Spring 2024
Christine Hayes
Christine Hayes is Sterling Professor Emerita of Religious Studies in Classical Judaica at Yale University. Hayes’s research interests include Talmudic-midrashic studies, the history and literature of Judaism in late antiquity, and the philosophy of law. She received her BA from Harvard University and her PhD from UC Berkeley, and in 2023 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Lund University in Sweden. Her most recent book, What’s Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives, received the 2015 National Jewish Book Award in Scholarship, a 2016 PROSE award in Theology and Religious Studies from the American Publishers Association, and a 2016 Jordan Schnitzer Award from the Association for Jewish Studies. Her other scholarly monographs are Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds (1997 Salo Baron prize) and Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities (2003 National Jewish Book Award finalist). She has authored two introductory volumes (The Emergence of Judaism and Introduction to the Bible). Her edited volumes include Jewish Law and its Interactions with other Legal Systems (2014), the Cambridge Companion to Judaism and Law (2017), Classic Essays in Rabbinic Culture and History (2018), and most recently The Literature of the Sages: A Revisioning (2023). Hayes has held a faculty position at Princeton University and visiting faculty positions at Tel Aviv University Law School (2015), the University of Pennsylvania Law school (2018), and the Harry Radzyner Law School at Reichman University (2023), as well as fellowships at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (2018) and the Maimonides Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Hamburg (2023). She is active in professional and academic organizations and served as President of the Association for Jewish Studies from 2018-2020. She is an editor for the Encyclopedia for the Bible and its Reception, a senior faculty fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, and an elected member of the American Academy of Jewish Research. She is currently working on a book of humor and play as tools of skepticism in talmudic literature.
Fall 2023
Michal Bar-Asher Siegal
Michal Bar-Asher Siegal is a scholar of rabbinic Judaism. Her work focuses on aspects of Jewish-Christian interactions in the ancient world, and compares between Early Christian and rabbinic sources. She is a faculty member at The Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and was an elected member of the Israel Young Academy of Sciences. Her first book is Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2013, winner of the 2014 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award). Her second book is Jewish – Christian Dialogues on Scripture in Late Antiquity: Heretic Narratives of the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2019, a finalist, National Jewish Book Award (2019).
2022-2023
Miryam Segal
Miryam Segal is associate professor at Queens College (History) and the Graduate Center (Middle Eastern Studies; Liberal Studies). In 2021-22 she will be visiting professor in Jewish Law at Harvard Law School. Prof. Segal earned her bachelor’s degree at Harvard College, her doctorate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds a master’s degree from Yale Law School. Her doctorate is in Hebrew and Comparative Literature, but she has taught many different subject areas in a variety of departments, including religious studies, Hebrew Bible, rabbinic literature, modern Hebrew and Israeli culture, and gender studies. Her most recent teaching and research focuses on American legal history and the Anglo-American oath, and Jewish law.
Her first book, A New Sound in Hebrew Poetry: Poetics, Politics Accent, focuses on the formation of the “new accent” in poetry and speech. She has completed a manuscript for a second book on the intertwined gender politics of Labor Zionism and of Hebrew poetry in early twentieth century Jewish Palestine (“Working Writers”). She has co-edited two volumes: Vixens Disturbing Vineyards: The Embarrassment of Scriptures, which examines the influence of narrative on community, and a forthcoming collected volume on Jewish family law. For the latter she wrote an article on the vow in biblical law and narrative, part of a larger project on neder in biblical and early rabbinic writing. Prof. Segal is a member of the Executive Board of the Jewish Law Association, and Co-Chair of the JLA’s publications committee.
