Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Following the example of Ma'agarim, the Bar Ilan Responsa Project is now available to subscribers online. If I understood correctly, you can run searches without subscribing, but the full text would be barred. By the way, in terms of online text, I just noticed that while Wikipedia has entries in a great many obscure languages, it doesn't seem to have an Aramaic Wikipedia. Anyone out there game to start it off? When we were in basic traning, I remember one of my friends coming up with some brilliant translations of army slang into Aramaic. אית לך שעתא בנפקותא!

Scholion is having its annual marathon of lectures by prospective fellows, including a few people I know (go Miriam!). One of them, Benny Brown, will be speaking about the stringent sexual restrictions of Gerrer hassidim. Meanwhile, Rav Elyashiv has banned all forms of higher education (beyond a teacher's diploma) for women.

5 Comments:

Blogger Uzi Silber said...

Manuscript boy: I'm a new arrival in blogland. just stumbled onto your fantastic blog. rest assured I'll be spending some time here enjoying and harvesting the pninim.
im looking for more reviews of 'yeinam'. do you know of any?
nyapikores.blogspot.com

7:19 PM  
Blogger Uzi Silber said...

did you hear about frum newspapers and other periodicals requiring that printed images of women's faces be blurred?

7:27 PM  
Blogger manuscriptboy said...

Hello Uzi and welcome to the blogosphere. I know of two other reviews of Yeinam. One was written by Yisrael Ta-Shma in Tsiyon, shortly before he died. Soloveitchik responded to it in the same journal after TS had passed away. And Elliott Horowitz wrote a short review in AJS Review 29,2 (2005).

7:29 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The way I understood Rav Elyashiv's edict (and the way it was explained to me by a chareidi whose wife is studying in one of the affected programs),is that the courses of study will have some text-books and lecturers withdrawn and will no longer grant graduates a Bachelor's Degree as they have until now. (That's because some of the Ministry of Education's requirements won't be met anymore; for example, that all lecturers have Master's Degrees.)But the courses of study per se will continue and graduates will receive some sort of certificate recognized within the chareidi system. I just wonder whether the rabbanim realize how transparent they appear. They have obviously felt threatened by the women overtaking them educationally and financially.

9:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Unfortunately, Bar Ilan did not follow the Adakademia's reasonable pricing scheme. When the latter made their ~1300 shekel database available online, they did it for 200 shekel per year; that is, the yearly rate was set at about 15% of the full purchase.
In comparison, Bar Ilan's pricing scheme is through the roof. The full database, which generally sells for 1500-2000 shekels, is being marketed for 1119 shekels/year - that is, significantly more than 50% of the full purchase price for only a single year's access!!! I fear that Bar Ilan's pricing scheme will attract libraries and institutions alone. It thus misses a wonderful opportunity in which subscription to the site could have become a standard in every jewish home. A more reasonable pricing scheme could have brought about this wonderful educational ideal (as well as a watershed of revenues for Bar Ilan).

12:10 AM  

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