It ought to inform future halakhic writing about gender and sexuality.A synagogue could do worse than having a weekly study group focused on these extracts, or an individual could go through the whole by reading one passage a day for about four months. It could be learned in a regularized, ritualized fashion that parallels projects of learning classical rabbinic texts.Second, I thought I would offer a few potential uses for this anthology, some obvious and some less so: In browsing its pages, you encounter, in short succession: the rabbinic delineation of a system of sexes that challenges American culture’s strong binary a midrash imagining Mordekhai breast-feeding Esther an early-modern doctor pronouncing on the physiological origins of lesbianism Emma Lazarus’s homoerotic love poetry and more. Rather than trying to review such a massive collection, I will first just say that it is a remarkable book. Each is framed by a brief, historical preface and suggestions for further reading. They have been translated from sixteen languages and sample diversely from different streams of Judaism- Rabbinic and Hellenistic, Ashkenazic and Sephardic, Orthodox and liberal they range generically from legal responsa to poetry, memoir to sermons, sociology to travel novel and they include both proud affirmations and harsh condemnations of it. As the title suggests, the sources included span two millennia. It is hard to imagine the reader competent to review Noam Sienna’s new book, A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts From The First Century to 1969, so I will not try.

Noam sienna a rainbow thread