Hayim Lapin, Rabbis as Romans: The Rabbinic Movement in Palestine, 100-400 CE. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.  295 pp. $55.

By Nathan Schumer

Writing the social history of the rabbinic movement in Roman Palestine has always been a difficult task. Previous treatments of this topic include Lee Levine’s The Rabbinic Class of Roman Palestine in […]

Review of Elliot Dorff and Jonathan Crane (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics and Morality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 540pp. $150.

By Ute Steyer
utsteyer@jtsa.edu

Although ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ are terms that are often used interchangeably, philosophers tend to distinguish between them. In philosophical parlance, “morality” refers to value judgments […]

Review of  Elizabeth Shanks Alexander, Gender and Timebound Commandments in Judaism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.  296 pp. $99.00.

By Rachel Furst

The Mishnah’s stipulation that men and women do not share the same mitzvah obligations – namely, that women are exempt from some categories of commandments that men are duty-bound to […]

By Yitzy Hammer

Over the past few years, I have become familiar with two very different areas of law – International Humanitarian Law (IHL – i.e. the laws of war) and Jewish Law. I became acquainted with IHL last summer when I was chosen to represent the IDC in a moot-court competition focusing on […]

Details of the “Religious Legal Theory Conference” being held at Emory Law School in February, including information concerning the call for papers, can be found at the blog of the Center for Law and Religion Forum here.

Review of David Weiss Halivni, The Formation of the Babylonian Talmud. Trans. Jeffrey L. Rubenstein. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. 352 pp. $65.00

By Matthew Goldstone

A significant percentage of the foundational research in the field of academic Talmud study is written in Hebrew.[1]  The monumental works of Epstein, Albeck, […]

Mark L. Movsesian has a review of Ronald Dworkin’s Religion Without God, published posthumously in September, at the Center for Law and Religion Forum.

By Lynn Kaye, PhD

lkaye@huc.edu

Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati’s recent book, Acting White? Rethinking Race in ‘Post-Racial’ America argues that race is not a set of physical features, but a performance. Racial identity is work done every day when a person of color anticipates the expectations of their white colleagues and […]

Review of Dina Stein, Textual Mirrors: Reflexivity, Midrash and the Rabbinic Self. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 216 pages. $79.95

By Lynn Kaye

lkaye@huc.edu

Dina Stein’s book argues that the dominant discourse of the rabbis, midrash, reflects and constitutes an imagined rabbinic self. This self, and the distinctiveness […]

The Program in Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies and the Law & Humanities Institute at Cardozo Law School will be hosting a conference on “A Thousand Years of Infamy: The History of Blood Libel, on November 14-15, 2013. Details and registration information here.