Yeshiva University Research Articles

Ladin in Lineage: Through the Doors of Jewish Gendered Life at Yeshiva University's Stern College for Women

Abstract: This article traces the crossings of religion and gender, American Orthodox and secular Judaism, teachers and students, religious educational institutions and the lives that inhabit them. Highlighting Jewishness and transness as intersecting forms of crossing, it explores periods of personal and institutional transition in the lives of Professor Joy Ladin, Yeshiva University's first openly transgender employee, and three of her former students. Experimenting methodologically with form and source, this piece combines interview with textual and theoretical analysis to link the Jewish gendered lives of its interlocutors—who emerge from different locations across the Orthodox-secular Jewish spectrum—with one another, and with larger communal and institutional forms of American Judaism they index. In doing so, this essay connects gender, religion, and education as intersecting forms of lineage, which pass through the interlocutors' and institution's historical and contemporary worlds. Activating crossing as a form of Jewish learning and queer scavenging, the piece enacts a method of Jewish institutional and embodied knowledge production that moves across lived and textual religion, articulating an alternate path through current struggles for queer/trans religious lives. This path does not opt to lose or loosen these lives from American Orthodox life and its textual discourse, but rather, it links them to both, and to one another.

Introduction

I am thrilled that this current issue features six papers that were delivered as part of an international academic conference that I organized in New York City in Fall 2019. Sponsored by Yeshiva University Center for Israel Studies and held at the Yeshiva University Museum, the conference’s title “Philistines! Rehabilitating a Biblical Foe” challenged the speakers to present not only new material on the ancient Philistines but also to orient this material toward fresh paradigms. The geographic diversity of the scholars (Australia, Israel, and United States) was matched by the diversity of their primary areas of expertise (archaeological, anthropological, biblical, and botanical).Consequently, the papers exhibit a great range of approaches. The broadest can be found in Aren Maeir’s article, which tackles both the history of archaeological research on the Philistines and how this research ultimately demanded that earlier theoretical paradigms be disbanded in favor of new ones that better reflect the growing complexity of the material finds. The articles by David Ben-Shlomo and Suembikya (Sue) Frumin provide in-depth details in two areas respectively, iconography and botany. Ben-Shlomo’s article illustrates that the growing corpus of iconographic and figurative finds has as much as anything else necessitated the shift from a paradigm of singular Philistine origins to a more nuanced picture reflecting a multiplicity of historical antecedents and concomitant implications for Philistine identity.Frumin’s article provides fresh data and interpretation through the lens of staple cereals and fruits. Here, it is the paradigm of Philistine decline and assimilation that is upended, in favor of one that views Philistia as maintaining self-sufficiency and agency as it integrated into the regional economy. The recognition of Philistine independence up until the end of the Iron Age finds further support in Shalom Holtz’s article in which he argues that Jeremiah’s prophesy to the Philistines (Jer 47) is particularly terrifying, not because the Philistines are weak compared to Judah but because they are in fact similar in strength.The final two articles focus specifically on Tell es-Safi/Gath. Shining a light on a single Philistine building, Louise Hitchcock uses refractions to illustrate not only the building’s history but also its potential meaning to generations of its inhabitants. Finally, Jeffrey Chadwick’s article redirects away from Gath of the Philistines to a brief episode when Gath was Judahite.Reading these papers has brought back wonderful memories of a pre-pandemic conference. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.

Religious Values in Secular Institutions?

