Yahoo reports that a cache of Jewish texts has been found in Afghanistan. Well, it seems the texts were found years ago and are now in private hand in London. If true, this would be the first significant textual evidence we have of the medieval Jewish Afghani community, the very people who brought us the scallion battles for Dayyenu on Passover!

This year, Chanukkah wouldn’t be complete without a glance at the Maccabeats, a group of (former) Yeshiva University students. Last year, they belted out a beloved cover version of “dynamite” (I even heard it in June at Zurich Airport). Here’s a reminder:

This year, they came up with something new. They teamed up with Matisyahu–who recently confused people when he lost his facial hair– and connected the song  with a fundraiser. They are aiming for  $10.000 per day on behalf of the Gift of Life Foundation through  www.MakeSomeMiracles.com.

Chanukkah, known as the Festival of lights, thanks to Adam Sandler, began on Tuesday.  In honor of the holiday, I’ll try to post a little something each day. I’ll begin by pointing you to  Ophir Münz-Manor‘s wonderful piece on Chanukkah piyyutim over at the Talmud blog, you can read the first installment here.

And the folks at medievalists.net also came up with some  good remarks that include a clip for those too lazy to  read…

Chanukkah in the middle ages

The Association of Jewish Studies will meet from Sunday to Tuesday in Washington DC. This is the “big professional” conference of Jewish Studies in the US, and I look forward to meeting colleagues and friends there, and perhaps hear a good paper or two. You can find the schedule here.

A meeting commemorating Paula Hyman z”l will convene this Sunday evening, December 18, at 10:15 pm in the Independence D/E meeting rooms of the Grand Hyatt Washington. I hope to see you there!

The Jewish intellectual world lost two great minds to cancer this week: Paula Hyman and Christopher Hitchens (who might not be happy to be claimed as a Jew).

If you entered the field of Jewish Studies and picked up a book on modern Jewish history, you will have encountered Paula Hyman at some point or another. You might have read her My Life as a Radical Jewish Woman: Memoirs of a Zionist Feminist in Poland (2nd edition 2002) or Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women (1995), a book whose Hebrew translation helped to popularize the word gender in Hebrew. She was a towering figure in our field who work brought gender analysis into the mainstream of Jewish history (we’re always a bit behind and in need of a nudge). She was a Jewish feminist and scholar who died last Thursday, after a decade-long battle with cancer, at the age of 65.

Paula Hyman also had a distinguished teaching career and taught at Yale, and for about a decade, she headed their Jewish Studies program. She served as the dean of the Seminary College of Jewish Studies, taught history at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and regularly spoke at the Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University and Ben-Gurion University. Deborah Dash Moore remembers her friend fondly at the Forward. She will be missed by many.

Christopher Hitchens needs even less of an introduction. One of the most influential public intellectuals of the last decades, he has written widely and sparred with many, not shying away from sampling water boarding or bikini waxes (more painful, though less scary than the former), or from shocking allies by defending Salman Rushdie or the wars in the Falklands or Iraq. You can read a full obit here, at the NY Times. In a class on “Holy Women in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity”, we read excerpts from his study of Mother Teresa’s institutions in Kolkata, fittingly named ”Compromising Positions” and a  searing critique of her work. As my students liked to point out, he was the only non-Catholic invited to give testimony at hearing on Mother Teresa’s canonization. In another class, an Intro to World Religions, some chose to approach Atheism through his God is not Great: The Case Against Religion (2007). Many were puzzled by the books’ chatty and irrespective tone, they were  impressed by the author’s breadth, although they didn’t like his barbs in the Four Horsemen, a two-hour long debate I regularly assign to my students.  Intellectually honest to a fault, I still think he would have been amused by the remark posted on a friend’s FB wall: May he rest in peace and rise in surprise.

Their voices will be missed!

Two exciting opportunities to study at the historic Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, Ohio. Please post the attached information regarding the Ph.D. Fellowship in Jewish Intellectual History as well as The American Jewish Experience (co-sponsored by the American JewishArchives). The Fellowships are to be awarded beginning academic year 2012-13.

The fellowship will be awarded to an incoming student who has demonstrated high academic competence in an area of Jewish Studies or American History. The purpose of the fellowship is to enable an outstanding graduate student to pursue a Ph.D. in the American Jewish Experience at HUC-JIR, School of Graduate Studies while utilizing the world-renowned collection of The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, Ohio.
The fellowship carries an annual award of $33,000, which covers tuition plus a living stipend of $12,000 and is renewable for a maximum period of four years. The AJE Fellow will also have teaching opportunities at HUC-JIR, the University of Cincinnati, and other neighboring institutions. For more information, please see http://www.huc.edu/academics/catalog/ or http:// www.gcccu.org/.

APPLICATION PROCEDURES: Candidates should write to the Director of the School of Graduate Studies, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion: Dr. Nili S. Fox nfox@huc.edu or to Ms. Sarah Strouse, Administrative Coordinator, gradschool@huc.edu for more information and application forms. The due date for completed applications is February 2, 2012. The first fellowship will be awarded for the 2012–2013 academic year.

In the last six, seven years, a new type of Jewish-Islamic culture sharing has arisen among an admittedly small group of Orthodox Jewish women: extreme veiling. The press, for instance Ha-aretz in a recent article,  has dubbed the women who favor this type of clothing “Taliban women,” a term I detest, because it stereotypes veiling and associates any type of covering with the Taliban, extremists who have a rather limited vision of how a woman should behave or dress. Veiling of course is common in many cultures, and already appears in the Bible–didn’t Tamar cover her face, so that even Judah, her own father-in-law didn’t recognize her? And didn’t Rebecca hasten to fast her veil when she spotted Isaac from afar? Veiling then is not so alien to the Bible, but alien to the western face of Judaism, for sure (and I’m not a proponent of frumking it).

