Tzvi Novick

Jun 16, 2024 | blogs.timesofisrael.com | Tzvi Novick

Is revenge a Jewish value? It is well known that the Torah prohibits “taking vengeance against one’s countryman” (Leviticus 19:18).[1]  This prohibition governs interpersonal relationships among Israelites. Its point is: Don’t try to get back at your fellow Israelite who has wronged you; rather, try to teach him to be better. Put differently, the point seems to be: Save vengeance for others. Which others? At various points, the Torah celebrates vengeance upon the wicked, or on Israel’s enemies.

Jun 6, 2024 | ancientjewreview.com | Tzvi Novick

Wollenberg’s learned new book, The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible, makes two interrelated claims. Part 1 argues that “rather than valorizing the Pentateuch and its prophetic echoes as perfect transcripts of the divine will, many early rabbinic practitioners experienced the Bible as a problem.”  Or, not the Bible per se, but the Bible as a written text. What makes the written Bible problematic?

May 15, 2024 | dx.doi.org | Tzvi Novick

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 February 2024 Keywords covenantrabbinic literatureQumrancorporate identityhalakahDeuteronomy 29 Type Article Information Harvard Theological Review ,Volume 117 ,Issue 2 , April 2024 , pp.

Mar 27, 2024 | commonwealmagazine.org | Amirah Orozco |Tzvi Novick |Joseph Amar |Arvin Alaigh

On October 19, 2023, an Israeli airstrike near St. Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church in Gaza City caused a wall of the church to collapse, killing eighteen Palestinian civilians who had taken refuge there. If, as Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) stated, the deaths were a case of “collateral damage,” what happened two months later at Holy Family Catholic Church was targeted and premeditated.

Mar 5, 2024 | commonwealmagazine.org | Tzvi Novick |Arvin Alaigh |Xavier M. Montecel |Dorothy Fortenberry

Before the destruction wrought by the Holocaust, there was the dislocation of the Great War. When Avraham Levite, a survivor of Auschwitz, came to write the story of his hometown—the Galician shtetl of Brzozow, which was annihilated by the Nazis—he traced the town’s entrance into modernity to the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire during World War I. Its collapse, Levite wrote, unshackled the “fathomless hatred of the Jews, endemic in Poland,” leading to pogroms and poverty.