How Shamma Friedman, Winner of This Year’s Israel Prize, Revolutionized Talmud Study

Meet the American-born JTS professor who modernized an ancient pursuit

By Shai Secunda

This past Sunday, sitting amidst the curated clutter of his peaceful study near Jerusalem’s Israel Museum, the accomplished Talmud scholar Shamma Friedman wrapped up a typical afternoon of work. Suddenly, the phone rang. Friedman picked up the receiver to hear a secretary announce that the Israeli Education Minister, Shai Piron, would be on the line shortly. Then, the pensive silence of hopeful expectation. After the conversation was through, the professor eased himself into his chair and disbelievingly gazed out the window at the fading January light. Within minutes, the internet lit up with the news that Friedman would be awarded the seventh Israel Prize in Talmud at a special Independence Day ceremony. He phoned his wife Rachel, closed the door to his study, and made the short trip home to celebrate the good tidings.

Shamma Friedman, professor of Talmud and rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Schechter Institute, is the most important Talmudist of his generation. That may sound like a desperately arcane perch, but marginality is of course a relative concept. Friedman’s accomplishments would appear inconsequential only to those not privy to the longest and most absorbing conversation the Jewish people have ever held—the study of the Talmud.

The Talmud itself might paradoxically be described as a marginal bedrock. It is the foundational work of normative Judaism, yet it often seems hopelessly consumed by language games and conceptual digressions. Ostensibly, the Talmud is structured as a commentary on an early third-century rabbinic legal compilation known as the Mishna; in practice, it ranges far beyond that. Everything that comes into view is ripe for analysis, and anything is fair game for extensive discussion—from weighty questions of theology to locker-room banter between obese rabbis.

Within the confines of that narrow vastness, Friedman made multiple breakthroughs—and still remains an impressively productive scholar. He wrote extensively on Rabbinic Hebrew, published studies on talmudic manuscripts, explored the composition of talmudic narratives, examined the relationship between the Mishna and related works, and produced important scholarship on towering medieval Talmudists like Maimonides. But arguably, Friedman’s greatest legacy has been to untangle the Talmud’s complicated textual web, and show how it was actually put together.

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Muslim Couple Preserves Remnants of Jewish Life in Uzbekistan

Few Bukharan Jews Remain in Central Asian Land

By Alanna E. Cooper for The Jewish Daily Forward

As the sun set over Bukhara, Uzbekistan on a recent Friday evening, I joined the local community in welcoming the Sabbath. This was my first time back to the historic spot on the Silk Road since I first visited in the 1990s. At that time, Uzbekistan had just gained independence in the wake of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, and the country’s 35,000 local Jews were migrating en masse to the United States and Israel. I was a doctoral student in cultural anthropology, witnessing the end of one of the world’s longest chapters in Diaspora history.

Today, 15 years since my last visit, an estimated 70 Jews remain in Bukhara. The city’s synagogue is still able to draw a minyan on Friday evenings, but just barely. Listening to the worshippers’ soulful prayers drift across the synagogue courtyard, I wondered who would come to occupy this space in the future.

Historians conjecture that Jews arrived in Central Asia along trade routes in the years following the Babylonian Exile more than 2,000 years ago. When they are all gone, will any physical signs remain to mark the memory of the vibrant, ancient community that once was?

Perhaps Akbar House — a tourist destination in Bukhara’s old Jewish quarter — serves as a premonition of what is to come.

I had visited Akbar House in 1997 at the suggestion of a friend. Back then, the home did not have a sign, let alone a name. My friend, who was born and raised in Bukhara, knew I was looking for souvenirs to bring back home to the United States and suggested I visit Mastura and her husband Akbar, who might have something appropriate for sale. I walked through the winding alleys of the mahallah (neighborhood) to their house so I might see their merchandise.

In those days, the couple was among the growing number of Muslims who had bought houses in the neighborhood as the Jews were emptying out. Why they chose to move there, I do not know. Mastura showed me traditional jewelry, hair adornments, amulets, and artifacts used by the region’s nomadic peoples.

Casually, and offering a very soft sell, she explained that the pieces were valuable antiques collected from many local peoples. I was a student with little disposable income and I left without purchasing anything. The event was unremarkable, and I forgot about Mastura and her husband altogether until my recent return to Bukhara this past October.

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Mayim Bialik Update from Israel: The Flight, The Kibbutz, The Family

By Mayim Bialik for Kveller

Well, my children have adjusted great to Israel. I, on the other hand, have adjusted about as well as my mother says I adjusted to daylight savings as a baby which is to say horribly. My “worst case scenario” for them for the first night actually became my own worst case scenario, with me sleeping only a few hours before darting awake, unable to sleep and armed with the energy to take a jog or make a cake, neither of which I can do in the kibbutz apartment I am in. My boys snored quietly and rhythmically in a cold room, warm under blankets and content in their dreamy homeland.

