Learning to Read Talmud Workshop
June 7–8, 2016
Project co-directors: Prof. Jane Kanarek and Prof. Marjorie Lehman
Reading Talmud requires sophisticated textual interpretive abilities and has its own particular characteristics. But, how do students learn to read Talmud? How can we assess that process? What can we learn about the pedagogic practices that foster successful reading of Talmud?
Drawing on a relatively new and growing body of scholarship in the field of Talmud pedagogy, this project was built on the earlier Initiative on Bridging Scholarship and Pedagogy in Jewish Studies in two ways:
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It continued and deepened the Bridging Initiative's focus on the teaching and learning of classical Jewish texts.
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It recruited creative and thoughtful instructors of Talmud to study their own practice and their students' learning.
"Learning to Read Talmud: What it Looks Like and How it Happens," a volume based on the work of the project and edited by Jane L. Kanarek and Marjorie Lehman, offers studies of courses that develop further an understanding of how students learn to read Talmud. The goal was to help instructors in multiple settings improve their practice.
We gathered a small cohort of scholars of rabbinic literature to examine what it means to learn to read Talmud and how we teach our students to do so. Drawing on a relatively new and growing body of research that seeks to bridge the worlds of academic Talmud scholarship and scholarship on pedagogy, we were interested in thinking together about how our students construct their understandings of Talmud and how we, as scholars and teachers, help them to do that. We wanted to move beyond impressionistic understandings of our teaching and investigate what we meant by learning to read Talmud and the ways in which we translate our different understandings into our diverse classrooms.
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- Learning to Read Talmud: What it Looks Like and How it Happens — Jane L. Kanarek and Marjorie Lehman
- Stop Making Sense: Using Text Guides to Help Students Learn to Read Talmud — Beth A. Berkowitz
- Looking for Problems: A Pedagogic Quest for Difficulties — Ethan Tucker
- What Others Have to Say: Secondary Readings and Learning to Read Talmud — Jane L. Kanarek
- And No One Gave the Torah to the Priests: Reading the Mishnah's Reference to the Priests and the Temple — Marjorie Lehman
- Talmud for Non-Rabbis: Teaching Graduate Students in the Academy — Gregg E. Gardner
- When Cultural Assumptions About Texts and Reading Fail: Teaching Talmud as Liberal Arts — Elizabeth Shanks Alexander
- “Talmud in the Mouth”: Oral Recitation and Repetition Through the Ages and in Today's Classroom — Jonathan Milgram
- Talmud That Works Your Heart: New Approaches to Reading — Sarra Lev
- Postscript: What We Have Learned About Learning to Read Talmud — Jon A. Levisohn
- Naftali Cohn, associate professor of religion at Concordia University in Montreal.
- Alyssa Gray, professor of codes and responsa literature and Mehlman Chair in Rabbinics at HUCJIR in New York.
- Chaya Halberstam, an associate professor of Judaism at King's University College, a Catholic affiliate college of Western University, in London, Ontario.
- Richard Kalmin, the Theodore R. Racoosin Professor of Rabbinic Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
- Jane L. Kanarek, associate professor of rabbinics at Hebrew College.
- Sarit Kattan Gribetz, assistant professor of classical Judaism in the theology department at Fordham University.
- Jon Kelsen, faculty member at Drisha, where he teaches Talmud and rabbinics and is Rosh Kollel of its June Kollel.
- Marjorie Lehman, associate professor of Talmud and rabbinics at Jewish Theological Seminary.
- Jon Levisohn directs the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education.
- Joseph Reimer teaches in education studies, Delet, and the Hornstein Program at Brandeis.
- Michael Rosenberg, assistant professor of rabbinics at Hebrew College.
- Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, professor of Talmud and rabbinics in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University.
- Zvi Septimus, Caroline Zelaznik Gruss and Joseph S. Gruss Visiting Lecturer in Talmudic Civil Law.
- Julia Watts Belser, assistant professor of Jewish studies in the theology department at Georgetown University.