Universities that are incorporated under a secular charter face a number of challenges in claiming religious exemptions or religious character. These secularly chartered but religiously motivated universities (SCbRMU) often are attempting to get the best of both worlds, by maintaining entitlement to government funding that is exclusive to secular entities while also claiming religious protections. In this paper, Yeshiva University (yu) is used as a case study of the difficulties faced by these institutions. yu has been sued by a group of students and alumni for refusing to authorize an official lgbt club, and yu has argued that it is entitled to a religious exemption from New York City anti-discrimination laws. This paper discusses the history of yu and its relationship with lgbt rights, as well as relevant case law concerning religious education, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and religious exemptions. The paper concludes with a discussion of the legal options a SCbRMU has when faced with these issues, including shedding part of its identity (either the religious or the secular), maintaining the status quo, and defiance. Ultimately, none of the options are ideal for such an institution, and the nature of the conflict for yu, when discrimination against funding religious institutions leads to the financial need for a secular charter, and the school’s secular status then leads to difficulty receiving a religious exemption from anti-discrimination laws, show that society is not tolerant of ambiguity in this scenario, and institutions are better served if they avoid these contradictions.

Eating America

Research Article| August 01 2022 Eating America Joanne Jacobson Joanne Jacobson Joanne Jacobson is professor emerita of English at Yeshiva University, and former Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Yeshiva College. Her most recent book is Every Last Breath: A Memoir of Two Illnesses (University of Utah Press, 2020). “Eating America” is part of a new project, on home. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Gastronomica (2022) 22 (3): 19–22. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2022.22.3.19 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Joanne Jacobson; Eating America. Gastronomica 1 August 2022; 22 (3): 19–22. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2022.22.3.19 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentGastronomica Search In the years just after World War II, the Passover seder pressed into service every seat in my aunt and uncle’s house, down to the nicked and crayon-stained furniture from my cousins’ bedrooms. Included, of course, were the massive, upholstered oak chairs that completed the dining room set, one of the first major purchases that clinched homeownership for this first American generation. The sticky, vinyl-seated chairs from the kitchen dinette were also jammed around the table, and the wheeled office chairs that had to be lugged from the basement—which occasionally took an elder on an unexpected ride into a wall. The aging immigrants who gathered rarely spoke of their own flight, at the turn of the twentieth century, from Polish anti-Semitism or the Czar’s army; nor did they connect their escape from Europe to the story of the Israelites’ escape from Egypt that they read in stumbling English from the... You do not currently have access to this content.

Challenging Stereotypes of Scholarship: Intention in the Talmud Between America and Israel

Challenging Stereotypes of Scholarship:Intention in the Talmud Between America and Israel Sara Ronis A review of: Intention in Talmudic Law: Between Thought and Deed by Shana Strauch Schick. Pp. xii 178+. Leiden: Brill, 2021. Hardback: $135.00 In 2018, I participated in a roundtable at the Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies titled "Different Approaches to Rabbinics Research: Between America and Israel." The participants were junior and senior scholars in academic positions in the United States and Israel, all reflecting on the complicated relationships between scholarship in these two regions. My own presentation was meant to represent the perspective of American early-career scholars. Being early career myself at the time and recognizing that people without tenure have distinct risks in offering critiques, I surveyed a number of junior scholars and shared their aggregated views without attaching names to the quotes. In talking to my peers, two important themes that came up were the perception that there is a shared academic interest in "law" – both actual laws and the concept of law more generally – across the community of scholars in North America and Israel, and a sense that rabbinists in Israel and America are engaged in fundamentally different kinds of work. The general picture that emerged was one in which Israeli scholars have better skills of textual criticism, manuscript traditions, and better knowledge of some of the Hebrew reference works, and as one colleague put it, American scholars are asking about what texts mean more expansively, "in conversation with wider theoretical trends and interdisciplinary approaches in the academy more broadly."1 This distinction points to a pervasive stereotype which contributes to how different communities of scholars see each other and engage with each other's works. But it is also clearly too broad; it does a disservice to the textual skills of rabbinists [End Page 275] trained in America, and to Israeli scholars' ability to engage with broader questions and conversations in the academy. Shana Strauch Schick's 2021 book Intention in Talmudic Law: Between Thought and Deed both affirms this shared interest in the law and convincingly challenges a reductive binary between scholars in these two regional centers. Strauch Schick earned a PhD from Yeshiva University, and teaches in both the United States and Israel. Where many scholars who have been trained in the United States read the Talmud with an eye toward discourse and rhetorical analyses, and identity-construction, Strauch Schick demonstrates profound expertise in textual criticism and manuscript traditions, and using these skills, offers a positivist reconstruction of the development of rabbinic concepts of intention. Strauch Schick's work is characterized by her extremely careful readings of complicated legal texts. It is worth repeating this last point – these rabbinic texts are complicated; understanding them requires profound experience with rabbinic thinking as well as deep familiarity with modern legal categories. In this short but dense book, Strauch Schick expertly analyzes these rabbinic texts and brings legal theory to bear in understanding what the rabbis are doing. Using source critical methodologies together with an eye toward the rabbis' cultural contexts, she Constructs a legal-intellectual history that highlights the distinct positions of the Amoraim expressed in their statements and rulings (identifying each according to generation, cultural environment, and school of thought) as well as the approaches favored by the redactors. This careful process of reconstruction reveals a decided shift in rabbinic thinking that ramifies across many aspects of Talmudic law" (p. 2). She offers this detailed reconstruction over the course of an introduction and five subsequent chapters. In her introduction, Strauch Schick situates her work within three scholarly contexts: the field of Jewish thought on rabbinic intention (including works by Shaul Kalcheim, David Brodsky, Yaacov Habba, Irwin Haut, Jacob Bazak, Avraham Goldenberg, Shalom Albeck, Ephraim Urbach, and Leib Moscovitz), scholarship applying source critical methodologies to the Talmud (the approach pioneered by David Weiss Halivni and Shamma Friedman, and nuanced by Robert Brody), and scholarship on the historical context of the Bavli (with an extensive list of relevant scholars, from Alexander Kohut and Jacob Levy in the nineteenth century to the more recent work of her dissertation advisor Yaakov Elman, [End Page 276] Isaiah Gafni, Shaul Shaked...

Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life by Zev Eleff (review)

Reviewed by: Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life by Zev Eleff Jody Myers Zev Eleff. Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020. 311 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000404 Zev Eleff has devised a fruitful and interesting way of describing developments within American Orthodox communities and the tensions between the Modern Orthodox and the Orthodox Right. He focuses on the quest for authenticity, a concern that has been central in the United States since the early nineteenth century. Authenticity in religion is a subjective judgement rendered by adherents who believe there is a correct form of beliefs and practices unsullied by financial, [End Page 498] political, and external cultural influences. One might think that for Orthodox Jews conformity to Halakhah determines authenticity. Eleff repeatedly shows, however, that among the Orthodox the charge of inauthenticity is leveled against an innovation when religious authorities deem it problematic but cannot fault the innovation on halakhic grounds; they therefore delegitimize it by declaring it new and contrary to Torah values. The Modern Orthodox, who have sought explicitly to incorporate elements of American liberal culture into their lives, have been most often accused of initiating inauthentic practices even though all Orthodox Jewish communities have developed new rituals, pedagogies, and rules. Furthermore, Eleff argues that scholars have underestimated the extent of American religious culture's influence on Orthodox Judaism, a corrective he demonstrates. Authentically Orthodox is not a historical narrative. It consists of nine case studies, each constituting a separate chapter focusing on a separate post–World War II innovation. Eleff arranges these in three sections. Part 1, "Halakhah and Change," examines kitniyot prohibitions on Passover, the Bat Mitzvah, and the yarmulke. Part 2 deals with the changed image of Orthodoxy in response to a Yeshiva University student team's victory in a College Bowl program on national TV, the creation of toys and games for Haredi children, and the life span of a Modern Orthodox Baltimore yeshiva. Part 3 focuses on "protected male space" through Yeshiva University regulation of co-ed social events, women's engagement in Torah study, and separate women's prayer groups. Each chapter can stand alone. Strictly speaking, none of the innovations were in violation of or required by Halakhah. For example, the case study on the yarmulke shows that in the 1960s American Orthodox Jews began to consider it imperative for men to wear a yarmulke during their waking hours no matter their activity, a position at variance with halakhic codes; they also began to describe the practice as a proud display of Jewish identity—certainly an American interpretation. In the 1980s, when the obligation to wear a yarmulke conflicted with a high school basketball league's rules prohibiting head coverings during playoffs, a yeshiva high school's leaders and supporters mounted a legal challenge. (The importance they attached to the sport is also an obvious sign of Americanization.) In Menora v. Illinois High School Association, the plaintiffs claimed that the prohibition violated the students' First Amendment Free Exercise right, and they won the two-year battle. At about the same time, some Orthodox rabbis and organizations began to oppose the long-standing Jewish community stance that the Constitution's Establishment Clause required strict separation of church and state and precluded state aid to religious schools. For this and related issues, the Orthodox were aligning themselves with Christian conservatives and asserting their distinctive American Orthodox identity. Similarly, in "Mitzvah Merchants and the Creation of an Orthodox Children's Culture," Eleff describes the school contests, trading cards, and toys developed by Orthodox educators that parallel those made by evangelical Christian educators. Both groups share the conviction that children's games should be "practice" for authentically religious adults. Their alternatives to American youth culture nevertheless promote the "American" values of competition, individual achievement, and acquisitiveness. [End Page 499] Eleff's frequent references to American religious history and historiography make his treatment of American Orthodox Judaism especially insightful. For example, in his chapter on Orthodox Bat Mitzvah ceremonies, Eleff builds upon the observation by historian Frederick Jackson Turner (and Shari Rabin's application of it to nineteenth-century American Jews) that there has...

