Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (New Historicism-Studies in Cultural Poetics , No 25)

Rating:
Summary: brilliant speculation
Review: Boyarin manages to cover some very interesting Talmudic material on gender and sexuality in an intelligent and informed manner. He also has a deep understanding of cultural theory, and argues for a number of exceptionally striking theses regarding Talmuds' (deliberate plural: he contrasts the Babylonian Talmud with the Jerusalem or Land of Israel Talmud) relationships to sexuality, gender, and embodiment. HOWEVER, Boyarin's claims are so wide-ranging and fundamental that it would require the study of a great deal of additional primary textual material to really confirm them in a responsible fashion.

Rating:
Summary: A taboo subject approached openly
Review: This books approaches in a very open way the issue of sex in the Talmud. Not an easy thing to do... Yet it manages to do so well, without excessively offending one view or another. Through its approach, it probably expores one of the earliest expressions of feminism in Judaism.

Rating:
Summary: the Talmud through a feminist, po-mo lens
Review: you don't have to be a radical traditionalist to understand how Boyarin deliberately misinterprets the Talmud and projects onto it his own feminist, post-modernist ideas.