Leah Sarna

Jul 15, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Leah Sarna |Akiva Schick |Abraham Socher |Tal Keinan

De Gruyter 803 pp., $152.99 A few summers ago, I came across a student crying in the beit midrash. This isn’t terribly unusual—I run summer programs for teenage girls. But this time was different. The sobbing student had been introduced to Talmud study in her Jewish day school, but only on that day did she learn that the Tosafot, a commentary penned by Rashi’s students and their medieval disciples and printed on the pages of the standard Vilna edition of the Talmud, was written by men.

Apr 26, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Jeffrey Rubenstein |Akiva Schick |Shai Secunda |Leah Sarna

Cambridge University Press 360 pp., $130 The Babylonian Talmud is the largest and arguably the most important work on the Jewish bookshelf. Its 37 tractates and more than 2,700 folios preserve an immense body of legislation, legal analysis, and court cases, alongside a wealth of biblical interpretation, rabbinic stories and sayings, and much more. But we know surprisingly little about the people who produced the Talmud and their history.