Trans Talmud places eunuchs and androgynes at the center of rabbinic literature and asks what we can learn from them about Judaism and the project of transgender history. Rather than treating these figures as anomalies to be justified or explained away, Max K. Strassfeld argues that they profoundly shaped ideas about law, as the rabbis constructed intricate taxonomies of gender across dozens of texts to understand an array of cultural tensions. Showing how rabbis employed eunuchs and androgynes to define proper forms of masculinity, Strassfeld emphasizes the unique potential of these figures to not only establish the boundary of law but exceed and transform it. Trans Talmud challenges how we understand gender in Judaism and demonstrates that acknowledging nonbinary gender prompts a reassessment of Jewish literature and law.

This volume sheds light on the early rabbis as the shapers of religion and uncovers for the modern reader the early Sages' fundamental beliefs concerning God, the world and the human condition.

These nine masterful readings of the Talmud by the renowned French Jewish philosopher translate Jewish thought into the language of modern times. One of the major continental philosophers of the twentieth century, Emmanuel Levinas was also an important Talmudic commentator. Between 1963 and 1975, he delivered an enlightening and influential series of commentaries at the annual Talmudic colloquia of a group of French Jewish intellectuals in Paris. In this collection, Levinas applies a hermeneutic that simultaneously allows the classic Jewish texts to shed light on contemporary problems and lets modern problems illuminate the texts. Besides being quintessential illustrations of the art of reading, the essays express the deeply ethical vision of the human condition that makes Levinas one of the most important thinkers of our time.

In Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals, Mira Beth Wasserman undertakes a close reading of Avoda Zara, arguably the Babylonian Talmud's most scandalous tractate. According to Wasserman, Avoda Zara is where this Talmud joins the humanities in questioning what it means to be a human.

In A Traveling Homeland, Daniel Boyarin makes the case that the Babylonian Talmud is a diasporist manifesto producing and defining the practices that constitute Jewish diasporic identity in the form of textual, interpretive communities built around talmudic study.

"Published by the University of Nebraska Press as a Jewish Publication Society book."