A Tale of Seven Cases – Faculty Unions in the United States – From Yeshiva To Elon: Is It Time to Review Yeshiva and the Positions of Church-Sponsored Colleges and Universities As Well?

This article is a summary discussion of the main issues faced by faculty at private, often church-sponsored, universities who sought to be represented by a union in collective bargaining with their employers. The discussion begins by tracing the origins of the rule that faculty at private universities are managers and not employees under the aegis of the National Relations Act in the Supreme Court case of Yeshiva University. The summary then follows developments over the years up to the most recent decision of the National Labor Relations Board that sanctioned the efforts of adjunct professors at Elon University to seek union representation. In examining these two book-end cases, the article discusses issues relating to the effect of the religion clauses of the First Amendment in the context of the National Labor Relations Board’s shifting views on the topic. Last, the authors discuss unionization in the context of church-sponsored colleges and universities. Is it now time for the Supreme Court to review its seminal decision in Yeshiva University and for church-sponsored colleges and universities to rethink their positions as well?

OCR: university didn't inform student of investigation findings

Case name: Letter to: Yeshiva University, No. 02‐15‐2077 (OCR 09/29/20).

YAIR (Yeshiva Academic Institutional Repository): How rethinking an open-source institutional repository is changing the visibility of faculty, students, and administration

The director of libraries conceived of Yeshiva University’s institutional repository (IR) in 2018 in part as a cost-effective alternative to Digital Measures, a scholarly productivity tracking program used to determine faculty eligibility for tenure. It was mandated in Yeshiva University’s first Strategic Plan 2016-2010, under Strategic Imperative 2: Advance Faculty Development and Excellence in Teaching and Research. The IR would be a secure, prestigious, university-sanctioned platform for showcasing, documenting, and sharing intellectual output across the globe. It was important that most of the work would be open access, with accompanying Creative Commons Non-Commercial No-Derivatives licenses. In addition to faculty, undergraduate and graduate students would be given a platform to self-archive their intellectual output. Both faculty and students would have the option to opt-out from making their work public, or at least limiting the visibility to the university public only.

OCR: University didn't inform student of investigation findings

Case name: Letter to: Yeshiva University, No. 02‐15‐2077 (OCR 09/29/20).

Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life by Zev Eleff

Reviewed by: Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life by Zev Eleff Michal Raucher (bio) Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life. By Zev Eleff. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020. 311 pp. Boundary-policing has become a defining feature of Orthodox Judaism. Social science research reveals the elusiveness yet realness of these boundaries. Historians have largely presented a picture of Orthodoxy in America as a "slide to the right," wherein Orthodox Jews have moved to more stringent religious attitudes over the last century, thus pushing out many of those who might otherwise consider themselves Orthodox. However, amidst a sustained focus on how American Orthodoxy has changed despite an internal narrative of stasis and adherence to a singular tradition, we can now identify more clearly the many ways Orthodoxy has transformed, responded, and divided over the last century. [End Page 435] Authentically Orthodox demonstrates that throughout the twentieth century, Orthodoxy has not shifted its boundaries to the right but moved them in different directions depending on surrounding cultural and religious factors. Zev Eleff takes a broad view in developing a theoretical framework for thinking about how Orthodoxy has defined itself in twentieth-century America. Diving into nine case studies, Eleff argues that authenticity is what determines whether something—peanut oil, Binyan Blocks, or women's prayer groups, for instance—remains within the boundaries of Orthodoxy. Authenticity is subjective, contested, and a moving target. It is a feeling that is determined by "a web of experiences mediated by any number of cultural forces" (3). Those cultural forces come from a combination of what Eleff terms America's "indigenous religious culture" (by which he often means Christianity), European immigrants, and leading Israeli Orthodox rabbis (22). He argues that this quest for authenticity is what defines the boundaries of American Orthodoxy. Eleff illustrates how American Orthodox Jews have dealt with tensions over authenticity. The first case study concerns the permissibility of eating peanut oil on Passover and the influence of Hasidic emigres from Eastern Europe. The second chapter shows how bat mitzvah ceremonies became an accepted practice within Orthodoxy. The third chapter details the authentication of a religious norm for men—wearing a yarmulka in public. Chapter four focuses on how Modern Orthodoxy enlivened their youth with Mighty Mites, the Yeshiva University quiz squad. Next, Eleff looks at how the Orthodox right produced a faith-based youth culture through the Bracha Bee and rabbi trading cards. Chapter six tracks the rise and fall of Yeshivat Rambam, a Modern Orthodox day school in Baltimore that was ultimately rendered inauthentic because of the "religiously inhospitable soil" of Catholicism and the Orthodox right (143). The next three chapters focus on gendered spaces. Chapter seven explores the struggle over female college students at Yeshiva University. Chapter eight tracks the acceptance of women's Talmud study, as Eleff argues that this counterintuitive authenticity was due in large part to the decoupling of women's Talmud study from feminism. Chapter nine shows how this decoupling was not successful among women's prayer groups, which ultimately led to the elites not granting them authenticity. Eleff does important work in rooting Orthodoxy in its American framework. One powerful example of this can be seen in the chapter on peanut oil. Eleff shows how American consumerism of the early twentieth century "purchased more than a modicum of religious authenticity and helped peanut oil secure its foothold in Orthodox homes" (38). However, Hungarian Orthodox opposition to peanut oil ultimately influenced [End Page 436] American Orthodoxy only because of the conservative turn in American Protestantism. Hungarian Orthodoxy was deemed a more authentic expression of Orthodoxy in America because the American religious context had an anti-modernist, separatist, and conservative trend. The concept of authenticity is a productive theoretical approach to thinking about how boundaries are constructed. The case studies highlight the malleability of the concept. What ultimately authenticates a practice or innovation is not whether it is considered in line with Jewish law. Instead, the book reveals that at times the question was whether something was authentically Orthodox, like a bat mitzvah ritual, while at other times, the question was whether Orthodox Jews could be authentically American, like when they...

