Trans Talmud

Trans Talmud
Author: Max K. Strassfeld
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2023-10-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520397398

Trans Talmud places eunuchs and androgynes at the center of rabbinic literature and asks what we can learn from them about Judaism and the project of transgender history. Rather than treating these figures as anomalies to be justified or explained away, Max K. Strassfeld argues that they profoundly shaped ideas about law, as the rabbis constructed intricate taxonomies of gender across dozens of texts to understand an array of cultural tensions. Showing how rabbis employed eunuchs and androgynes to define proper forms of masculinity, Strassfeld emphasizes the unique potential of these figures to not only establish the boundary of law but exceed and transform it. Trans Talmud challenges how we understand gender in Judaism and demonstrates that acknowledging nonbinary gender prompts a reassessment of Jewish literature and law.

The Talmud

The Talmud
Author: Ben Zion Bokser
Publisher: Paulist Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1989
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780809131143

This volume sheds light on the early rabbis as the shapers of religion and uncovers for the modern reader the early Sages' fundamental beliefs concerning God, the world and the human condition.

Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals

Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals
Author: Mira Wasserman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2017-05-19
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0812249208

In Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals, Mira Beth Wasserman undertakes a close reading of Avoda Zara, arguably the Babylonian Talmud's most scandalous tractate. According to Wasserman, Avoda Zara is where this Talmud joins the humanities in questioning what it means to be a human.

Nine Talmudic Readings

Nine Talmudic Readings
Author: Emmanuel Levinas
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2019-05-16
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0253040507

These nine masterful readings of the Talmud by the renowned French Jewish philosopher translate Jewish thought into the language of modern times. One of the major continental philosophers of the twentieth century, Emmanuel Levinas was also an important Talmudic commentator. Between 1963 and 1975, he delivered an enlightening and influential series of commentaries at the annual Talmudic colloquia of a group of French Jewish intellectuals in Paris. In this collection, Levinas applies a hermeneutic that simultaneously allows the classic Jewish texts to shed light on contemporary problems and lets modern problems illuminate the texts. Besides being quintessential illustrations of the art of reading, the essays express the deeply ethical vision of the human condition that makes Levinas one of the most important thinkers of our time.

A Traveling Homeland

A Traveling Homeland
Author: Daniel Boyarin
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2015-07-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812247248

In A Traveling Homeland, Daniel Boyarin makes the case that the Babylonian Talmud is a diasporist manifesto producing and defining the practices that constitute Jewish diasporic identity in the form of textual, interpretive communities built around talmudic study.

The Babylonian Talmud

The Babylonian Talmud
Author: Jacob Neusner
Publisher: Hendrickson Pub
Total Pages: 16530
Release: 2011
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9781598565263

The Hebrew Scriptures contain many hundreds of laws both religious and civil. They concern the Temple (in Exodus), the priesthood (in Leviticus), the Temple offerings and other rites (in Numbers), and the social order of Israel (in Deuteronomy). These may rightly be called the written law (Torah). The oral law is the extension of these precepts to cover all of life and its contingencies. The oral law (or Mishnah) was written down by rabbinic sages about 200 C.E. With the Talmud, Jewish sages systematized the laws in Scripture together with those of the oral tradition. While the Mishnah records rules governing the conduct of the holy life of Israel, the Talmud concerns itself with the details of the Mishnah. Israel's oral law found its definitive expression in the Talmud. The Talmud of Babylonia (a.k.a., the Bavli, or Babylonian Talmud), is a sustained commentary on the written and oral law of Israel. Compiled between 500-600 C.E., it offers a magnificent record of how Jewish scholars preserved a humane and enduring civilization. Representing the primary document of rabbinic Judaism, it throws considerable light on the New Testament as well. This monumental American translation was completed a decade ago--but was extraordinarily expensive and difficult to find--and features translations by Jacob Neusner, Tzvee Zahavy, Alan Avery-Peck, B. Barry Levy, Peter Haas, and Martin S. Jaffee, with commentary and new introductions by Jacob Neusner.

A Bride for One Night

A Bride for One Night
Author: Ruth Calderon
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2014-03-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0827612095

"Published by the University of Nebraska Press as a Jewish Publication Society book."

Transgenesis

Transgenesis
Author: Ava Nathaniel Winter
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Total Pages: 80
Release: 2024-08-06
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1639550054

An excavatory collection of poems tracing the connections between Jewish transfemininity, queer desire, and cultural histories. Selected by Sean Hill for the National Poetry Series, this collection is a scrupulous chronicle of individual and cultural knowledge. In an exceptional debut, Ava Nathaniel Winter challenges our concepts of the beautiful and the sacred, delving not only into the historically marginalized, but also into the chilling subconscious of supremacy. “Let me be clear / from this beginning,” she writes, “What I mean by beauty / is a terror I have fled from / into language.” Winter writes with a documentarian’s attention, a poet’s resonance. “I’m trying,” she admits, “to find language for what we do / to one another.” From Łódź, Poland, to predominantly white suburban America, from the space shared by queer lovers to antique cabinets filled with Nazi memorabilia, from Talmudic depictions of genderqueer rabbis to archival lynching photos, she regards the tender and the difficult with equal gravity, commemorates the fraught gift of survival. At the heart of this collection—despite its moments of profound darkness—is a new, hard-won holiness. The “earthy aroma of rye” calling up a mother’s baking, her mother’s, hers. Belief in a lover’s lavishing. A chosen future, one where we are “reader, sibling, sister.” If Transgenesis began in fear of beauty, where it lands is this: “turning at last / to face her.”