Authors

Shai Secunda- Co-Editor and Contributor

My research focuses on the the Babylonian Talmud and the ways in which it incorporates earlier rabbinic texts and echoes of its Sasanian context into a distinct textual archaeology. My interest in context has led me to Zoroastrian literature, where I work primarily on Middle Persian legal texts. It has also engendered an abiding curiosity in Eastern Christianity, Manichaeism, Mandaeism, and late antique Mesopotamian incantation texts – also known as the magic bowls (which lie in front of me in my profile picture). I am also interested in Gender, Orality, and the uses of post-structural theories for understanding the Bavli.

I first studied Talmud seriously in a certain black-hat yeshiva located in Baltimore, MD. I later moved to New York City and studied for a Doctorate at Yeshiva University under the direction of Yaakov Elman. During my second year at YU, I began commuting to Harvard in order to study with the Iranist, P. Oktor Skajervo. After finishing my coursework at YU, I moved to Israel to study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. There, I wrote my dissertation on the development of the laws of menstruation in the Bavli and in corresponding Zoroastrian texts. In the fall of 2007, I returned temporarily to the US so I could take up a post-doc at Yale’s program in Judaic Studies. In 2009 I moved back to Israel so I could begin research as a three-year Mandel fellowship at the Scholion Center for Interdisciplinary Jewish Research.

I lecture in the Hebrew University Talmud department, on the Bavli, Gender, Middle Persian literature, and late antique Jewish magic. I am completing two books – one on methods of reading the Bavli contextually, and the other on the interplay between Zoroastrian and rabbinic conceptions of the female body and the laws of menstruation.

Shai’s Posts

Yitz Landes- Co-Editor and Contributor

Originally from Teaneck, NJ, for the past seven years I have been living in Israel, where I have spent time in different yeshivas, served in the army, and studying for my BA. I first got into academic Talmud when in high school I was assigned readings from Jeffrey Rubenstein’s Talmudic Stories and participated in a class trip to see some of the genizah fragments held in the JTS library. These first encounters deeply influenced my years of study in yeshiva, during which I supplemented the regular curriculum with what some may call an (un)healthy amount of academic secondary literature.

Right now I am at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem majoring in Talmud and minoring in Comparative Religion. My main interest is the Babylonian Talmud- the intellectual history of its legal passages, and its Sasanian context. My interest in rabbinics also extends to the rabbinic legal discourse, textual transmission and fluidity, Orality, and the culture in which the Babylonian Talmud is and has been read.

Outside of the university I work as a research assistant at The Shechter Institute of Jewish Studies, collect field-notes for an ethnography of the National Library of Israel, and spend a couple of hours a week playing music and running barefoot.

Yitz’s Posts

Amit Gvaryahu – Contributor

I graduated from the Hebrew University in Talmud and Classics. I am currently working on my MA Thesis, entitled “Laws of Damages in Tannaitic Literature”. My interests are civil and comparative law in late antiquity, late antique religion, jewish prayer and liturgical poetry, the history of halakhah and Talmudic philology.

I live in Jerusalem with my wife Yedidah, and am a member of several initiatives in Israel and the US that aim to spread academic Talmud to the wider interested public.

Amit’s Posts

Ophir Münz-Manor- Contributor

I received my Ph.D. in Hebrew Literature from the Hebrew University in 2007, focusing on late antique liturgical poetry, also known as Piyyut. After the completion of my doctoral dissertation I spent two years at american universities (Brown and the University of Pennsylvania), specializing in Syriac and Byzatine hymnography. Upon returning to Israel I joined the faculty of the Department of History, Philosophy and Judaic Studies at the Open University of Israel as a lecturer of Rabbinic Culture. My work involves a comparative study of Jewish and Christian liturgical poetry from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, exploration of the relationships between Piyyut and contemporary Jewish texts (especially Rabbinic and Hekhalot literatures) as well as investigations of questions of gender and performativity in late antique liturgical compositions. I am completing three books – a critical edition of the poems for Hanukkah by the seventh century payytan, Elazar birabi Qalir, an annotated anthology of late antique Piyyut and a textbook on gender and sexuality in Rabbinic literature.

I live in Jerusalem with my wife, Limor, and two children, Shmuel and Miriam. Outside the academia I play the keyboards in Krikha Raka (eng. Paperback), an indie music-group that performs modern Hebrew poetry and watch as much football (eng. Soccer) as I can.

Ophir’s Posts

Ron Naiweld- Contributor

I am a research associate at the CNRS in Paris, France, working mainly on the spiritual and discursive aspects of rabbinic literature. I am interested in the figure of the late antique rabbi as a spiritual master and disciple, and of rabbinic literature as a discourse proposing to its “addressees” a way of life, just like the late antique philosophical schools and monastic masters. I try to examine the particularities of rabbinic spirituality, mainly the way it articulates morality and law.
In my PhD dissertation I offered a phenomenological analysis of the talmudic ethics of the self, comparing it to both philosophical and Christian discourses on the self from the same period (Les antiphilosophes: pratiques de soi et rapport à la loi dans la littérature rabbinique classique. Paris, Armand Colin, 2011).
My two current research interests are:
1. The propagation of the rabbinic way of life in the Jewish world of Late Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages. I compare talmudic and midrashic sources to their Christian or non-rabbinic Jewish parallels, in order to show how the rabbis distinguish themselves, and the spiritual option or way of life they propose, from other religious/spiritual currents of the late antique world.
2. I continue to examine the philosophical implications of my analysis of the rabbinic conception of the relationship between the individual and the Law.

Ron’s Posts

Guest Posts