Learning to Read Talmud

Learning to Read Talmud is the first book-length study of how teachers teach and how students learn to read Talmud. 

Through a series of studies conducted by scholars of Talmud in classrooms that range from seminaries to secular universities and with students from novice to advanced, this book elucidates a broad range of ideas about what it means to learn to read Talmud and tools for how to achieve that goal. Bridging the study of Talmud and the study of pedagogy, this book is an essential resource for scholars, curriculum writers, and classroom teachers of Talmud.

Introduction. Learning to Read Talmud: What It Looks Like and How It Happens

Jane L. Kanarek and Marjorie Lehman

Chapter 1. Stop Making Sense: Using Text Guides to Help Students Learn to Read Talmud

Beth A. Berkowitz

Chapter 2. Looking for Problems: A Pedagogic Quest for Difficulties

Ethan M. Tucker

Chapter 3. What Others Have to Say: Secondary Readings in Learning to Read Talmud

Jane L. Kanarek

Chapter 4. And No One Gave the Torah to the Priests: Reading the Mishnah’s References to the Priests and the Temple

Marjorie Lehman

Chapter 5. Talmud for Non-Rabbis: Teaching Graduate Students in the Academy

Gregg E. Gardner

Chapter 6. When Cultural Assumptions about Texts and Reading Fail: Teaching Talmud as Liberal Arts

Elizabeth Shanks Alexander

Chapter 7. Talmud in the Mouth: Oral Recitation and Repetition through the Ages and in Today’s Classroom

Jonathan S. Milgram

Chapter 8. Talmud that Works Your Heart: New Approaches to Reading

Sarra Lev

Postscript. What We Have Learned About Learning to Read Talmud

Jon A. Levisohn

Contributors