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Soren Kierkegaard and the Interpretation of the Akedah:
Echoes of Jewish Themes
by Isaac Vita Kohn

Nations Restrained by the Ways of Religion:
Rabbi Menahem Meiri's Revolutionary Attitude Toward Non-Jews
by Jenny R. Labendz

The Eichmann Trial on Trial:
David Ben-Gurion, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Holocaust Memory in Israel
by Yoni Goldberg

Peshat and Kabbalah in Nahmanides' Eschatological Thought
by Samuel Groner

The Maternal Line:
Ruth and Bathsheba in the Bible and Literature
by Elizabeth Cate

Within the exegetical challenge of understanding the biblical story of the binding of Isaac, there is a striking synergy between many Jewish texts and the insights of Soren Kierkegaard. Arising out of his twin obsessions with philosophical rigor and passionate religious commitment, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling expresses an awesome astonishment at the apparently incomprehensible faith of Abraham, an awe that is equaled only by Kierkegaard’s commitment to a rational-critical hermeneutic that insists upon comprehending the incomprehensible. Kierkegaard’s invaluable perspective dovetails beautifully with midrashic commentaries, providing a systematic foundation that helps to expand and extend those commentaries and to map them into a modern philosophical framework.
Critics have charged, in various ways, that Kierkegaard has failed to balance his dual commitments to faith and to philosophy. A particular pair of questions, raised in the name of post-Kantian moral philosophy, is especially intriguing because it aligns seamlessly with a pair of answers prophetically supplied centuries earlier by the great twelfth century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides.
The works of several twentieth century writers reflect the influence, consciously or otherwise, of a Kierkegaardian way of thinking about the akedah, confirming the synergy between Fear and Trembling and the Jewish interpretations offered by Maimonides and midrashic authors.

The ways in which Jews and the Jewish community as a whole interact with non-Jews have been dealt with in Jewish sources from the Bible to the present day. The social and philosophical frameworks for these discussions have varied greatly, as has the explicitness with which writers discuss their influence. While today we may comfortably celebrate the diversity of the larger communities of which we are a part, the processes -anthropological, sociological, historical, textual, and philosophical – that led to this reality must not be ignored. When we engage in understanding how we arrived where we are, we may more fully understand what this present situation means and wherein lie its flaws. This paper highlights one small piece of the development of Jewish relations with non-Jews.
Rabbi Menahem Meiri of the 13th century Provence, know mostly for his commentary on the Babylonian Talmud, was unique in his ideologically driven religious tolerance of and moral respect for non-Jews. When the Rabbis of the Talmud established laws regarding non-Jews, Meiri considered them to have done so in the context of a non-Jewish world they perceived as spiritually and morally abhorrent. In his own time, however, Meiri was faced with the reality that the non-Jewish world had a moral center and non-Jews were not to be considered inferior human beings. Although throughout Europe halakhists were changing and reinterpreting laws regarding non-Jews, the legal and philosophical underpinnings of Meiri’s halakhic decisions set him apart as a thinker to whom we must pay special attention in the study of Jewish intellectual history. This paper is a brief examination of the Meiri’s unique methodology in dealing with these issues, particularly in contrast with that of the Franco-German tosafists.

The 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel was much more than just a trial; on this point there is no dispute. Whether being much more was in the best interests of the young Jewish state, however, remains a topic of controversy to this day. This paper examines the trial from the dueling perspectives of then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, an instrumental figure in the proceedings, and philosopher Hannah Arendt, an ardent critic of Ben-Gurion.
Even before the trial unfolded, the fate of the accused was eclipsed by issues of national, historical and religious importance. Questions like Is Israel the legitimate heir and representative of the Holocaust victims? and Can Jewish suffering be used to secure Israel’s admittance into the world forum? underlay the proceedings and indeed, the very fabric of Israeli society at the time. The following pages aim to highlight not only the watershed that was this trial, but also the deep-seated layers of political awareness and historical tension that drove it forward and made it, for better or worse, much more.

This paper has two parallel aims: to analyze Nahmanides’ ideas regarding messianism, resurrection, and the world to come, and to use this analysis as a case study toward understanding how Nahmanides uses different modes of interpretation to ground his arguments. More specifically, in his voluminous writings Nahmanides strives to ascertain both the plain meaning of Biblical texts (peshat) and their mystical undertones. (Kabbalah). In this paper, I look at the ways in which Nahmanides uses peshat Kabbalah in his eschatological writings, and conclude that although these two methods of analysis are very different, in Nahmanides’ eschatological thought they consistently reach the same conclusions.

This paper is a literary analysis of Ruth and Bathsheba as female charcters whose voices are suppressed in the Hebrew Bible. Though their stories are seemingly thematically disparate, the two women are linked by their relational status in the text. My analysis is an attempt to show how their potential radicalism is eclipsed by more conventional characters in their stories. As autonomous women, they present a challenge that has continued to intrigue authors until today, as evidenced by the literary interpretations of the two women over time. Assessing the biblical accounts of Ruth and Bathsheba's stories in concert with these literary examples emphasizes their imposed textual silence as a central aspect of their identities.