Classes by Mordechai Dinerman

In 1612, Avraham Portaleone of Mantua published a landmark work of encyclopedic proportions covering all things Beis Hamikdash. Reading through four of his discussions, we meet a man working under far-from-ideal...

In 1790, Moses Seixas of Newport, Rhode Island, and Manuel Josephson of Philadelphia corresponded, with Josephson composing what effectively amounts to a halachic teshuvah. Josephson raised concerns about the conduct of...

The bar mitzvah ceremony didn’t always look the way it does today. In fact, for much of Jewish history, it barely looked like anything at all. In this episode, we investigate: When did a ceremony first appear? What did...

In the spring of 1096, crusading armies swept through the Jewish communities of the Rhineland, leaving devastation in their wake. This class traces how those events gave rise to rituals of memory. In the community of...

In the late 1920s, a Jerusalem rabbi cited an obscure passage describing a certain Rabbi Moshe’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land, including what appeared to be a visit to the Temple Mount itself. He seized on it as proof...

Mechiras chametz is today a standard part of observing Pesach. But how did this practice come to be, and how has it evolved over the centuries? In this class, we analyze the relevant sources in Ashkenazic and Sefardic...

There’s a well-known story about Sir Moses Montefiore going up onto Har Habayis during one of his seven legendary trips to Eretz Yisrael. But once you begin looking into it, you quickly discover that there are several...

The Mishneh Torah printed in Venice in the 1570s was the product of a broad and deliberate program of censorship. Beyond removing the handful of references to the Christian founder, which we discussed in the prior...

In October 1949, The New York Times announced a sensational discovery: an ancient manuscript of Mishneh Torah was discovered and it contained a long-lost provocative passage about the Christian founder. The headline...

The class follows the paper trail in Rabbi Yosef Caro’s Kesef Mishneh to reconstruct how and when this major commentary actually came into being. After examining its printing history and the author’s stated purpose, the...

Today, we explore Jewish life during Prohibition, when the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages were banned in the United States. While the U.S. government granted religious exceptions for wine, both the Reform...

This class takes us inside the Jewish wine economy of earlier centuries. We will see communities enforcing price ceilings, outlawing seller collusion, and appointing assessors to protect community members from being...

In the mid-1860s, a wave of rabbinic correspondence swept across central and eastern Europe as leading rabbis grappled with a vexing dilemma: how to respond to an antisemitic trial that touched directly on core points...

In this final class of the series, we explore the Rebbe’s comments about Israel’s lopsided hostage deals during the late 1970s and 1980s, alongside the perspectives of other poskim during that period. The Hostage...

In this class (third of a four-part series), we look at the halachic debate over freeing hostages as it unfolded in Israel during the 1970s. After the September 1970 triple hijacking, several poskim weighed in on...