Dr. Richard Hidary, associate professor of Jewish history at Stern College for Women, has published two articles. The first, titled “Hanukkah and State: The Hasmonean Legacy,” appears in the December 27, 2016, issue of Jewish Review of Books. It demonstrates how the exchange between Rabbi Shlomo Riskin and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in the previous two issues about the proper separation between church and state is illuminated by the history of Hanukkah, which “does echo an ancient debate over religion, power, the nature of the Maccabees’ victory, and the legitimacy of the Hasmonean dynasty that divided thinkers along Israel-diaspora lines.” The second piece is a review of Michal Bar-Asher Siegal’s Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud in The Review of Rabbinic Judaism 19 (2016). Titled “A New Approach to Contextualizing Bavli Stories and a Meta-Analysis of Comparative Methodologies,” Hidary concludes that Siegal “has contributed a new set of tools by which to understand the Bavli [Babylonian Talmud] and its cultural environment, and we can look forward to new developments in the field that this book will inspire.”