The 1619 Project, and a Quibble
The New York Times has recently been running a series of articles marking the 400th anniversary of the arrival of African slaves in the New World that they are calling the 1619 Project. The approach...
View ArticleBlurbing Ecclesiastes
Last week in my course at Brown, “How the Bible Became Holy,” students read the book of Ecclesiastes and portions of Sirach. At the beginning of class I tried a new warm-up exercise, in groups:...
View ArticleInscriptions and FAIR Archiving
I direct on online project that seeks to collect, analyze, and make accessible the inscriptions of Israel/Palestine from roughly the sixth century BCE to the seventh century, CE. The site can be...
View ArticleCanonizing the Bible: Historical Simulation
For several years, I have included a historical simulation as the final exercise of my undergraduate class, “How the Bible Became Holy.” This year I will do the same. The guidelines for the...
View ArticleAntisemitism: A History
Throughout my teaching career, I have dabbled with the topic of antisemitism. The closest that I came to tackling it head-on was one called “Judaism and Christianity in Conflict,” which was more a...
View ArticleNew Course: Introduction to Digital Humanities
Almost since the beginning of my career I have been involved in projects that fall under the umbrella of what we call today, the “digital humanities,” especially my project Inscriptions of...
View ArticleJews, Coronavirus, Digital Humanities, etc.
This semester I am teaching two new courses, “Antisemitism: A History” and “Introduction to Digital Humanities.” Except, of course, I’m not anymore. Better: I’m paused. I’ll pick the courses back up,...
View ArticleBJS Open Access Books
BJS is a book series with a long and distinguished history, and I have the privilege of serving now as its Managing Editor. In addition to working on our publication list (we have recently published...
View ArticleGrading in the Age of COVID-19
In the midst of a global pandemic that is causing tens of thousands of deaths, ravaging the most vulnerable of us, and bringing millions to the brink of economic catastrophe, college students...
View ArticleWrapping Up: Introduction to Digital Humanities
I am now wrapping up my graduate class on “Introduction to the Digital Humanities,” which I taught for the first time. Judging from the conversations and presentations we had, in and out of class,...
View ArticleOpen Access: Tasting the Dish
Over the past year I have been managing a project, with support from an NEH/Mellon Humanities Open Book grant, to digitize and make open-access fifty-one older books in the Brown Judaic Studies (BJS)...
View ArticleBJS Open Book White Paper
As many of you know, over the past year, I have been directing an NEH/Mellon Humanities Open Book Grant to digitize 52 volumes from the backlist of Brown Judaic Studies. I have written about the...
View ArticleThe Birth and Death of a Quirky Tax Exemption
July 15 is Tax Day, the day that most income tax returns are due. The nationwide extension from the normal date of April 15 is, from what I can tell, unprecedented. A state or region celebrating a...
View ArticleDigital Humanities: Some Updates
Over the last few years, attempting to ease myself into the field of “digital humanities,” I have attended a few related conferences. The largest was DH2019 in Utrecht, which I frankly found...
View ArticleExpected Job Opening: Project Manager for “Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine”
Please note – and this is important – that the following position announcement is tentative and pending both funding and final institutional approval. If you are interested in the position, please...
View ArticleThe Rabbinic Citation Network
In a previous post, I shared some work that Mike Sperling and I were doing to visualize and analyze the rabbinic citation network in the Babylonian Talmud, that is, who cited whom. I am very pleased...
View ArticleJewish Studies by the Numbers
With Alex Berry, I have launched a new web project that analyzes journals in Jewish studies. You can view the site here, where you can see many different ways of visualizing and interacting with the...
View ArticleSirach vs. Ben Sira
The Book of Ben Sira was written in Hebrew by a Jewish scribe around 180 BCE. Jews (well, the Jews who could read) read and ascribed authority to it until the early Middle Ages. The Cairo Geniza...
View ArticleJosephus’s Knowledge of Scripture
In my book, How the Bible Became Holy, I suggested that both Josephus and Paul should be seen in a similar light: Jews from Jerusalem who, like many in their class, were brought up with little...
View ArticleBen Sira and Wine
I recently published a commentary on the book of Ben Sira in the Jewish Annotated Apocrypha. As a result of that, I was invited by Rabbi Drew Kaplan to appear on his podcast series, “Jewish Drinking.”...
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