2021-2022
Daniel Boyarin
Daniel Boyarin, Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture and rhetoric, UC Berkeley retired, received his Ph.D in 1975 from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He has been an NEH Fellow (twice), a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, a holder of the Berlin Prize at the American Academy in Berlin and a Ford Foundation Fellow. He spent the academic year 2012-2013 as a fellow of the Wissenschaft Kolleg in Berlin and was a von Humboldt Forschung Preisträger at the FU Berlin in 2017. He has been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2006. Boyarin has written extensively on talmudic and midrashic studies, and his work has focused on cultural studies in rabbinic Judaism, including issues of gender and sexuality as well as research on the Jews as a colonized people. His most recent research interests centered primarily around questions of the relationship of Judaism and Christianity in late antiquity and the genealogy of the concepts of “religion” and “Judaism.” Current projects include a critical edition of the second chapter of Bavli Pesachim, a biography of Josephus for the Yale Jewish Lives, as well as a book to be entitled: The No-State Solution: a Jewish Manifesto. His previous books include Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (1990), Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (1993), and A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (1994), and Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (1997) all published by the University of California Press. Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism appeared at Stanford University Press in the fall of 1999 [French and Italian translations published]. Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity has been published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2004 (winner of the AAR award for best book on religion in the area of historical studies in 2006.) Socrates and the Fat Rabbis in 2009 by the University of Chicago Press. The Jewish Gospel: The Story of the Jewish Christ was published in 2012 by the New Press (New York). A Traveling Homeland: The Talmud as Diaspora (Penn: 2016), Imagine No Religion [with Carlin Barton: Fordham: 2016]. Judaism: the Genealogy of a Modern Notion by Rutgers University Press in 2018 in the series Key Words in Jewish Studies.
2019-2020
Ruth Calderon
Dr. Ruth Calderon is one of Israel’s leading figures in the effort to revive Hebrew culture and sustain a pluralistic Israeli-Jewish identity and was elected to the Israeli Knesset in January 2013. She became a national celebrity when she taught a page of Talmud in the Israeli parliament, arguing that the text was the heritage of the entire Jewish people. She is founder and former director of the Elul Beit Midrash in Jerusalem (the first secular yeshiva in the world) and founder and chair of Alma: Home for Hebrew Culture in Tel Aviv. After eighteen years as director of Alma, Ruth was appointed head of the culture and education department at the National Library of Israel. She also hosted a TV program, Ha-Heder, on which she invited guests to study Jewish texts with her.
Dr. Calderon is the author of A Bride for One Night (2001, English translation 2014), a homiletic reading of Talmudic legends that develops seventeen passages from the Talmud into stories, many of which gave voice to women ordinarily silenced by the text. (https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/jps/9780827612099/) and Talmudic Alpha Beta (2014).
2018 – 2019
Moshe Halbertal
Moshe Halbertal is the Gruss Professor at NYU Law School and a Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University. He received his PhD from Hebrew University in 1989, and from 1988 to 1991 he was a fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He is the author of many books, including Idolatry (co-authored with Avishai Margalit, 1992) and People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority (1997), both published by Harvard University Press; Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Tradition and Its Philosophical Implications (2007), On Sacrifice (2012), and Maimonides: Life and Thought (2013), all published by Princeton University Press; and several books published in Hebrew, including Interpretative Revolutions in the Making (1997) and By Way of Truth: Nahmanides and the Creation of Tradition (2000). His latest book (co-authored with Stephen Holmes) The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel was published by Princeton University Press in 2017. Halbertal was named a member of Israel’s Academy for the Sciences and the Humanities.
2017 – 2018
Ayelet Hoffman Libson
Ayelet Hoffmann Libson is a scholar of Talmud and Jewish law, specializing in rabbinic law, the relationship between law and religion, and the history of Jewish law. An Assistant Professor at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, she is also a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.
Professor Libson received a B.A. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University. She was selected as an inaugural fellow for the Israel Democracy Institute’s Program on Judaism and Human Rights and has also won several other fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Lady Davis Foundation, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. She has also pursued advanced graduate study in Talmud and Jewish Law at the MaTaN Advanced Talmud Institute and at the Beit Morasha Program in Jewish Law, both in Jerusalem.
Professor Libson teaches courses on rabbinic literature, the history of Jewish Law, and the intersection between religion and human rights. Her publications have appeared in several journals such as American Journal of Legal History and Oxford Journal of Law and Religion and she is the author of Law and Self-Knowledge in the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2018) https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/law-and-selfknowledge-in-the-talmud/E1E81FB7353CC81A4A5EBE36A7C44CFA