This book re-thinks the relationship between the world of the traditional Jewish study hall (the beit midrash) and the academy.

Ethan B. Katz teaches History and Jewish Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His previous books include The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (2015) and Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times (2015, co-edited with Ari Joskowicz).

Sergey Dolgopolski is Gordon and Gretchen Gross Professor of Jewish Thought in the University at Buffalo SUNY. He has written Other Others: The Political After the Talmud (2018); The Open Past: Subjectivity and Remembering in the Talmud (2012); and What is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement (2009).

Elisha Ancselovits teaches at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies and Yeshivat Maale Gilboa and is a fellow at Emory University's Center for the Study of Law and Religion. He has published widely in English and Hebrew and is completing a multi-volume history of Judaism through the lens of Jewish Law.

Introduction: Engagement: Religious Devotion, Academic Relativism, and Beyond. 1. Terms: Is Jewish Studies Devotionist, Relativist, or Transcendentalist? 2. Philosophy: Moses Mendelssohn, Leo Strauss, and the Relativist/Devotionist Divide. 3. History: Devotionist Textual Scholarship and Historical Consciousness in Early Modern Responsa. 4. Law: The Mothers, the Mamzerim, and the Rabbis: A Post-Holocaust Halakhic Debate as Legal and Historical Source. 5. Language: Did the Medieval Grammarians' Scientific Approach to Hebrew Reject or Embrace Tradition? 6. Ethics: Debating the Proper Orientation of the Ethical Self in Rabbinic and Monastic Sources from Antiquity. 7. Pain: Milk and Blood, or the Critical Place of Suffering for Sages and Readers of the Talmud. 8. Consent: Coercion, Consent, and Self in the Redaction of a Bavli Sugya. 9. Feminism: Relativism and Devotion, the Yarmulke, and the Ex-Bais Yaakov Girl. 10. Postmodernism: The Soft Radicalism of Rav ShaGaR. 11. Education: A Case Study in Devotional and Relativist Learning in Early Childhood Religious Education. Afterword: Limits: Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis.