Isaac HershKowitz

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Lecturer at Bar Ilan University

This article focuses on a Memorial Day ceremony that was regularly held during the State of Israel’s first two decades to honor the holy books destroyed during the Holocaust. The ceremony aimed to commemorate the Nazis’ attempt to destroy Judaism, not just the Jewish people. At the forefront of these efforts was Shmuel Zanwil Kahana, who sought to...

In this study I demonstrate a distant reading of Rabbi Kook’s early writings from the Žeimelis period, using advanced tools of big data analytics. Analyzing frequent words and phrases in the Žeimelis corpus is coupled with a comparison to the most important corpus of Kook’s writing: Shemonah Qevaṣim. This parallelization illustrates the clear and c...

Since its final destruction in antiquity, the memory of the temple in Jerusalem has served as the nexus of Jewish liturgy and messianic worldview. This article has sought to examine the ideological and cultural roles played by the image of the Jewish temple in the Hebrew literature of 1848–1948. Toward this end, I formulated a broad corpus comprise...

This article studies three influential musar works from the early modern period: Reshit ḥokhma, Shevet musar, and Kav hayashar. The author reveals that Kav hayashar uses angelological terms with far greater intensity than the others. This phenomenon portrays a different understanding of moral behavior vis-à-vis the goals of repair and improvement....

In this book, the halakhic thought of Rabbi Dr. Mordechai Vogelmann (1898 ;1984), who served as rabbi of Katowice until the outbreak of World War II and later as rabbi of the community in Kiryat Motzkin, is explored. Beit Mordechai's responsa, his halakhic opus, presents an innovative and bold ruling model. The halakhic considerations, methodology...

Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalisher’s messianic innovations asserted the centrality of a renewal of offerings on the altar to the creation of a linear path to redemption. Despite the common convention, his ideas were not disregarded by his peers and followers. In fact, while his ideas did not predetermine the rabbinic discourse, halakhic questions concerning...

Introduction The establishment of the first settlements by Gush Emunim (the Bloc of the Faithful) after 1974 constitutes a decisive turning point in Israeli politics in particular and in the Middle East in general. From that date onwards, the settlement project has set the ideological and practical agenda of Israeli public life. It has transformed...

Religious Zionists have been the driving force behind the settlement project in Israel for the past 40 years. They often see settling in the Greater Land of Israel as a messianic activity. It might be thought that when state policy clashes with radical messianic movements, the result would be violent, bloody confrontations. This study seeks to expl...

"I would describe the book as follows. It aims at both studying (interpreting) for the sake of 'doing' and doing for the sake of interpreting." With these words, Prof. David Shatz attempts to define the purpose of his new book: Jewish Thought in Dialogue: Essays on Thinkers, Theologies, and Moral Theories. It is this ambiguousness that Shatz endeav...

In The Theology of Oral Torah: Revealing the Justice of God,1 after describing his attempt to formulate a descriptive theology throughout his publications, Professor Jacob Neusner writes: So much for historical and descriptive theology. What of the constructive kind? It remains to take note of my one effort at constructive theology [. . .] Judaism'...