Shai Secunda
Shai Secunda is the Jacob Neusner Professor of Judaism at Bard College and a contributing editor at the Jewish Review of Books.
Like a Surgeon with a Scalpel, an Archaeologist with a Spade
David Weiss Halivni once rescued a scrap from a page of the Shulchan Arukh from the sandwich paper of a Nazi guard. His whole life turned out to be about rescuing texts.
As They Are
A unique view into the inner lives of Hasidic women.
This Great House
Israel's new National Library is the most architecturally exquisite building erected in the history of the Jewish State. Like its predecessor, it’s also an excellent place to “hock” about books and ideas.
Facing Faces
Nearly every morning since October 7, I open my phone and look at the faces of the war’s most recent victims. I gaze at these portraits fearfully, searching for a…
Ruby Sees Red
"I’m still trying to wake up from this nightmare. I walk in the streets. I see parents with babies. I can’t look. I walk in Riverside Park, I see an older man hugging his granddaughter, and I almost start crying. We have been forced back into Jewish history, into the bloody raw part of Jewish history."
Not Rain
"In shul, the Torah reader suddenly picks up his ringing cellphone, nodding as he is told to be ready within half an hour. Something inexplicable, tremendous, and terrifying is taking place. Not rain; war."
From Place to Place in Search of a Place: Reading Agnon in Berlin
Far from his family, and searching for a sukkah, Shai Secunda found himself following Shai Agnon’s footsteps through the city of Berlin.
Bind Them as a Sign: A Photo Essay
A Hasidic-owned, bicycle-powered tefillin factory in Krakow, Poland.
The Fierce Lust for Contemplation
How did traditional yeshivas become fertile ground for radical literature?
No Balm
A new book on talmudic medicine illustrates the ills of modern academia, argues Shai Secunda.
Wandering Jews
Jews have been travelers since God told Abraham to get up and go. How deeply has this constant motion been imprinted on the Jewish psyche?
Wild Things: The New Neo-Hasidism and Modern Orthodoxy
Who are Joey Rosenfeld and his pseudo-Hasidic pranksters, and what does their success have to do with the future of Modern Orthodoxy?
Sephardi Soap
With the runaway success of the novel The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, a television adaptation was all but inevitable, and the decision of Yes Studios to invest record amounts of cash in the show, while eyebrow raising, is also unsurprising.
A Season of Tzuris: The Shtisels Return
In Season 3 of the hit Netflix show, the Shtisels reckon with an endless procession of trials and tribulations, from the perils of courtship to the strains of fraying marriages.
Life in Learning
The special relationship between Jews and learning has been endlessly documented. Yet these investigations have largely overlooked the textual communion that transubstantiates books and learning into the body and blood of Jewish experience.
Our Lady in Tehran
In Tehran, the Mossad has orchestrated a complex and brazen operation as part of a last-ditch effort to cut the capital’s power supply so that the Israeli Air Force can take out Iran’s nuclear program
(Almost) People
What does it mean to say that books have lives?
The Play’s the Thing: A Revolutionary New Haggadah
The exodus from Egyptian bondage was a good thing. What about a haggadah that is "unbound"
Rocketmen
A brilliant and moving exhibit at the Israel Museum pairs the Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, who died in the space shuttle Columbia explosion, with the obscure biblical gure Enoch, who was also an astronaut of sorts.
Quarried in Air
Sefer Yeṣirah is the most influential Jewish book you never heard of. Indeed, it has been argued that early commentaries written on the book tilled the gnostic soil out of which sprouted the tree of Kabbalah.
Perpetual Motion
Remembering Yaakov Elman, who changed the way we study Talmud.
Sacrificial Speech
Just a few years after the publication of her Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature, Mira Balberg has somehow managed to write another path-breaking work on another formidable and arcane section of rabbinic literature—sacrificial law.
Shababshubap
Black hat chic: Shai Secunda's review of Shababnikim, the new television show about cool yeshiva students.
Purity and Obscurity
When contemporary Jews of priestly lineage avoid cemeteries, when ordinary Jews wash their hands before eating, or immerse themselves in ritual baths, they are acting according to the dictates of an ancient system.
Bling and Beauty: Jerusalem at the Met
In a new exhibit at the Met curators Barbara Drake Boehm and Melanie Holcomb wear their liberal hearts on their sleeves, imagining that Jerusalem's crowds might yet be resurrected as a convivial medieval pluralism.
Nuclear Family
Part of the artistry of Shtisel derives from an almost ritualistic obsession with the details that ultra-Orthodox Jews themselves obsess over.
Desert Wild
Zornberg’s sessions are deeply informed by traditional Jewish sources, especially the interpretations of classic rabbinic midrash and the homilies of Hasidic masters.
Common Clay
Virtually nothing of Babylonian Jewry of the talmudic period, from the 3rd to the 6th century C.E., has survived beyond the Babylonian Talmud itself to help contextualize or confirm the many things the text tells its readers.
Brave New Bavli: Talmud in the Age of the iPad
The Talmud was hypertextual before we had the word. ArtScroll's new app is only the beginning.
Marginalia
Israeli director Joseph Cedar's new film Footnote was anything but that at the Cannes Film Festival, despite its setting in the Hebrew University Talmud department.