North American Jews: Are You Really That Insular, Or Do You Just Play Insular on TV?
At the urge of many friends, I watched a few episodes of the new Netflix show Nobody Wants This, which centers around the romantic relationship between a (male, presumably Reform)
Who Owns a Jigsaw Puzzle? The Amazing Story of the Litigation over the 4QMMT Dead Sea Scroll
Among the Dead Sea Scrolls is a short and puzzling one, referred to as 4QMMT–found in Cave 4 of Qumran, and titled Miqtzat Ma’asei Torah (“some deeds of the Torah.”)
Reading the Dead Sea Scrolls as Cult Ethnography
This fall I have the great joy of auditing James Nati‘s excellent course on the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered in Qumran in the late 1940s and led to
The Scouring of Samson: Incarceration and Corporal Punishment
One of the major assumptions of modern penologists is that prison, as an artifact of modernity, came to replace other forms of punishment: executions, maiming, etc. Overall, I think there
Two Federal Rulings on Campus Protests
This week saw two federal district court decisions against Harvard and UCLA, respectively, regarding their failure to protect their Jewish and Israeli students from antisemitic discrimination, which you can read
Joseph in the Joint: Fatalism, Transformation, and the Bible’s Most Illustrious Prisoner
In the last few weeks I’ve been sharing snippets from my new book in progress, Behind Ancient Bars. Chapter 2 of the book will be devoted to the Hebrew Bible’s
Dark Esther
My new project Behind Ancient Bars looks at several prominent incarceration stories in the Hebrew Bible. One that is often missed is Esther’s stint at Ahasuerus’s harem. Because most of
Political Incarceration Under Siege: Jeremiah in the Pit of Mire
An important question in the sociology of punishment is whether the social reaction to deviance/challenge becomes more ferocious during times of social and political turmoil. This question is often attributed