2024-2025
Special
Presentation

Dr. Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg is an alumna from Hebrew University and the University of Chicago, currently serving as an Associate Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Dr. Wollenberg is passionate about teaching how the Hebrew Bible has been imagined and used by religious practitioners since its canonization. Her first book, How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible, explores Rabbinic attitudes towards the idea of written revelation. 

​

Early Judaism is often described as the religion of the book par excellence—a movement built around the study of the Bible and steeped in a culture of sacred bookishness that evolved from an unrelenting focus on a canonical text. But in The Closed Book, Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg argues that Jews didn’t truly embrace the biblical text until nearly a thousand years after the Bible was first canonized. She tells the story of the intervening centuries during which even rabbis seldom opened a Bible and many rabbinic authorities remained deeply ambivalent about the biblical text as a source of sacred knowledge.

 

Join the Enoch Seminar virtually from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. ET on Monday, October 28, for a dialogue about rabbinic authority over scripture. Rebecca Wollenberg will be interviewed by Isaac Oliver, Director of ‘Talmud for Everyone,’ and joined by Marjorie Lehman, Laura S. Lieber, Michal Bar-Asher Siegal

and Daniel H. Weiss. 

 

The book is available for purchase here: https://a.co/d/dWPvK9u

 

Register for the event here: https://tinyurl.com/hepby8ha