The Rise and Fall of Torah U’Madda*

Abstract Rabbi Norman Lamm, who assumed the presidency of Yeshiva University in 1976, sought to clarify the mission of the institution by using as its tagline the phrase Torah U'’Madda–denoting the dual aim of providing traditional Jewish study (Torah) along with a standard college curriculum (Madda, meaning knowledge). It would replace the word “Synthesis,” which generations of students, including Lamm himself, had found vague and confusing. Lamm launched what he called the Torah U'Madda Project, which ultimately included a campus lecture series, an annual journal, and a book entitled: Torah Umadda: The Encounter of Religious Learning and Worldly Knowledge in the Jewish Tradition. While denying any intention to construct a hard-and-fast institutional philosophy on how to integrate Orthodox Judaism and secular higher education, Lamm insisted that serious exposure to both Torah knowledge and the arts and sciences fulfilled the Torah's mandate to understand and appreciate all aspects of God's world. Lamm's initiative failed, however, because economic conditions induced many students to forsake the liberal arts for vocational and pre-professional courses, and the trend to the right in American Orthodoxy–expressed by rabbis at Yeshiva itself and abetted by the year or more spent at Israeli yeshivot before college–stressed single–minded concentration on Torah study and justified secular education only for the purpose of making a living.

A course-based undergraduate research experience examining neurodegeneration in Drosophila melanogaster teaches students to think, communicate, and perform like scientists.

As educators strive to incorporate more active learning and inquiry-driven exercises into STEM curricula, Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) are becoming more common in undergraduate laboratory courses. Here we detail a CURE developed in an upper-level undergraduate genetics course at Yeshiva University, centered on the Drosophila melanogaster ortholog of the human neurodegeneration locus PLA2G6/PARK14. Drosophila PLA2G6 mutants exhibit symptoms of neurodegeneration, such as attenuated lifespan and decreased climbing ability with age, which can be replicated by neuron-specific knockdown of PLA2G6. To ask whether the neurodegeneration phenotype could be caused by loss of PLA2G6 in specific neuronal subtypes, students used GAL4-UAS to perform RNAi knockdown of PLA2G6 in subsets of neurons in the Drosophila central nervous system and measured age-dependent climbing ability. We organized our learning objectives for the CURE into three broad goals of having students think, communicate, and perform like scientists. To assess how well students achieved these goals, we developed a detailed rubric to analyze written lab reports, administered pre- and post-course surveys, and solicited written feedback. We observed striking gains related to all three learning goals, and students reported a high degree of satisfaction. We also observed significantly improved understanding of the scientific method by students in the CURE as compared to the prior year's non-CURE genetics lab students. Thus, this CURE can serve as a template to successfully engage students in novel research, improve understanding of the scientific process, and expose students to the use of Drosophila as a model for human neurodegenerative disease.

Shared Scars

Shared Scars Abby Manzella (bio) I share a scar with my father and brother.Our abdomens marked as kin.My father's a slicing long and wide,a question how life was resewn.My brother's, he says, "like bullet wounds,"and mine just dots, bleached-out stains. The genetic, the hereditary,the failures of the bodypassed from one to the next,aim indiscriminate and true.Fathers to sons, not the only path.An inheritance evading primogeniture.The gall of the vitriol,a pain like fireworks of stone.But there's progression in the science,diminished harm with knowledge. I learned from them,but the doctors said they learned mnemonically.Four Fs they said:female, family, forty, and fat.No insult intended to the woman before them,who defied the categories wielded,except their definitions of family. I do not know what my father (or his grandfather) felt.I do not know when he grasped the source.I did not yet exist.For my brother, it took weeks,but he, I saw, [End Page 285] not quite adult,slapping the steering wheelto cut the ache,extracting himself from his carwith hand to roof rack,the wracking hurt so great,the displacement insufficient.Still I cooled his head and called for help.The organ must goto deplete yellow from skin,to drain the pain from his eyes. We can survive with much less. When my turn came,I knew the smack of the heelagainst my bathroom floor to quell the agony.I knew.My mirrored eyes were my brother's.I thanked him for this knowledge,if not all my ancestors for the pain.Still my scar and quick solutioncame through their suffering.Their detriment, my benefit. This is family. [End Page 286] Abby Manzella Abby Manzella has taught and written on contemporary American literature and film, particularly as they relate to issues of race and gender, at the University of Missouri, Yeshiva University, Centre College, Tufts University, and the University of Virginia. She has been published in Feminist Studies, Frontiers, Women's Review of Books, Ms., BUST, and Literary Hub. Her book, Migrating Fictions: Gender, Race, and Citizenship in U.S. Internal Migrations, was named a Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title. She can be reached at abbymanzella@hotmail.com. Copyright © 2020 Abby Manzella