Leaving aside politics and religion (because that’s the best way to come to Israel: leaving those aside if you can), this is a rare beauty, this Israel thing.

There is nothing like El Al. We flew El Al, which is the national airline of Israel. My sons could not believe the security screening process, whereby hansdome and dashing suited Israeli agents of both sexes grill you on your plans, your packing, and how you got to the airport. They are looking not only for suspicious answers but for suspicious behavior, and even I with nothing to be nervous about, found myself a little hot under the collar as the agent explicitly explained that there is a concern that someone might use any family to try and hurt people and that that is the basis for the questioning. Gulp.

There is nothing like the community feeling of Israel. I have traveled to a lot of places in my life: extensively throughout the United States (covering about 40 states I’d say), Canada (east and west), a dabbling of Central America and Mexico, a healthy dose of Western Europe, and two crazy days in Cairo. There is nothing like feeling like you are on a plane or in a country with your extended family as there is in Israel.

Strangers become instant friends and buddies, discussing their plans… “I’m coming to look for an Israeli girlfriend,” one nebbishy first-time traveler on my flight declared to a handsome brawny Russian Jewish hunk on his aisle, adding, “but girls only seem to want guys who look like you.”

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The Rebbe's Brooklyn Abode... In Brazil

Why has one building in Crown Heights, Brooklyn been painstakingly recreated all over the world, from São Paulo to Melbourne, Los Angeles to Milan? Because the building, 770 Eastern Parkway, is the headquarters of Chabad Lubavitch, the Hasidic sect known for its outreach to Jews around the globe.

The Gothic-style red brick building that used to house a medical clinic is such an icon that Chabad centers all over the world are often built to look exactly like the original, which was made famous by the 7th Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson.

What does it look like when this Brooklyn-style building gets plopped down in the hills of South America, or on a busy European street? You have to see it to believe it—or just see 770, the work of photographers Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, who traveled the world documenting the 12-going-on-13 replicas and their strangely incongruous surroundings. What's your favorite? The one in São Paulo is a top contender for ours.

- Tamar Fox for Jewniverse

Lawrence of Arabia as Archaeologist

Stephen E. Tabachnick for Mosaic Magazine

A barefoot T. E. Lawrence grins after his successful occupation of Turkish-controlled Aqaba. Although Lawrence of Arabia’s arduous journey across the Arabian desert (called “God’s Anvil” in the 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia) has captured the popular imagination, his activities at other Near Eastern sites—as an archaeologist-in-training—remain much less familiar.
Most people picture T.E. Lawrence as the dashing leader dressed in white and gold Arab robes portrayed by Peter O’Toole in the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia. While the real Lawrence was not exactly like the character in the David Lean film—he never deliberately burned his finger with a match or said he enjoyed killing people, for instance—he was, nevertheless, one of the most colorful figures to emerge from World War I.

Riding a camel and fighting like a Bedouin tribesman, T.E. Lawrence played a leading role as a British adviser to Prince Feisal during the Arab revolt against Turkish rule (1916–1918) and was clearly torn between his pro-British and pro-Arab sympathies. As an adviser to Winston Churchill after the war, Lawrence helped establish Prince Feisal’s family, the Husseins, as rulers in the Middle East. The present King Hussein of Jordan is the beneficiary of Lawrence’s work in helping his grandfather, King Abdullah, solidify control of Transjordan.

Much of Lawrence’s story is fairly well known, thanks not only to the Lean film but to the publicity work of the American journalist Lowell Thomas, who as early as 1919 began telling Lawrence’s story—albeit not always accurately—in slide shows that he presented to millions of people in New York and London. Since Lowell Thomas’s biography, With Lawrence in Arabia (1924), approximately 50 biographers have kept the story current.

But despite all this publicity, it is sometimes forgotten that Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888–1935) was a very competent Middle Eastern archaeologist before the war and that his archaeological activities and Biblical interests helped shape him for the military and political role he later played. Although his pre-war work focused on the Crusaders and on the Hittites, he contributed to the resolution of at least one important issue in Biblical archaeology and touched on several others.Indeed, Lawrence derived his earliest interest in the Middle East from his religious training. Lawrence’s family belonged to St. Aldate’s Church in Oxford, an Evangelical congregation headed by one of the leaders of that movement in England, Canon A.M.W. Christopher. The Bible was read in Lawrence’s home in the mornings before he and his four brothers went to school and on Sundays, and he studied the Holy Land during his Sunday school classes. Given this training and his exceptional abilities, it is not surprising that at the age of 16 Lawrence achieved distinction in an examination of religious knowledge.

