In the midst of a talmudic debate about the appropriateness of beer for use in Sabbath ritual (instead of the usual beverage of wine), an incident is recounted: one disciple encounters his teacher using beer for a Sabbath meal ritual, and remarks: “Abba has begun to make money from the beer business!” (b. Pesahim 107a)....

Eduardo Halfon’s stories cut across borders of geography, history, culture, and identity. A Guatemalan-Jewish writer with ties to the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, Halfon writes fiction that weaves together stories of the Holocaust, the Ashkenazi and Sephardic diasporas, and the Guatemalan civil war in provocative and moving ways. In this special event,...

In biblical texts, we find preserved the “mark of contradictions, fragmentations, and adjunctions,” as intellectual historian Michel de Certeau once wrote (The Writing of History 1988: 313). This talk will explore the mark of contradictions in what may seem a peripheral set of texts within the broader biblical narrative, the Samson stories of Judges 13-16....

What role did women play in the making of Jewish literary modernity? We know too little about the women writers, artists, and intellectuals who participated in transforming Jewish culture in the twentieth century. This talk will offer a counter history of modern Jewish literature from the perspective of women. The talk will focus on two...