Yitz Greenberg and Modern Orthodoxy: The Road Not Taken ed. by Adam S. Ferziger, Miri Freud-Kandel and Steve Bayme

Reviewed by: Yitz Greenberg and Modern Orthodoxy: The Road Not Taken ed. by Adam S. Ferziger, Miri Freud-Kandel and Steve Bayme Lance J. Sussman (bio) Yitz Greenberg and Modern Orthodoxy: The Road Not Taken. Adam S. Ferziger, Miri Freud-Kandel, and Steve Bayme eds. Boston: Borderlines, 2019. viii + 300 pp. Yitz Greenberg and Modern Orthodoxy: The Road Not Taken is the most recent book, both academic and popular, on the Greenbergs, Blu and Rabbi Dr. Irving, a scholarly and activist married couple who have profoundly impacted American Judaism for over half a century. The growing list of titles about one or the other of the Greenbergs includes Steven T. Katz and Stephen Bayme's edited collection Continuity and Change: A Festschrift in Honor of Irving Greenberg's 75th Birthday (2011); Darren Kleinberg's Hybrid Judaism: Irving Greenberg, Encounter, and the Changing Nature of American Jewish Identity (2016); and Devorah Zlochower's edited collection You Arose, A Mother in Israel, A Festschrift in Honor of Blu Greenberg (2017). Moreover, both have been the subject of numerous articles in a wide variety of academic and intellectual publications despite the fact, as Greenberg himself states, "Modern Orthodoxy has not taken the road I advocated" (7). Hence the Robert Frost-alluding subtitle of this anthology of scholarly articles. Essentially, Yitz Greenberg and Modern Orthodoxy is the published record of a 2014 conference attended by "sixteen scholars around the globe gathered at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in the bucolic Yarnton Manor in the Oxfordshire countryside, for the first (now annual) Oxford Summer Institute on Modern and Contemporary Judaism" (1). The book includes twelve articles from the 2014 conference as well as an insightful autobiographical "Retrospective View" by Greenberg. The contributors, some of whom previously contributed to the 2011 festschrift, represent a broad spectrum of scholars, including historians, philosophers, and sociologists. [End Page 636] This new study of Greenberg is divided into two parts: "Law and Theology," which mostly focuses on his thought, and "Past and Present," which expands to include a variety of studies on Modern Orthodoxy in general. The editors' forward succinctly explains that "the current volume offers readers the opportunity to examine in-depth the trenchant and candid efforts of one of the most thoughtful and earnest voices to emerge from within American Orthodoxy to address the theological and moral concerns that characterize our times" (5). Greenberg's opening autobiographical statement, one of several he has shared throughout his long career, is helpful to a scholarly assessment of his self-understanding at the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century. Organized chronologically, it also provides a taxonomy of many the leading issues he has confronted over the decades including, in part, "Growing up in Modern Orthodoxy," "Rabbi Soloveitchik's Influence," "The Holocaust Transforms My Thinking," "The 1960s and Their Impact," "Recoil from the '60s and the Rise of Ultra-Orthodoxy," "Working for CLAL Yisrael as a Modern Orthodox Jew; Losing Ground in Modern Orthodoxy," and "The Decline and Rebirth of (Post) Modern Orthodoxy." The fork in the road in Greenberg's life clearly came in the 1960s and was profoundly conditioned both by the general upheavals of that decade as well as, in academic religious circles, a particular interest in theology that later faded from mainstream American religious discourse. In her insightful contribution to the anthology, Sylvia Barak Fishman places special emphasis on the now well-known April 28, 1966, interview in The Commentator, the Yeshiva University student newspaper, written by Hillel Goldberg and entitled, "Orthodoxy, YU, Viet Nam & Sex" as a turning point in Greenberg's career. However, Greenberg himself points to a 1965 exchange with a Reform theologian, Rabbi Jakob Petuchowski, about the place of women in Jewish law as having "crystallized my nascent pluralism" (18). The 1966 Commentator interview also gave rise to a lengthy response to Greenberg by Rabbi Dr. Aharon Lichtenstein which is analyzed in the book's final chapter, "'The Road Not Taken' and 'The One Less Traveled': The Greenberg-Lichtenstein Exchange and Contemporary Orthodoxy" by Adam S. Ferziger, one of the book's three editors and author of Beyond Sectarianism: The Realignment of American Orthodox Judaism (2015). Correctly...