I prefer frumkas, a term used when these women and their peculiar style first cropped up: frum (Yiddish for pious), and burka (a type of veil). Many were living in Beit Shemesh, many were Ba’ale Tshuvah or newly religious, or converts. These women, their detractors like to point out, are “new at this” and, it is said, misconstrue Jewish ideas about veiling. These are women who do not just dress modestly in the currently traditional Jewish way, that is, cover their hair (if they are married), and wear long-sleeved tops, long skirts, tights and closed shoes, but add additional layers; perhaps a shawl, worn like a tchador, usually in dark colors.

Some took to wearing many layers of clothing to obscure their figures, and some even convinced their husbands to wear not one, but a whole bunch of talitot (prayer shawls), one on top of the other. Then they began to refuse to talk to male shopping assistants in stores, or even the phone. They suffered a slight setback when one of their leaders, a rabbi’s wife, was arrested and convicted on child abuse, but the trend continues. Today, some have withdrawn their shawl-wearing daughters from school and home-school. It goes on: There are rumors that some have ceased to nurse male infants for reasons of modesty. There have been extreme cases in which medical care has been impeded by women’s refusal to relate to men. One family for instance refused to bring a newborn in distress to the hospital (the child was still whisked away to an ICU and luckily survived.

I encountered the frumkas for the first time when I was preparing a class on Jewish messianism in 2006 and I was smitten. These women do not simply veil for reasons of über-zniyut (extreme piety), but also, and perhaps most importantly, because they believe that this act of covering and obscuring their bodies will usher in the messianic age.  Yes, of course it is hideous to refuse to speak to male doctors, or to deprive your daughters of schooling. But to use über-zniyut to make a point? Brilliant. These women have done what a woman can do in their circles to mark her piety: they have given birth, often many, many times, they pray regularly and with zest. But they have also been told for years that their bodies are dangerous, and have to be concealed for the sake of Torah. Isn’t it only logical to take this to the next level? And to think, they could bring about the messiah by this very act!

In the meantime, the trend has spread to other cities, including Jerusalem, and the rabbinic authorities have taken note. There has been plenty of opposition by many who consider the frumkas gang-ho weirdos, of course, but so far, the rabbis had been largely silent. Now, they side with the opposition, with husbands who forbid their wives and daughters to veil, and they offer fast divorces and fierce opposition. The entire phenomenon is seen as overly zealous and even un-Jewish. Yet, I can’t help that these male ultra-orthodox rabbis find these women threatening. They have harsh words for them:

Haaretz reports that… [a]fter hearing the testimonies, the Badatz, in a rare sort of consensus, ostracized the group of women with the shawls, though it did not name it per se. The wording of the unprecedented announcement was unusually harsh: “To our sorrow, we the Badatz have listened to testimony regarding the inequities of these women that have uprooted Torah from Israel, acting on their own, adopting a lifestyle that is void of Torah and educational values. They do not send their offspring to Talmud Torah and schools; they prevent receiving medical care, even in life-threatening cases, as well as issues concerning matters that are not fitting to be discussed, pertaining to the chuppah and kedushin [i.e., main elements of weddings], etc.

“Therefore, we are warning Jewish women and girls that it is prohibited to join them and one must distance oneself from their customs and their ways, since ultimately, they will, has v’sholom, lead to destruction and annihilation” (translation by The Yeshiva World News. )

A “soft” but still negative position has been taken by Rav Ovadia Yosef, the former Sefardic Chief Rabbi of Israel and one of the towering figures of twentieth-century Jewish law. He ruled  that To the best of my knowledge, it is not prohibited by the Torah but there are objections to this new path that has been chosen, especially since it is strange. Therefore, we cannot prohibit it, but it is not our way ( I couldn’t find an actual source for this).

Traditional Judaism, like many other religious systems, has often used women’s bodies as boundary markers. Perhaps the sudden  unease stems from the fact that now, women are redrawing the boundaries themselves, without rabbinic endorsement? And so, when I read that Rabbi has, I cannot help but be amused that they have been beaten or at least dented  by their own weapons.

The phenomenon is even more enticing when we include the fierce battle under way in Jerusalem against the depiction of women in advertisements which has effectively been banned, a battle waged by the same groups that reject über-zniyut! Shawl-wearing, totally shape-obscuring women? Not good. No women on ads at the bus stop: good (a bit like Egypt’s Salafist Nour party that has refused to print even the names of women candidates on their campaign posters)….

Stay tuned. Some women have taken now to wearing veils with a conic hood, to further obscure the sexy shapes of their heads. One commentator reports having seen women strolling around with card boxes!

The SBL (Society for Biblical Literature) is offering a free download of a new edition of the (Greek) New Testament. Edited by Michael W. Holmes, this critical text differs from the Nestle-Aland/United Bible Societies text in more than 540 instances.

You can download it here.

REMEMBER!

The synagogue in Baden-Baden, November 9, 2011

I’ve written about this day in German history before, here.

This Wednesday, the American-Israeli venture capitalist and author of Start-Up Nation Jon Medved of Vringo.com will deliver the

2011 Israel High Tech Lecture

Wednesday, November 09, 2011 | 07:00 PM to 10:00 PM

Katie & Irwin Kahn JCC, 306 Flora Drive,Columbia, SC, 29223,

For more information, contact Benjamin Kranitz at benk@jcccolumbia.org

Don’t miss it!

You can get a taste in this video: