Happy families may all be alike, but the priestly family is unhappy in its own ways, shows Marjorie Lehman in her fine-grained readings of Babylonian Talmud Tractate Yoma. Lehman’s story is one of patriarchy and hierarchy, but also of vulnerability and reflection, as the tractate turns towards the practices of self-affliction that, until today, characterize the day of atonement. Tractate Yoma reads, if not quite like a novel or poem, then like a series of meditations on the shifting meanings of home and the anxieties about continuity and control. You will leave Bringing Down the Temple House never thinking the same way again about ‘the house’ as a Jewish cultural topos.
Marjorie Lehman
Dr. Marjorie Lehman is professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at The Jewish Theological Seminary and the Area Coordinator of Rabbinic Literatures and Cultures. She teaches a wide range of courses in Rabbinics, including courses on gender in Talmudic literature, aggadah, halakhah, the history of the Jewish book, and pedagogy. Her scholarly journey reflects a commitment to balancing the historical and intellectual aspects of Jewish texts while also focusing on the ways they speak to and help us to understand our place in the contemporary moment.
Dr. Lehman’s first book, The En Yaaqov: Jacob ibn Habib’s Search for Faith in the Talmudic Corpus (Wayne State University Press, 2012) reflects her interest both in the study of Talmudic aggadah and also in the concept of studying a complete literary work – in this case the early sixteenth century collection, the En Yaaqov. Building on this interest and integrating it with her interest in gender in rabbinic literature, she explored the Babylonian tractate, Yoma, as one cultural unit of study. This book, Bringing Down the Temple House: Engendering Tractate Yoma is forthcoming (Brandeis University Press, 2022). With a staunch commitment to collaborative work, Dr. Lehman has co-edited two books, Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination (Liverpool: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization at Liverpool University Press, 2017) and Learning to Read Talmud: What it Looks Like and How It Happens.
As co-director of an internationally renowned digital humanities project in Jewish Studies called Footprints: Jewish Books in Time and Place, Dr. Lehman has dedicated herself to tracking and analyzing the global movement of copies of Jewish books since the inception of print. As a provenance project, Footprints offers scholars the opportunity to think about the way a book becomes personalized by paying careful attention to the marks individuals leave on its physical form including its owners’ signatures, censors’ marks, marginalia, and the mementoes pasted between its leaves. It brings to the humanities a new approach to studying history that considers book ownership as able to offer insight into the complexity of Jewish life and culture.
A deeply reflective and committed teacher, Dr. Lehman pays great attention to pedagogy and has collaborated on research with members of JTS’s Jewish Education faculty and has conducted workshops in conjunction with the Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis University. She serves on the advisory board of the Jewish Day School Standards and Benchmarks Rabbinics Initiative and was a rabbinics advisor at the Frankel Jewish Academy in West Bloomfield, Michigan and at the Gesher Jewish Day School in Fairfax, Virginia. Her role on the editorial board of the journal Teaching Theology and Religion has enabled her to be in dialogue with professors.
Dr. Lehman has published articles in the Jewish Studies Quarterly, Nashim, AJS Review, the Journal of Teaching Theology and Religion and the Journal of Textual Reasoning, and she has lectured and presented scholarly papers at many conferences throughout the United States, Europe, and Israel. She has been awarded fellowships and served as a visiting scholar at several institutions. Currently, she serves on the advisory boards of the Center for Jewish Studies, the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan and the board of trustees at the Ramaz School in NYC.
