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Digital media enable new possibilities in Jewish life and lived religion. This "digital Judaism" combines elements of Jewish tradition with the capabilities to create, modify, and transform digital objects in novel ways. It builds on American media history and has been greatly accelerated in response to the exigencies of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–2021. The Internet as a form of media functions as an amplifier of human capabilities and Jewish possibilities that can be integrated into Jewish life. This creates the contemporary online–offline media ecology to which I apply the theoretical concept of "virtuality." Virtuality extends and builds upon Heidi Campbell's religious-social shaping of technology (RSST), Michael Satlow's "maps" for defining a Judaism, Uzi Rebhun's study of symbolic Judaism, Ananda Mitra and Rae Lynn Schwatrz's concept of online/offline cybernetic space, and Jack Wertheimer's remix concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship of Judah and Samaria in the period from the 6th to the 2nd century B.C.E is currently still being described as an uninterrupted period of ongoing conflicts between Samarian and Judean YHWH-worshippers. This article examines evidence which offers an entirely different picture of Samarian–Judean relations in the post-exilic period: in the Levant in post-exilic times, there were two homologous Yahwisms in Judah and Samaria which existed side by side. It is for this reason that, when studying this formative period, scholars should give due consideration not only to Judah, but also to the North as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay seeks to illuminate the problematics, methods, and dynamics of comparison by interrogating how certain analytical categories in the study of religion, such as scripture and the body, can be fruitfully reimagined through a comparative analysis of their Hindu and Jewish instantiations. I consider a range of issues that are critical to any productive comparative study, and I reflect more specifically on the principal components of my own comparative method in light of Oliver Freiberger's analytical framework: the goals of comparative analysis; the modes of comparison; the parameters that define the scope and the scale of the comparative inquiry; and the operations involved in the comparative process, beginning with selection of the specific traditions and analytical categories to be addressed and formulation of the organizational design of the study and culminating in the re-visioned categories and models in the study of religion that constitute the fruits of the comparative inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My specific project in this paper is to combine several related and notorious questions in the history of Judaism into one: What is the nexus among the semi-divine (or high angel) figure known in the Talmud as Metatron, the figure of the exalted Enoch in the Enoch books (1-3 Enoch!), "The One Like a Son of Man" of Daniel, Jesus, the Son of Man, and the rabbinically named heresy of "Two Powers/Sovereignties in Heaven?" I believe that in order to move towards some kind of an answer to this question, we need to develop a somewhat different approach to the study of ancient Judaism, as I hope to show here. I claim that late-ancient rabbinic literature when read in the context of all contemporary and earlier texts of Judaism—those defined as rabbinic as well as those defined as non-, para-, or even anti-rabbinic—affords us a fair amount of evidence for and information about a belief in (and perhaps cult of) a second divine person within, or very close to, so-called "orthodox" rabbinic circles long after the advent of Christianity. Part of the evidence for this very cult will come from efforts at its suppression on the part of rabbinic texts. I believe, moreover, that a reasonable chain of inference links this late cult figure back through the late-antique Book of 3 Enoch to the Enoch of the first-century Parables of Enoch—also known in the scholarly literature as the Similitudes of Enoch—and thus to the Son of Man of that text and further back to the One Like a Son of Man of Daniel 7. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to illuminate Jesus' Jewishness by introducing the perspective of covenant and a new concept, covenant path searching. The concept reflects a phenomenon discernible in all Judaism of the time: the activity of trying to find out how to keep faithful to the covenant. The analysis suggests that Jesus refrained from such an activity thus remarkably departing from the contemporary covenant thinking. This does not necessarily mean detachment of Jesus from Judaism or that he should be pictured as an antinomian. The so-called eschatological covenant of later Old Testament prophetic books could offer an explanation. The texts foretell an inner knowledge of God's will which renders pursuing questions of covenant loyalty futile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]