Swimming against the
Current comprises essays celebrating the
achievements of Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller. These articles, like the honoree,
challenge intellectual convention and accepted wisdom, focusing on four
categories: Bible and Talmud, Jewish Thought and Theology, Modern
Jewish History and Sociology, and Zionism and Jewish Politics.

Shaul Seidler-Feller is a doctoral candidate in modern Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Judaica consultant at Sotheby¿s New York. Together with Sharon Liberman Mintz and David Wachtel, he coedited The Writing on the Wall: A Catalogue of Judaica Broadsides from the Valmadonna Trust Library.

David N. Myers holds the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History at UCLA, where he directs the Luskin Center for History and Policy. He is the author or editor of fifteen books in the field of Jewish history.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Portrait of Chaim Seidler-Feller
Shaul Seidler-Feller and David N. Myers

Bibliography of Publications by Chaim Seidler-Feller

Part I. The Sources of the Tradition: Bible and Talmud

Order as Meaning: Juxtaposition in the Bible
Isaac Gottlieb

Behind Every Great Prophet Is a Woman: The Women in Exodus 2 in Talmudic Interpretation
Shana Strauch Schick

Study of Torah as a Discourse of Violence: Milhamtah shel Torah, Variations on a Theme
Aryeh Cohen

Discipleship in Rabbinic Literature
Moshe Halbertal

Secular Legal Paradigms and Talmudic Law: Rav Tsa`ir on Legal Loopholes
Elana Stein Hain

Part II. Jewish Thought and Theology

Buber, Scholem, and the Me¿or enayim: Another Perspective on a Great Controversy
Avraham Yizhak (Arthur) Green

On Not Finishing the Work: A Commentary on Avot 2:16 143
Michael Walzer

The Faith of Abraham
Howard Wettstein

The Ascent and Decline of the ¿Historical Jew¿
Moshe Idel

Divine Command Theory in Jewish Law and Ethics
Elliot N. Dorff

Part III. Modern Jewish History and Sociology

Polio Season: Transformations of Philip Roth¿s ¿Jewish Mother¿ from Sophie Portnoy to Marcia Steinberg
Sylvia Barack Fishman

Go to School, Work, Marry, Have Children, Be Jewish: Jewish Women and Jewish Men in the United States and Israel
Sergio DellaPergola

The Day of Reckoning: Max Radin and the Rule of Law in International War Crimes
Eugene R. Sheppard

Antisemitism: Reflections and Ruminations
Deborah E. Lipstadt

Part IV. Zionism and Jewish Politics

Sovereignty and Ethics in the Thought of Rabbi ¿ayyim David Halevi
Suzanne Last Stone

Rabbi Shlomo Goren on the Maimonidean Law of Siege: An Essay on the Ethics of Jewish Warfare
David Ellenson

Invoking the Indigenous, for and against Israel
Carole Goldberg

Jewish Folk Art and Ideology: The ¿imhat Torah Flag through the Ages
Shalom Sabar

Student Tributes

Meira Wolkenfeld
Adam Greenwald
Mayim Bialik
Jonathan Jacoby

Colleague Tributes

Laurie L. Levenson
Edward Feld
David Berner
Saul Andron

List of Contributors