Notes on Contributors
Michal Bar-Asher Siegal
PhD (2010), Yale University, is Associate Professor of Talmud in the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She is a scholar of rabbinic Judaism and focuses on Jewish-Christian relations in the Babylonian Talmud. Her most recent book is Jewish-Christian Dialogues on Scripture in Late Antiquity: Heretic Narratives of the Babylonian Talmud (CUP, 2019).
Meir Ben Shahar
PhD (2012), The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is a senior lecturer at Sha’anan College and the Open University. He has published articles on Josephus and rabbinic literature. His monograph A Dam of Forgetting: Second Temple Memories in Late Antiquity, is forthcoming from Yad Ben Zvi Press.
Katell Berthelot
PhD (2001), Sorbonne University, is Professor of Ancient Judaism at CNRS / Aix-Marseille University. Her most recent publications include In Search of the Promised Land? The Hasmonean Dynasty Between Biblical Models and Hellenistic Diplomacy (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018) and Jews and their Roman Rivals: Pagan Rome’s Challenge to Israel (Princeton University Press, 2021).
Yonatan Feintuch
PhD (2009), Bar-Ilan University, is Lecturer of Talmud at Bar-Ilan University. He has published articles and books on Aggada in Rabbinic Literature including Panim El Panim (Maggid, 2019), and on the interrelationship between Halakha and Aggada in the Babylonian Talmud.
Steven Fraade
PhD (1980), University of Pennsylvania, is the Mark Taper Professor of the History of Judaism at Yale University. He is the author of many articles and books on the history and literature of Judaism in Greco-Roman times and Late Antiquity, including From Tradition to Commentary: Torah and its Interpretation in the Midrash Sifre to Deuteronomy (SUNY Press, 1991), Legal Fictions: Studies of Law and Narrative in the Discursive Worlds of Ancient Jewish Sectarians and Sages (Brill) 2011) and most recently, The Damascus Document (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Alyssa M. Gray
PhD (2001), Jewish Theological Seminary, is Professor of Codes and Responsa Literature and Emily S. and Rabbi Bernard H. Mehlman Chair in Rabbinics at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Among her many publications are A Talmud in Exile: The Influence of Yerushalmi Avodah Zarah on the Formation of Bavli Avodah Zarah (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2005; 2nd ed. 2020) and Charity in Rabbinic Judaism: Atonement, Rewards, and Righteousness (London and New York: Routledge, 2019).
Christine Hayes
PhD (1993), UC Berkeley, is Sterling Professor of Religious Studies in Classical Judaica at Yale University. She has published articles and monographs in talmudic-midrashic studies, including Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities (Oxford University Press, 2002) and What’s Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives (Princeton University Press, 2015), as well as edited volumes including The Cambridge Companion to Judaism and Law (2017).
Richard Hidary
PhD (2007), New York University, is a Professor of Judaic Studies at Yeshiva University. He is the author of Dispute for the Sake of Heaven: Legal Pluralism in the Talmud (Brown University Press, 2010) and Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Tal Ilan
PhD (1991), The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is Professor (emeritus) of Jewish Studies at the Institut fuer Judaistik, Freie Universitaet Berlin. She has published extensively on Jewish history in Late Antiquity including a four-volume Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity and is the co-editor of the new Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum of which two volumes are in print. She is also the editor of the Feminist Commentary on the Babylonian Talmud.
Jane L. Kanarek
PhD (2007), University of Chicago, is Associate Professor of Rabbinics at Hebrew College. She is the author of Biblical Narrative and the Formation of Rabbinic Law (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and an editor of Motherhood in the Jewish Cultural Imagination (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2017).
Yishai Kiel
PhD (Rabbinics and Iranian Studies, 2011) and PhD (Law, 2020), The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is a scholar of Jewish law and religion in late antiquity and the early medieval period, with a focus on the intersection of Jewish thought with the Christian, Islamic, Zoroastrian and Manichean traditions in the Sasanian and early Islamicate Near East. He is the author of Sexuality in the Babylonian Talmud: Christian and Sasanian Contexts in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Hayim Lapin
PhD (1993), Columbia University, is Professor of History and Robert H. Smith Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland. He has published on the history of Jews, especially Rabbis, in Palestine and on the history of Palestine as a Roman province. His recent work has been on “Rabbinization” in the fifth to ninth centuries and on digital methods for the analysis of classical texts.
Vered Noam
PhD (1997), Hebrew University, is Professor of Talmud at Tel Aviv University. She has published monographs, editions and many articles on Second Temple and rabbinic literature, including Shifting Images of the Hasmoneans: Second Temple Legends and Their Reception in Josephus and Rabbinic Literature (Oxford University Press, 2018).
Tzvi Novick
PhD (2008), Yale University, is the Abrams Jewish Thought and Culture Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. He writes on early rabbinic law and late antique liturgical poetry; the latter is the subject of his recent book, Midrash and Piyyut (Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 2019).
Jeffrey L. Rubenstein
PhD (1992), Columbia University, is the Skirball Professor of Talmud and Rabbinic Literature in the Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies of New York University. He is the author of several books on rabbinic narratives, including Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition and Culture (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) and The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
Shai Secunda
PhD (2008), Yeshiva University, is Jacob Neusner Professor of Judaism at Bard College. His published work focuses on the Talmud and its Iranian Context and includes The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in its Sasanian Context (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) and The Talmud’s Red Fence: Menstrual Impurity and Difference in Babylonian Judaism and its Sasanian Context (Oxford, 2020).
Moshe Simon-Shoshan
PhD (2005), University of Pennsylvania, is Senior Lecturer in the Department of the Literature of the Jewish People at Bar-Ilan University. His research focuses primarily on narrative in Rabbinic literature. He is the author of Stories of the Law: Narrative Discourse and the Construction of Authority in the Mishnah (OUP, 2012) and numerous articles.