In his vast oeuvre, the great Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon only refers to one person as “my teacher and rabbi”—an honorific generally reserved for a disciple describing his mentor—and that is Samuel Shraga Feivel Bialoblocki, a relatively obscure rabbi and professor of Talmud. Agnon employed Bialoblocki at various points to proofread his work and check his citations of rabbinic texts. Aviad Hacohen tries to separate the facts about this rabbi, who was born sometime around 1890, from the Agnonian myths:

From early childhood, Bialoblocki was known as “the prodigy of Pilvishki,” after the small town in Lithuania where he was born. After studying in Ponevezh, [a Lithuanian shtetl with a renowned yeshiva], under Rabbi Isaac (Itzele) of Ponevezh, he went on to study in Germany at the University of Giessen, where he completed his doctoral dissertation in 1928. His dissertation focused on the laws of marriage in Judaism and Islam, and in the introduction, Bialoblocki explored the possible influence of Jewish family law on the hadith, the oral tradition of Islam. He also wrote a substantial entry on this subject for the Encyclopedia Judaica that was published by the Jewish Eshkol Publishing house (Berlin, 1928-34).

Bialoblocki settled in Palestine in the 1930s, and, in part thanks to Agnon, eventually found a post on the faculty of Bar-Ilan University. But the best description naturally comes from the novelist’s own pen:

One summer day, I entered the bookshop of Reb Michel Rabinowitz, of blessed memory. Surely there are some who remember the man and his shop. The shop was open, as though not for business but more for Torah scholars to engage in pilpul. When I entered, I found the shop filled with scholars, sparks of fire emanating from their mouths, and a new person I had never seen before was standing there, studying a book. One scholar said, “We must check in the Rif,” [the gloss on the Talmud by the 11th-century sage Isaac Alfasi]. He raised his head from his book and said, “The language of the Rif is as follows,” and immediately recited the words of the Rif by heart. Another scholar said, “Let’s examine Maimonides.” He responded, “Maimonides does not mention this law.” . . .

That man was Rabbi Samuel Bialoblocki. And still, he did not make an impression on me. In Jerusalem, if we paid attention to all the sharp and knowledgeable ones, we would never stop marveling.

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.