Fall 2024 Volume I, Issue 1
GREETINGS FROM THE JLA BOARD
At our recent conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, our international membership elected the Board of Directors. Below, a short bio of each of us and the offices we hold.
Rachel Slutsky, Secretary
is Monsignor John Oesterreicher Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Jewish-Christian Relations in Antiquity. Her dissertation, composed for the Ph.D. she earned at Harvard University, is the basis for her book manuscript, The Gentile Enigma: Divine Law and Identity in Early Judaism. Her research studies the uses of Jewish law for communal self-understanding in both ancient and modern discourses. She has published in The Review of Rabbinic Judaism: Ancient, Medieval and Modern; Women’s History Review. She was part of the Organizing Committee of our most recent conference, the JLA International 2024.
Emmanuel Bloch, Treasurer
is Visiting Research Scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He earned his Ph.D. in Jewish Philosophy at Hebrew University on the topic of tsniut, and the modern evolution of halakhic conceptions of modesty. He has published articles on this topic in Journal of Studies in Judaism, Humanities and the Social Sciences; Diné Israel; Journal of Law and Religion and Journal of Jewish Studies. His broader interest is in how Jewish law responds to social and technological change in modern times.
Beth Berkowitz, Vice Chair
is Ingeborg Rennert Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Department of Religion at Barnard College. She is the author of three books on Rabbinic literature (Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic Christian Cultures; Defining Jewish Difference from Antiquity to the Present; Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud), and has just completed a fourth monograph, What Animals Teach Us About Families: Kinship and Species in the Bible and Rabbinic Literature. An article she developed from research on this book, “A Genealogy of the Jewish Family, Animals Included,” appeared in JLAS Volume 32 (2023).
Miryam Segal, Chair
is associate professor of History at Queens College and of Middle Eastern Studies and Liberal Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her original field is Comparative Literature (her A New Sound in Hebrew Poetry is about the new accent in Modern Hebrew speech and poetry). Her current research is on the vow in Jewish law. She is editor of JLAS Volume 32 (2023) Jewish Law and the Family--Anatomies of Home and Disruption, in which appears her introduction, “Jewish, Family, Law,” and her article on “Daughters, Fathers, and Wives in Jephthah’s Vow Story and in Numbers 30.”
CONFERENCE NEWS
JLA INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 2024
Our very first JLA International since the pandemic began met this summer in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Below, Prof. Natalie Dohrmann, Keynote lecturer, speaking on “Canon, Cultural Contraction, and the Law.”
Approximately 75 people participated in JLA International 2024: Canon, Authority, and the Creation of Halakhah at the Harvard Law School hosted by the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law, on August 19-21.
Almost half of the participants came from Israel, about forty percent from the United States, and several attendees arrived from Europe.
In your feedback, conference participants noted the many excellent talks and especially the high level of engagement during and between session that the in-person format encouraged.
Above left, Prof. Stephan Wendehorst speaking on Jewish law as a source of law in Europe’s precodification mixed jurisdictions. Above right (left to right), Dr. Paula Somogyi, who spoke on paleography and their legal history clinic, and their use of overlooked archives, along with her colleagues Drs. Ulrich Hausmann, Wendehorst, Kevin Hecken, and Mr. Georg Donabauer, who spoke on their rich research and teaching cluster at the University of Vienna. Their “A Legal Pluriverse of Multiple Canons and Authorities” session was a highlight of the conference.
Special thanks to the Organizing Committee: Elana Stein Hain, Ronit Irshai, Jane Kanarek, Miryam Segal, Rachel Slutsky, and Yael Wilfand. Thanks as well to former JLA Chair George Wilkes and to Emmanuel Bloch for critical support during the conference, and to our hosts at Harvard Law School, Noah Feldman, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, and Susan Kahn, Associate Director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program.
Members of the JLA International 2024 Organizing Committee take a break at the conference. Left to Right: Profs. Jane Kanarek, Yael Wilfand, Ronit Irshai and Dr. Elana Stein Hain.
JEWISH LAW AND
ANTI-SEMITISM WORKSHOP
Our multi-disciplinary workshop of four talks followed by a panel discussion, met in September 2024 in Vienna. Scholars in Vienna and arriving from Paris, Edinburgh and Israel—including Noémie Benchimol, Benjamin Porat, Wolfgang Wieshaider and Rachel Wozner—shared research and thinking on the impact of anti-semitism on Jewish law and practice, representations of Jewish law as promoting racism and misanthropy and historical treatment of Jewish law, among other topics.
Special thanks to Noémie Benchimol, Stephan Wendehorst and George Wilkes for convening the workshop, and to the Institute for Legal and Constitutional History of the University of Vienna for hosting and co-sponsoring with the JLA.
THE BIG IN JEWISH LAW
ON THE LEGAL ISSUES, PHENOMENA, AND EPOCHS THAT
OFTEN SEEM "TOO BIG" FOR SCHOLARLY ANALYSIS
Our one-day conference in November 2022 at the CUNY Graduate Center hosted by the Center for Jewish Studies was well-attended and a lively gathering to discuss big ideas in humanistic fields. We are grateful to Prof. Francesca Bregoli and Dory Agazarian at the CJS, and to Prof. Arnold Franklin at the Queens College Center for Jewish Studies.
Dr. Richie Lewis’s two-hour text study on “From the Mishnah to Babylonian Talmud: Literacy and the Loss of Religious Experience” kicked off the conference. Pictured below, Dr. Lewis in conversation with Prof. Beth Berkowitz, co-organizer of THE BIG.
