Mira Balberg's Books

Blood for Thought

The Reinvention of Sacrifice in Early Rabbinic Literature

By: Mira Balberg

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Blood for Thought

The Reinvention of Sacrifice in Early Rabbinic Literature

By: Mira Balberg

Blood for Thought delves into a relatively unexplored area of rabbinic literature: the vast corpus of laws, regulations, and instructions pertaining to sacrificial rituals. Mira Balberg traces and analyzes the ways in which the early rabbis interpreted and conceived of biblical sacrifices, reinventing them as a site through which to negotiate intellectual, cultural, and religious trends and practices in their surrounding world. Rather than viewing the rabbinic project as an attempt to generate a nonsacrificial version of Judaism, she argues that the rabbis developed a new sacrificial Jewish tradition altogether, consisting of not merely substitutes to sacrifice but elaborate practical manuals that redefined the processes themselves, radically transforming the meanings of sacrifice, its efficacy, and its value.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

300

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520401417

ISBN 13

9780520401419

Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature

By: Mira Balberg

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature

By: Mira Balberg

This book explores the ways in which the early rabbis reshaped biblical laws of ritual purity and impurity and argues that the rabbis’ new purity discourse generated a unique notion of a bodily self. Focusing on the Mishnah, a Palestinian legal codex compiled around the turn of the third century CE, Mira Balberg shows how the rabbis constructed the processes of contracting, conveying, and managing ritual impurity as ways of negotiating the relations between one’s self and one’s body and, more broadly, the relations between one’s self and one’s human and nonhuman environments. With their heightened emphasis on subjectivity, consciousness, and self-reflection, the rabbis reinvented biblically inherited language and practices in a way that resonated with central cultural concerns and intellectual commitments of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world. Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature adds a new dimension to the study of practices of self-making in antiquity by suggesting that not only philosophical exercises but also legal paradigms functioned as sites through which the self was shaped and improved.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

277

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520958217

ISBN 13

9780520958210

Fractured Tablets

Forgetfulness and Fallibility in Late Ancient Rabbinic Culture

By: Mira Balberg

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Fractured Tablets

Forgetfulness and Fallibility in Late Ancient Rabbinic Culture

By: Mira Balberg

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. This book examines the significant role that memory failures play in early rabbinic literature. The rabbis who shaped Judaism in late antiquity envisioned the commitment to the Torah and its commandments as governing every aspect of a person’s life. Their vision of a Jewish subject who must keep constant mental track of multiple obligations and teachings led them to be preoccupied with forgetting: forgetting tasks, forgetting facts, forgetting texts, and—most broadly—forgetting the Torah altogether. In Fractured Tablets, Mira Balberg examines the ways in which the early rabbis approached and delineated the possibility of forgetfulness in practice and study and the solutions and responses they conjured for forgetfulness, along with the ways in which they used human fallibility to bolster their vision of Jewish observance and their own roles as religious experts. In the process, Balberg shows that the rabbis’ intense preoccupation with the prospect of forgetfulness was a meaningful ideological choice, with profound implications for our understanding of Judaism in late antiquity.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

292

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520391888

ISBN 13

9780520391888

Blood for Thought

The Reinvention of Sacrifice in Early Rabbinic Literature

By: Mira Balberg

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Blood for Thought

The Reinvention of Sacrifice in Early Rabbinic Literature

By: Mira Balberg

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

300

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520401417

ISBN 13

9780520401419

Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals

The Talmud After the Humanities

By: Mira Beth Wasserman

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals

The Talmud After the Humanities

By: Mira Beth Wasserman

In Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals, Mira Beth Wasserman undertakes a close reading of Avoda Zara, arguably the Talmud's most scandalous tractate, to uncover the hidden architecture of this classic work of Jewish religious thought. She proposes a new way of reading the Talmud that brings it into conversation with the humanities, including animal studies, the new materialisms, and other areas of critical theory that have been reshaping the understanding of what it is to be a human being. Even as it comments on the the rabbinic laws that govern relations between Jews and non-Jews, Avoda Zara is also an attempt to reflect on what all people share in common, and on how humans fit into a larger universe of animals and things. As is typical of the Talmud in general, it proceeds by incorporating a vast and confusing array of apparently digressive materials, but Wasserman demonstrates that there is a whole greater than the sum of the parts, a sustained effort to explore human identity and difference. In centuries past, Avoda Zara has been a flashpoint in Jewish-Christian relations. It was partly due to its content that the Talmud was subject to burning and censorship by Christian authorities. Wasserman develops a twenty-first-century reading of the tractate that aims to reposition it as part of a broader quest to understand what connects human beings to each other and to the world around them.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

327

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812294084

ISBN 13

9780812294088

When Near Becomes Far

Old Age in Rabbinic Literature

By: Mira Balberg,Haim Weiss

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

When Near Becomes Far

Old Age in Rabbinic Literature

By: Mira Balberg,Haim Weiss

When Near Becomes Far explores the representations and depictions of old age in the rabbinic Jewish literature of late antiquity (150-600 CE). Through close literary readings and cultural analysis, the book reveals the gaps and tensions between idealized images of old age on the one hand, and the psychologically, physiologically, and socially complicated realities of aging on the other hand. The authors argue that while rabbinic literature presents a number of prescriptions related to qualities and activities that make for good old age, the respect and reverence that the elderly should be awarded, and harmonious intergenerational relationship, it also includes multiple anecdotes and narratives that portray aging in much more nuanced and poignant ways. These anecdotes and narratives relate, alongside fantasies about blissful or unnoticeable aging, a host of fears associated with old age: from the loss of physical capability and beauty to the loss of memory and mental acuity, and from marginalization in the community to being experienced as a burden by one's children. Each chapter of the book focuses on a different aspect of aging in the rabbinic world: bodily appearance and sexuality, family relations, intellectual and cognitive prowess, honor and shame, and social roles and identity. As the book shows, in their powerful and sensitive treatments of aging, rabbinic texts offer some of the richest and most audacious observations on aging in ancient world literature, many of which still resonate today.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

239

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0197501508

ISBN 13

9780197501504

Fractured Tablets

Forgetfulness and Fallibility in Late Ancient Rabbinic Culture

By: Mira Balberg

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Fractured Tablets

Forgetfulness and Fallibility in Late Ancient Rabbinic Culture

By: Mira Balberg

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

292

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520391888

ISBN 13

9780520391888

When Near Becomes Far

Old Age in Rabbinic Literature

By: Mira Balberg,Haim Weiss

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

When Near Becomes Far

Old Age in Rabbinic Literature

By: Mira Balberg,Haim Weiss

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

239

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0197501486

ISBN 13

9780197501481

When Near Becomes Far

Aging in Rabbinic Literature

By: Mira Balberg,Professor of History and Endowed Chair in Ancient Jewish Civilization Mira Balberg,Associate Professor of Hebrew Literature Haim Weiss,Haim Weiss

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

When Near Becomes Far

Aging in Rabbinic Literature

By: Mira Balberg,Professor of History and Endowed Chair in Ancient Jewish Civilization Mira Balberg,Associate Professor of Hebrew Literature Haim Weiss,Haim Weiss

When Near Becomes Far' explores representations and depictions of old age in the rabbinic Jewish literature of late antiquity (150-600 CE). Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of aging in the rabbinic world: bodily appearance and sexuality, family relations, intellectual and cognitive prowess, honor and shame, and social roles and identity.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

232

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0197501516

ISBN 13

9780197501511

Book's by Mira Balberg

Blood for Thought

Blood for Thought

Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature

Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature

Fractured Tablets

Fractured Tablets

Blood for Thought

Blood for Thought

Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals

Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals

When Near Becomes Far

When Near Becomes Far

Fractured Tablets

Fractured Tablets

When Near Becomes Far

When Near Becomes Far

When Near Becomes Far

When Near Becomes Far

Username

Password

Username

Password

Password again

Birthday

Email