When Jews Argue

Ethan B. Katz teaches History and Jewish Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His previous books include The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (2015) and Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times (2015, co-edited with Ari Joskowicz).

This book re-thinks the relationship between the world of the traditional Jewish study hall (the beit midrash) and the academy.

Introduction: Engagement: Religious Devotion, Academic Relativism, and Beyond. 1. Terms: Is Jewish Studies Devotionist, Relativist, or Transcendentalist? 2. Philosophy: Moses Mendelssohn, Leo Strauss, and the Relativist/Devotionist Divide. 3. History: Devotionist Textual Scholarship and Historical Consciousness in Early Modern Responsa. 4. Law: The Mothers, the Mamzerim, and the Rabbis: A Post-Holocaust Halakhic Debate as Legal and Historical Source. 5. Language: Did the Medieval Grammarians' Scientific Approach to Hebrew Reject or Embrace Tradition? 6. Ethics: Debating the Proper Orientation of the Ethical Self in Rabbinic and Monastic Sources from Antiquity. 7. Pain: Milk and Blood, or the Critical Place of Suffering for Sages and Readers of the Talmud. 8. Consent: Coercion, Consent, and Self in the Redaction of a Bavli Sugya. 9. Feminism: Relativism and Devotion, the Yarmulke, and the Ex-Bais Yaakov Girl. 10. Postmodernism: The Soft Radicalism of Rav ShaGaR. 11. Education: A Case Study in Devotional and Relativist Learning in Early Childhood Religious Education. Afterword: Limits: Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis.