Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Cross-Appointments
Fields of Study
- Late Antiquity
- Jewish Studies
Areas of Interest
- Judaism of Late Antiquity (notions of time and space)
- Talmudic Philology, Mishnaic Hebrew
- Jewish Enviromentalism
- Talmudic, Gaonic and Rabbinic literature (philology and commentary)
- Modern Hebrew Literature (Agnon, Bialik and Amichai)
Biography
My areas of research include rabbinic biographies, honorifics, ritual fringes, and early Jewish family rabbinic law, Modern Hebrew Literature, peace studies and aesthetics. I believe in the unity of knowledge which results in seeking answers to our research questions both in well-known texts and entirely different fields. My goal is to generate hypotheses, create models with predictive values and therefore testability. These models are applied to rabbinic, literary, and philosophical texts in order to understand the underlying unity in world cultures. I engage in classical problems of philology including word studies such as when, where and who the authors of anonymously presented literature are. In the Deaprtment of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations my courses require knowledge of Hebrew. In the Department for the Study of Religion my courses are in translation.
Education
Publications
- The Way of No Way: The (Dys)functional Jewish Family (The Jewish Law Association / Phillip. I. Lieberman : 2020)
- A New Understanding of the Sobriquet דורשי החלקות: Why Qumranites Rejected Pharisaic Traditions (Brill, Leiden : 2019)
- Honorifics as a Key to Periodization: The Sages and Beyond (Bar-Illan University Press : 2018)
- From Something to Nothing: Jewish Mysticism in Contemporary Canadian Jewish Studies (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne : 2018)
- Who are You Mar Zutra (Bar-Ilan University Press : 2014)
- Many Pious Women. Edition and Translation (De Gruyter, Berlin : 2011)
- Mar Zutra: His Place and Position (Bar-Ilan University Press : 2010)
- Biographies, Stories, Tall Tales: Fishing for Gullibility (World Union of Jewish Studies : 2002)
- Introducing Tosefta: Textual, Intratextual and Intertextual Studies (KTAV, Hoboken, NJ : 1999)
- Geonic Responsa: East and West (World Union of Jewish Studies : 1997)