Siren Songs

"For your voice is sweet and your appearance pleasant" (Song of Songs 2:14). On the basis of this verse, Jewish law prohibits a man's listening to kol ishah, a woman's voice in song. Unlikely as it may seem, this prohibition has sparked a controversy that could shake the foundations of Israel's self-defense and self-definition.

Kol Ishah Reviewed  Yehuda Henkin,  Urim Publications.  Thirty years ago, Saul Berman wrote an influential and relatively liberal interpretation of the kol ishah prohibition. But there has been an answer. (PDF)  SAVE

Sad Sexual Obsessions  Eric H. Yoffie,  Jerusalem Post.  Does the Israeli rabbinate's increasing focus on gender issues have an unattractive psychological component?  SAVE

Religion and the IDF  Aryeh Tepper,  Jewish Ideas Daily.  Almost a third of the officers in Israel's army now wear kippot. Is the IDF about to become the long arm of rabbinic law?  SAVE

Voice of a Woman  Shmuel Rosner,  New York Times.  If Orthodox Jews believe they are forbidden by law to hear a woman sing, how far should the Israeli military go to facilitate their observance?  SAVE

Gender Trouble  Yehudah Mirsky,  Jewish Ideas Daily.  For "Hardalim," the objections to women's singing go beyond modesty and gender separation; they are also a matter of national identity.  SAVE

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Jerusalem's Ego and Id

Biography is not the same as history. Biography charts the outer and inner life of a person—character, spirit, morality, emotion, perhaps even soul. History, by contrast, incorporates different narratives and pieces of evidence, seeks out new data, then rises above all the fragments with a synthesis.

Montefiore on Montefiore  Todd Leopold,  CNN.  There have been many reactions to Jerusalem: the Biography. Here, the author responds to the challenge put to him and delivers his own verdict on the book.  SAVE

Melisende’s Psalter  British Library.  Like her ancient predecessor, King David, Queen Melisende commissioned artwork for the Book of Psalms. Now preserved at the British Library, it can be seen online.  SAVE

Lord Shaftesbury: God’s Reformer  Marena Fisher,  Yale Standard.  Lord Shaftesbury, the paradigmatic Victorian reformer, dedicated his life to improving the condition of the poor, rehabilitating felons—and restoring the Jews to their homeland.  SAVE

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Highlights of 2011:
Part II

Part II of our round-up of the past year's most popular features on Jewish Ideas Daily. (Part I is here.)

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Part II"

In Search of the Moderate Voice

Rabbi Haim Sabato is a unique figure on the Israeli scene, both head of a yeshiva and a prominent Hebrew writer. His best known work, the novel titled Adjusting Sights, won Israel's most prestigious literary award and was made into a movie.

From the Four Winds  Haim Sabato,  Toby Press.  In one of Sabato's novels, a young Egyptian immigrant to Israel meets his Hungarian neighbors—and learns, for the first time, about the Holocaust.  SAVE

D’varim: Weeping for the Generations  Moshe Sokolow,  Jewish Ideas Daily.  Exegesis from Haim Sabato, performing his day job.  SAVE

The Romance of Gush Etzion  Aryeh Tepper,  Jewish Ideas Daily.  Lichtenstein's yeshiva inhabits a community with a storied past and a vibrant present.  SAVE

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The Evil Inclination

The yetzer hara, usually translated "evil impulse," is an elusive rabbinic concept. The words derive from God's observation in Genesis 8:21 (paralleled earlier in 6:5) that "the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth."

Evil Urge  Amit Gevaryahu,  Talmud Blog.  A new work tackles one of the most entrenched myths in the academic study of Jewish sources: namely, that Judaism has historically been a sex-positive religion.  SAVE

Bar Mitzvah and Yetzer Hatov  Jeffrey Spitzer,  My Jewish Learning.  In rabbinic texts, the distinction between childhood and young adulthood is the birth of the good inclination.  SAVE

Good and Evil  Virtual Jewish Library.  Maimonides integrated the "good inclination" and "evil inclination" in his Aristotelian theory of the soul; Kabbalah reads the concepts in cosmic terms.  SAVE

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