Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Fields of Study
- Jewish Studies
Areas of Interest
- Early Jewish Literature
- Women's Studies
(On Leave: July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025)
Biography
My chief area of research is law dealing with constructions of gender, sexuality, childhood, marriage, autonomy, and non-standard bodies as found in early rabbinic texts. Halakhah, Jewish law, is based upon texts from 200-600 CE and their subsequent codification. I attempt to uncover constructs and any agenda held by their authors and legal development within and after these texts. This means working out their ideas of anatomy, physiology, bodily processes, their court procedures, modes of authority and how sex, gender and parallel cultures may have impacted them. Many of my courses are in original languages, Hebrew and Aramaic. The courses with texts in translation are cross listed with Women and Gender Studies, Equity Studies, and Ethics, Society and Law.
Research
The Feminist Commentary on Babylonian Talmud Tractate project is headed by Tal Ilan, a professor of Jewish Studies at Free University in Berlin. The purpose of the project is to examine the Babylonian Talmud, the foundational document from which Jewish law has been derived, from the perspective of women. It is a document composed by men that has historically been studied and discussed only by men but frequently addresses women, their bodies, their sexuality, their intelligence, and their place in Jewish society. I am currently close to the completion of the first of a multi-volume commentary on Tractate Niddah. This is the tractate most deeply involved with women’s bodies. Several volumes on other Tractates have been published by Mohr-Siebeck.
Education
Publications
- The Way of No Way: The (Dys)functional Jewish Family (The Jewish Law Association / Phillip. I. Lieberman : 2020)
- Difficult Freedom (Academic Studies Press, Boston : 2018)
- From Something to Nothing: Jewish Mysticism in Contemporary Canadian Jewish Studies (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne : 2018)
- How Pragmatism Trumps Dogmatism: Marginalization and the Masses in the Case of Coming to the Temple (Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen : 2012)
- Misconstrued Mitzvot: The Menstruant Levirate Wife (Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen : 2007)
- From Heaven They Punished Her (Mesharim Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem : 2005)
- An Abbreviated History of the Development of Jewish Menstrual Laws (University Press New England, Hanover, MA : 1999)
- Introducing Tosefta: Textual, Intratextual and Intertextual Studies (KTAV, Hoboken, NJ : 1999)
- Sefer haBagrut leRav Shmuel ben Hofni Gaon veSefer haShanim leRav Yehuda ben Yosef Rosh haSeder (Yad haRav Nissim, Jerusalem : 1998)
- Rabbi Yannai Shrieked: You Have Purified the Birthing Woman! (Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv : 1997)