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.