No rabbi spoke at the celebration of Jeanne’s life. But neither of her two sisters would forgive the other for her death. (A Story)

Instead of flattering congregants for whatever style of life they happen to practice, rabbis should encourage them to be and do better.

In the past century, rabbis have ceased to function as leaders of the Jewish people, and no one is emerging to fill the void.

The rabbinic exegetical method whereby the individual letters of Hebrew words are assigned a numerical value has its roots in the Greek system of geometrical algebra.

A recent book claims otherwise, but we possess far too little evidence to make confident claims about what ancient Jews accepted as Scripture before the rabbinic period.

Can a verse in the Torah be interpreted in a way that contradicts Jewish law as defined by the talmudic rabbis? Two great medieval commentators disagree.

For two millennia, Jews have agreed on the identity of the four species of Sukkot plants; prior to  the rabbis, though, consensus is conspicuously absent.

A new generation of leaders has taken up a thousand-year-old struggle against rabbinic Judaism in hopes of anchoring their place in modern Israel.

The disputation in Barcelona 750 years ago between the one-time Jew Pablo Christiani and Rabbi Moses ben Nahman may have marked the first use of. . .

Simon bar Kokhba, a figure celebrated by secular Zionists, is often denigrated in rabbinic literature. But was he as devoted to Judaism as to. . .

A new book compares several talmudic discourses to Platonic dialogues. But how far does the analogy stretch?

The rabbis of Roman Palestine constituted a movement in opposition to Rome and Roman culture; but was their own culture, in some sense, Roman as well?

Like the majority of American Jews today, the Cutheans of old rejected rabbinic authority and law. But while the rabbis have endured, the Cutheans have all but disappeared.

Contrary to Reza Aslan’s claims, Jesus was not an intolerant ethnocentric nationalist—and neither were the majority of Jews at the time.