The remarkable story of two powerful Jewish women from Spain and Portugal and the challenge to Pope Paul IV for his maltreatment of Portuguese Jews in Italy.

Please join us Monday night in Brooklyn for the next installment of the The Jews of Italy! We plan to look at the life and work of Rabbi Ovadia of Bertinoro, an Italian Rabbi who revolutionized the study of the Mishnah and had a major impact on the life of Jews in 15th century Israel.

7:00 pm sharp at the mighty Avenue J campus of Touro College. Free and open to the community. No hard questions, please.

Who knew that writing a dictionary was so important? (For those of you born after 1985: a dictionary is an actual paper book full of words and their meanings). Natan ben Yehiel of Rome (c. 1035-1110) left the world a remarkable scholarly achievement in the form of the massive Arukh, a Talmudic dictionary that defined terms in Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Persian, and even Slavic languages. We know little about his life other than a cryptic poem he attached to his magnum opus and the testimony of an 18th century Rabbi–but what little we know is fascinating.