of American culture.

Looks at the role of Jewish American fiction in the larger context of American culture.

In Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals, Mira Beth Wasserman undertakes a close reading of Avoda Zara, arguably the Talmud's most scandalous tractate, to uncover the hidden architecture of this classic work of Jewish religious thought. She proposes a new way of reading the Talmud that brings it into conversation with the humanities, including animal studies, the new materialisms, and other areas of critical theory that have been reshaping the understanding of what it is to be a human being. Even as it comments on the the rabbinic laws that govern relations between Jews and non-Jews, Avoda Zara is also an attempt to reflect on what all people share in common, and on how humans fit into a larger universe of animals and things. As is typical of the Talmud in general, it proceeds by incorporating a vast and confusing array of apparently digressive materials, but Wasserman demonstrates that there is a whole greater than the sum of the parts, a sustained effort to explore human identity and difference. In centuries past, Avoda Zara has been a flashpoint in Jewish-Christian relations. It was partly due to its content that the Talmud was subject to burning and censorship by Christian authorities. Wasserman develops a twenty-first-century reading of the tractate that aims to reposition it as part of a broader quest to understand what connects human beings to each other and to the world around them.

This book brings together six articles the author has published in recent years on the development of the Orthodox Jewish community in Cleveland, Ohio. While a number of scholars have ably presented important parts of the history of Jewish Orthodoxy in Cleveland, Ohio, this book is a first attempt to deal comprehensively with the story of Cleveland Orthodox Judaism. Chapters one and two, taken together, present a connected narrative history of the evolution of the Jewish Orthodox community in Cleveland, Ohio from its beginnings to the early twenty-first century. The succeeding chapters present in greater detail persons and institutions of great importance to the historical development of the Orthodox community.

Eighty years from now, in a time of increasing environmental degradation and after one sixth of the Earth's population has died in a vast pandemic, a noted rabbi in Brooklyn hosts a convocation for Jewish clergy and scholars from every background. Her vision--to create a new Talmud for living in such dangerous times. Over the course of five years the attendees work to compile a text in multiple genres--but their text is never completed. Eighty years later, a single laptop is discovered that contains fragments of their text--and that is what this book contains. There are poems, stories, legal texts, and conversations, on belief, practice, liturgy, all designed for beleaguered people living in what seems to them the end of time. There are texts of hope, humor, despair, rage, and simple witnessing of the dying world around them (which may or may not be our world).

Trans Talmud places eunuchs and androgynes at the center of rabbinic literature and asks what we can learn from them about Judaism and the project of transgender history. Rather than treating these figures as anomalies to be justified or explained away, Max K. Strassfeld argues that they profoundly shaped ideas about law, as the rabbis constructed intricate taxonomies of gender across dozens of texts to understand an array of cultural tensions. Showing how rabbis employed eunuchs and androgynes to define proper forms of masculinity, Strassfeld emphasizes the unique potential of these figures to not only establish the boundary of law but exceed and transform it. Trans Talmud challenges how we understand gender in Judaism and demonstrates that acknowledging nonbinary gender prompts a reassessment of Jewish literature and law.