Lawrence’s family was more devout than most—with special reason. His father, originally named Chapman, was the lord of a manor in Ireland. He ran off with the family governess, leaving four daughters and a wife who never divorced him. The father and the governess went to Wales and changed their name to Lawrence, but they could never marry. The governess, Lawrence’s mother, became extremely religious because she felt she had sinned morally. She stated more than once that God hated the sin but loved the sinner, and made sure her five sons received a thorough religious education. Lawrence’s mother and one of his brothers later became missionaries in China.

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Throwing Out the Ten Commandments—the Ones That Once Sat Atop My Cake

I found a memento from my bar mitzvah in my parents’ house. Was it finally time to let go of the past, or was it worth keeping?

By Leonard Felson for Tablet Magazine
I was cleaning out my parents’ house for the last time: the two-story stucco structure my father built in Northern California in the early 1960s, where I’d grown up, where my mother had died four years ago, and where my father finally left 18 months later when he moved into a retirement community. Dad had taken some furniture, books, kitchenware, and framed photographs to Baywood Court—“retirement redefined,” said the sign welcoming visitors to the semi-independent-living complex—but he’d left plenty behind: beds, carpets, desks, an out-of-tune upright piano. Now that we’d decided to sell the house, my father and my two younger brothers and I were going through what remained, deciding what was worth keeping, and what was junk.

But sometimes such a distinction isn’t so clear.

In the otherwise empty refrigerator, I found an odd heirloom: the three-inch-by-four-inch confectionery replica of the Ten Commandments that adorned my bar mitzvah cake 48 years ago. My mother had hoarded it in the butter compartment, and even after her death, it lived on. My brother Howard stuck a Post-it note on the fridge door: “Len’s bar mitzvah cake decoration in refrigerator (since 1965)! Do not disconnect without moving it to another refrigerator, please!”

On the last day in the house, as I stood alone looking into the fridge, I faced a dilemma. Those Ten Commandments had meant something to my mother, and I felt tugged to honor her; I could transfer them to my dad’s new kitchen, or I could schlep them on the plane back to the East Coast and keep them in my own fridge. Or I could do what no one in my family ever considered: throw them out.

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In Tel Aviv, Israel’s ‘Sin City,’ an Unexpected Religious Revival Takes Root

Synagogues are full and kosher restaurants abound as liberal immigrants, Orthodox singles, and secular Jews come together

By Suzanne Selengut on Mosaic Magazine

On a typical Friday evening on Tel Aviv’s Ben Yehuda Street, this city known for its vibrant nightlife is in weekend mode. Beachgoers walk home as the sun goes down, sandy and tanned, clutching towels and flip-flops. Elegant couples head out for drinks and dinner. Singles gather at pubs and start to make their late-night plans for the biggest club night of the week.

But nearby, at the same time, a very different scene kicks into gear—one that most people don’t associate with Tel Aviv. Synagogues in the center of the city fill up with young professionals. On Frishman Street, just minutes from the beach, a red carpet fit for a Hollywood awards show marks the entrance to The Tel Aviv International Synagogue. Inside the sanctuary, about a hundred well-heeled men and women sing and clap in a scene reminiscent of synagogues on New York City’s Upper West Side. After services, the young rabbi welcomes everyone in a mix of Hebrew and English and invites them for refreshments in the courtyard, where single men and women flirt over glasses of kosher Cava and assorted pastries. Afterward, some head to friends’ homes for a traditional Friday night meal, while others hit their favorite restaurants or bars.

Welcome to the new Tel Aviv, where religious devotion mixes easily with the city’s predominantly secular ethos. Although Israel has become well-known for its religious-secular divide, with few active streams of liberal Judaism, Tel Aviv—long the defiantly secular counterpart to religious Jerusalem—is a study in how this culture may be changing. Attendance at synagogues and religious events in Tel Aviv has been growing for the past few years, and kosher restaurants are on the rise.

Part of this reflects an influx of immigrants, mostly Orthodox and Conservative/traditional, who have instilled a distinctly Diaspora-style, synagogue-based model of community to the scene. Part is also due to more Shabbat-observant Israeli singles moving to Tel Aviv from other cities, in search of a more liberal lifestyle. But part, too, is due to some increased interest in religious activities among Israel’s secular Jews.

Today, the city boasts dozens of active synagogues, social, civic, and religious organizations. Those who get involved in the city’s religious life are primarily single young professionals—a mix of immigrants and native Israelis, traditional Jews of all streams, and some who define themselves as secular.

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