The Going: A Meditation on Jewish Law

The Going: A Meditation on Jewish Law

Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch. 6 October 1907—7 November 2007

Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch was a pioneer in establishing the field of mammalian developmental genetics, bringing together experimental embryology and genetics at a time when the role of genes in development was far from accepted. She studied in Germany in the 1930s with the renowned experimental embryologist Hans Spemann and then moved to New York City where she spent her entire professional career at Columbia University and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. Her career was remarkable not only for its longevity—she continued experiments well into her 90s—but also for ushering in new ways of approaching developmental biology in mammals. In her studies of theT-complex in mice, she made use of naturally occurring mutations as nature's own experiments that allowed the investigation of the normal role of the genes in the events of morphogenesis. In her later work with the albino chromosomal deletions, she extended her studies to the genetics of physiological traits. Throughout the decades that saw a blossoming of the entire field of genetics, Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch's work tackling some of the most perplexing problems in mammalian genetics firmly established the mouse as model organism, not only for studying development, but also for the eventual application of molecular biology techniques to development. Her published work is a beautifully coherent and rigorous opus, for which she received many honours. Her influence on a generation of geneticists, developmental biologists and the field of developmental genetics was profound.The life of Salome Gluecksohn–Waelsch spanned a century that suffered the destructive upheaval of two world wars but also saw phenomenal progress in the sciences, including embryology and genetics. At the start of Salome's career, these two fields were far apart and developmental genetics was barely a concept. Along with a few other pioneers, Salome was instrumental in establishing that genes actually had roles in development and in founding the field of mammalian developmental genetics. Her career laid the ground work for the eventual integration of genetic and developmental studies through molecular biology.Salome Gluecksohn–Waelsch published under four different names at different stages of her life and career: Salome Glücksohn, Salome Gluecksohn–Schoenheimer, Salome Gluecksohn–Waelsch, and Salome G. Waelsch. Among her colleagues and friends, she was almost universally known as Salome and so for the purpose of this biographical memoir, I have chosen to refer to her by her first name, out of friendship and respect.

Evidence-Based Review and Discussion Points

Evidence-Based Review and Discussion Points

Assessment and Treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorder

Assessment and Treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorder

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Western Culture: An Enigmatic Dialogue

Previous articleNext article No AccessRabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Western Culture: An Enigmatic DialogueDavid ShatzDavid Shatz Search for more articles by this author David Shatz is the Ronald P. Stanton University Professor of Philosophy, Ethics, and Religious Thought at Yeshiva University. His extensive array of published works address both general and Jewish philosophy and include Philosophy and Faith (2002), Peer Review: A Critical Inquiry (2004), and the volume of his collected essays Jewish Thought in Dialogue (2010). As part of their Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers, Brill has published a book on his life and work, titled David Shatz: Torah, Philosophy, and Culture (2016).PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 45, Number 2Winter 2019Davidson and His Interlocutors Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/700963 Views: 223Total views on this site © 2019 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.