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People are now coming to recognize a more complex interplay of different forms of human communication, from lullabies to hypertext and beyond. This book notes that the question of causality will not get us very far, because writing and reading are hardly constant at all times and places. At its origin lies a yeshiva class. Comparing the place of texts in various cultural situations might help explain the persistent isolation of Jewish culture as a research specialty in anthropology. This chapter hints at the challenges to the still-prevalent notion that there is a bifurcation, analogous to that between orality and literacy, between the real world and the world of scholarship.

This chapter discusses the controversy between Mitnagdim and Hasidim focusing on Rabbi H. Hayyim of Volozhin's response to Hasidism. Hayyim waged the struggle against Hasidism in a style entirely different from that initiated and led by his teacher and master, Vilna Gaon. It explains that while Vilna Gaon waged an unrelenting war to eliminate the deviant sect, Hayyim chose to struggle against Hasidism on the plane of ideas and education. It also discusses Hayyim's realization that Hasidim were not heretics and their motives were pure and his establishment of the Volozhin yeshiva.

Refugee academics and industrialists, trainees supported by Isidore Apfelbaum's ‘private’ operation, German domestic servants placed by the Ladies Lodge of B'nai Brith, the two or three foreign students accepted by the Yeshiva, the two German ‘refugee’ rabbis and the handful of pacifists and Jewish ‘Friends of Friend’ supported by the Quakers represented the only known refugees from Nazism to have arrived in Manchester before November 1938. In spite of an escalating ‘war against the Jews’, many had delayed their departure in the belief that the Hitler regime would be as short-lived as its predecessors or, at any rate, that his anti-Semitism had been no more than a device for the achievement of power.

Of all the reversals of attitude which followed the changing international situation after March 1938, the most dramatic was that of the Manchester Yeshiva. The admission of refugees contributed to an already critical financial deficit and was accompanied by fresh campaigns against such long-term latitudinarian opponents as the Talmud Torah. The explanation lies rather in the Yeshiva's open and unapologetic defiance of financial logic, communal policy and Home Office regulations, even of what might have seemed the reasonable caution of some of its own committee men, to pursue a campaign of rescue based as much on the humanitarian dictates of Jewish orthodoxy as its more routine battles for the religious integrity of the community.

This chapter explores the establishment of the modern yeshiva by Elijah ben Solomon's followers. Over the nineteenth century, the yeshiva replaced the legal institution of the kehilah as the locus of centralized authority for non-Hasidic rabbinic Jewry. This change was encouraged by Elijah's commentary, Biur, to the Shulchan Arukh, the sixteenth century Jewish legal code. This commentary proved to be Elijah's magnum opus, and it contributed to the shift of eastern European Jewish intellectual life away from a code-based culture that reflected the governing institution of the kehilah toward a modern religious one revolving around the paradigm of persuasive education adopted by the Volozhin yeshiva.

This chapter looks at complex political and social forces at play in the controversy over whether Haredi yeshiva students should be drafted. While many Israelis find the fact that Haredim do not serve intolerable, other political forces support the exemption. Another factor is that the Haredi population is Israeli’s poorest population, in part because its young men spend so many years in religious study rather than gaining practical skills and working to support their large families. The Supreme Court inserted itself into this struggle with a series of long and learned judgments and, as such, can be seen as having taken part in the public debate on the issue. But clearly the court, despite its tremendous exertions, cannot solve the problem, and can play only a small role in the series of unsatisfactory arrangements that have and will continue to govern this issue for the foreseeable future.

Frieden writes about his entry into heder in this chapter, in which all the usual elements are present: an introduction to the alphabet, the bestowing of sweets so that learning should be associated with sweetness, the critique of the melamed. Just as this chapter provides an account of education in heder, it also provides insights into some other essential aspects of shtetl life, including the bar mitzvah celebration. Frieden conveys a great deal of information about the way that important life-cycle even was marked for him personally. His observations regarding the nature of bar mitzcah speeches reveal some of his attitudes regarding education, maturations, and authenticity—namely, he evinces his appreciation for the difference between rote memorization and true understanding.

This chapter tells of Menachem Mendel Frieden’s first encounter with yeshiva education, a feature of East European Jewish life with which many Jewish boys and young men had experience in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Frieden’s account of his daily activities at the yeshiva he entered in Dvinsk, together with his detailed description of the yeshiva’s physical setting within one of the city’s synagogues, is most enlightening. Through Frieden’s eyes, we get an intimate view of a student’s initiation into yeshiva life, of what it was like to eat in the homes of householders who had agreed to provide students with meals, and of the hierarchy of students in the yeshiva world.

In this section, Frieden recounts his study in a yeshiva in the town of Lyady. Here he provides insights into the life of late nineteenth-century yeshiva students in Eastern Europe, offering a glimpse into the workings of Hasidic courts. Frieden’s reference to the letter of introduction he brought with him to the rebbe of Lyady suggests the importance of networking within the world of Hasidism, and his description of the time he spent at the rebbe’s court offers evidence of the openness of the court to newcomers. At the same time, Frieden’s description of his encounter with the court serves as a reminder that not all those who came in contact with Hasidism became completely enamored with the Hasidic lifestyle. Frieden critiques the materialism of the rebbes and expresses disgust with one common Hasidic practice, even as he comes to admire the Hasidic style of prayer.

The history of this dynasty, the problem of its succession and the complex transition to an imported leader, the abdication of that new leader and the search for a replacement as well as the role of Zionism, the Holocaust, and migration in the dynasty’s fate are discussed. The dramatic occasion of the transition from father to a son who replaced him closes the chapter.

This chapter narrates how secular Jews in Europe, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, came to associate rabbinic literature with narrow-minded orthodoxy. Secular Zionists, in particular, wished to disassociate themselves from the shtetl—the life of traditional Jews in eastern Europe. The hand that severed the Jewish tree of knowledge left a void between the biblical period and contemporary era. The reason for this forgoing of old writings and holding on to the Bible alone can be traced to the Enlightenment, when the Jews aspired to establish their culture on the component it shared with the surrounding Christian society, to renounce the old image of the Jew, the world of the heder and the yeshiva, and to erect in its place a new Jew who jumped from the biblical period to the modern day.

In this chapter, the author relates his experiences with faculty unionization at the University of Dubuque (UD), a private liberal arts college and seminary in Dubuque, Iowa. As a member of the National Education Association (NEA), the author helped organize their local; negotiated their first contract; held several local, state, and national leadership positions; filed grievances; went out on strike with his coworkers; and generally fought management initiatives to contain and control faculty unrest. This chapter provides a firsthand account by a labor historian of how UD administrators seized on the opportunity created by the 1980 Supreme Court decision, NLRB v. Yeshiva University, to decertify the faculty union. It also highlights the achievement and subsequent loss of collective bargaining among faculty in higher education, along with the challenges and opportunities to academics as union activists in the long battle against the corporatism of the university.

The traditional method of study known as hevruta is the foundation of traditional Jewish methods of learning as practiced in the yeshiva. This method has been articulated as Scriptural Reasoning in a way that emphasizes the practice of engaged reflection on a text. In this chapter, the authors will attempt a different articulation based on the use of this method in their classrooms, an approach that emphasizes disagreement. When disagreement is placed at the center of the process, the hevruta method becomes a tool for encountering and learning from religious difference. The chapter provides an overview of and rationale for using hevruta, a treatment of learning objectives, suggested steps for classroom use, sample questions, and a discussion of hevruta and comparative theology.