The Talmud in National Geographic! Specifically, the tsnuami of 115 CE and the famous debate over the oven of Akhnai. Just a teaser in this little trailer for the second season (see if you can identify my voice!), the whole podcast is scheduled for release later this month. Was really a lot of fun to…

Here’s my review, published in the Life section of the OU.org blog: A Rosh Yeshiva Wrote a Novel Under a Pseudonym. It’s Pretty Good. Dr. Henry AbramsonSeptember 24, 2019 In the highly-polarized environment of contemporary Jewish culture, it’s easier to imagine a rosh yeshiva banning fiction than writing it. Imagine my surprise when I received a copy…

Good morning students of Jewish History! Looking forward to seeing you for the third installment in our fairly popular Crash Course in Jewish History. We’re grateful for the positive response from the live audience, not to mention an unusually large number of online views: as I write this post, the first two parts have been…

Good morning students of Jewish history! I hope you have Torah NY on your calendar for Sunday, September 22, at Citi Field NY. I’m really thrilled to be speaking there on my newest project, the rather audacious Jewish History in Daf Yomi podcast, which is part of the exciting All Daf app currently under construction…

Thank you all for coming last night. Hope you enjoy this video recording of the lecture, which covers Medieval Jewish History in a hopelessly superficial rush, from the close of the Mishnah in the 3rd century to the Spanish Expulsion in the late 15th century. Next week’s lecture will look at Modern Jewish History, picking…

Good morning students, colleagues, and other lovers of Jewish history! Tonight (Wednesday, September 11) we are scheduled to resume our Crash Course in Jewish History with Part II, focusing on the medieval period from the compilation of the Mishnah at the turn of the 3rd century through the Spanish Expulsion of 1492. Young Israel of…

Crash Course in Jewish History  (for very intelligent people) Extra Credit Readings for First Class: Wednesday, September 4, 2019 (privileges will be revoked for anyone who asks hard questions) Ancient History Wednesday, September 4, 2019 What is Jewish History? Peter Steinfels, “Salo Baron, 94, Scholar of Jewish History, Dies,” New York Times, November 26, 1989. 2.…

The Rebbe’s entry for Parashat Bo (January 13, 1940) is unusual. Recorded in the scribe’s careful hand, with minimal annotation, it has two bold diagonal lines drawn through the center of the text, indicating that the Rebbe rejected it altogether. A brief and uncharacteristic first-person comment is appended: “more of what we said I do…

Really nice to meet with Jésica Neuah of Editorial Perspectivas to work on the tentative cover and book design of the Spanish edition of The Kabbalah of Forgiveness! Great to work with her and the whole team. G-d willing the book will be released in the summer of this year.

I had chills listening to Rabbi Shlomo Katz review the Rebbe’s words on this week’s parashah. I am grateful for his kind words of praise for my recent book on the historical context of the Aish Kodesh, but to tell the truth, I hardly recognized my own words from the masterful treatment they received from…

Chaim Kaplan recorded the mood in the Warsaw Ghetto in January 1942:  The cold is so intense that my fingers are often too numb to hold a pen. There is no coal for heating and electricity is sporadic or nonexistent. In the oppressive dark and unbearable cold your mind stops functioning. Yet even in such…

Five months into the Nazi occupation, the Jews of Warsaw struggled to keep up with the barrage of administrative decrees inflicted upon them by the Germans. When the Rebbe spoke on Parashat Vaera, which fell on January 6, 1940, the worst was still far off. The Nazis had replaced the leadership of the Jewish Council…

The winter of 5702 brutalized the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto with unforgiving cold. Chaim Kaplan, a school principal whose journal Scroll of Agony survived the war, recounts in his typically blunt prose how the physical privations of January 1942 affected the spiritual life of Ghetto inhabitants: Gone is the spirit of Jewish brotherhood. The…

The Sephardic Diaspora Spring 2018 Lecture Series Monday Nights @ 7:00 pm Main Auditorium, Touro College, 1602 Avenue J Brooklyn NY 11230 (718) 535-9333 Free and Open to the Public No hard questions, please. Image: Eleanora of Toledo, student of Benvenida Abravanel February 5: Who Was Benvenida Abravanel? February 12 :Who Was Samuel Usque? (No Class Feb…

On December 27, 1941, the Piaseczno Rebbe delivered his last recorded drashah on Parashat Vayigash in the Warsaw Ghetto. The previous month was especially brutal: an especially cold winter, combined with a severe coal shortage, exacerbated the typhus epidemic, and each morning a detail of the chevra kadisha patrolled the streets to collect the bodies…

Really pleased to receive author copies of the new Ukrainian translation of my first book! Thanks to translators Anton Kotenko and Oleksandra Nadtoky and all the great people at Dukh i Litera.

Brief video describing the life and work of Don Yitshak Abravanel (Abarbanel), a great Portuguese-Spanish Jewish thinker and leader.  Part of The Jews of Sepharad series.   Click here to view books by Dr. Abramson (remarkably amazing Chanukah reading)

This was a wonderful evening.