Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi is one of the most quoted scholars in the Talmud - assuming he was one scholar and not two, which he may have been. ...

Menachem Ellon passed away a few months ago. He was 89. As a mark of respect I took upon myself to finally read his magisterial two-volume s...

There's a poignant story early in the Nidda tractate we're working our way through these days. Rabbi Eliezer had a big disagreement ...

The Mishna is instructing how to determine if various physical defects make an animal permanently impure and ineligible to be sacrificed whi...

It's been almost two months since I shut down this blog. The reason for the shutdown is still in place: Having been appointed as Israel...

Judaism is famously both a religion and a nationality, though this is not a matter everyone likes to accept. Recently I've been revisiti...

I don't know what to make of this story, except to say that the world is a curious place .

The Talmud isn't a history book. If you know how to read history from whatever you've got, however, there is much to be learned from...

Veteran readers may have noted that it's been quite a while since I blogged in the Daf Yomi series. (Recent readers can find the introdu...

Last year Dan Senor and Saul Singer published Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle . It's a great read, and doesn...

Here's a link to a fascinating talk by the Rav Re'em Hacohen about the divine origins of the Torah, and the impact of human choice ...

It took 45 years,but the Rav Steinsaltz has completed his annotation of the entire Talmud . Three million volumes have been sold so far, and...

Raban Gamliel (the leader of the Jews of Galilee after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans) and Rabbi Yehoshua were together on a sh...

Yehuda Mirsky  reports on efforts to study the Persian context of the Babylonian Talmud, and tells that it's a promising line of inquiry...

As I mentioned earlier, I'm reading Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People and finding it remarkably unconvincing. Perhap...

It's been a while since I did a Daf Yomi post. Partly this was because the Shavuot tractate was unusually complicated and rather remote,...

There's been too much excitement around here recently about matters that may well not be remembered six months from now, not to say six ...

From time to time I pose the question - as a question, not an answer - of the ability of non-Israeli Jewry to sustain itself over time. I us...

There's been a flurry of condemnation of some South African Jews who disapprove of Richard Goldstone to the extent that he won't be ...

The following story appears at least twice in the Talmud, the more detailed version (if memory serves) near the end of the Yoma tracate. How...