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BT Bava Batra 14b–15a brings a list of all the books in the Bible, attributing an author to each one. This list, and the ensuing discussion, impacted Jewish tradition and rabbinical biblical research deeply. Sages who related to the question of the biblical authors considered themselves obligated to remain faithful to this list, and few deviated from it and offered original proposals of their own. This list was the focus of several studies which systematically considered it, and some of its details were discussed over the generations by dozens, if not hundreds, of rabbinic scholars. Common to all these deliberations and discussions is the assumption that the list of authors was compiled as a Tannaitic baraita. In accordance with this dating, some traditions regarding details in the list of authors were understood to postdate the baraita and generally were presented as influenced by it. Details in the list of authors that appear questionable were explained in the context of its early composition. In the following discussion, I wish to reexamine the list of authors, its sources, and its principles. As opposed to my predecessors, this examination will be unrestrained by the accepted premise that the list is a Tannaitic baraita. As will be clarified below, not only was the list not composed during the Tannaitic period, it should even be dated to after the Amoraic era. This new chronological understanding will allow me to fully reveal its sources, closely examine its composers’ considerations, and solve several difficulties and details included in the list which were explained, over the generations, only partially and sometimes even erroneously.

[...]the mystery in the film is not who has been killing brides, sometimes on their wedding nights, but why Harrington has been doing so. [...]just make sure She doesn’t drip! (Bava, Blu Ray cover) Tim Lucas (not to mention multiple other commentators) has noted that its closest more contemporary counterpart is Mary Harron’s American Psycho (1990), drawn from the Brad Easton Ellis novel, which also asks the audience to take the point of view of a psychotic killer (Tim Lucas, quoted in Cremonini). O’Brien cites at length the phenomenological approach of Vivian Sobchack, which argues that “the ‘attention’ made visible in the zoom is analogous to learning as an ‘active and constitutive state,’ rather than a benign status quo.” O’Brien then offers his own theory, which argues that the zoom can “serve as a subtle reminder to audiences that a film’s production is a physically located process – and that the fictions we witness are a product of people going somewhere and filming something” (227-231). Haptic cinema, on the other hand, often makes use of soft focus, over- or under-exposure, shaky camera movement, grainy film stock, optical printing, scratching of the emulsion.

In five brief narratives in the Babylonian Talmud, an unnamed female petitioner protests or cries out before a rabbi. Notwithstanding echoes in a handful of adjudicatory and non-adjudicatory narratives involving male characters, this group of narratives has a distinct set of recurring features: the narrative structure and use of the expressions “protesting (or crying out)” (ṣwḥ) and “did not pay attention” (lāʾ + šgḥ). This suggests that gender was significant in the crafting and transmission of some adjudicatory narratives, and that it influenced the borrowing of literary features among the narratives. This article describes the form of Bavli adjudicatory narratives, which are some of the briefest legal narratives in the Bavli. It argues for literary analysis of those narratives in light of the narrative features described. A concluding appendix shows that English translations of the Bavli reflect gender bias in their translations of the verb, ṣwḥ.

The paper looks at several episodes in which R. Yirmiyah is rebuked for questions that are portrayed as epistemologically destabilizing to the rabbinic legal project. I argue that R. Yirmiyah is portrayed as a caricature of late rabbinic scholastic thought, and that his characterization enables the writers of the Bavli to hold their own scholastic tendencies up to critique while also drawing protective boundaries around the analytical direction their legal culture has taken. I also read the passages together to demonstrate that the Bavli functions as a unified literary work in previously unacknowledged ways. These episodes form a sort of nonlinear plot, a web of stories that produce a character with his own “history.” There may be no historical rabbinic nuisance named R. Yirmiyah, but there is certainly a constructed literary one, whose reappearance throughout the Talmud plays an important role in working out tensions within the rabbinic legal project.

Tradition and the Formation of the Talmudoffers a new perspective on perhaps the most important religious text of the Jewish tradition. It is widely recognized that the creators of the Talmud innovatively interpreted and changed the older traditions on which they drew. Nevertheless, it has been assumed that the ancient rabbis were committed to maintaining continuity with the past. Moulie Vidas argues on the contrary that structural features of the Talmud were designed to produce a discontinuity with tradition, and that this discontinuity was part and parcel of the rabbis' self-conception. Both this self-conception and these structural features were part of a debate within and beyond the Jewish community about the transmission of tradition. Focusing on the Babylonian Talmud, produced in the rabbinic academies of late ancient Mesopotamia, Vidas analyzes key passages to show how the Talmud's creators contrasted their own voice with that of their predecessors. He also examines Zoroastrian, Christian, and mystical Jewish sources to reconstruct the debates and wide-ranging conversations that shaped the Talmud's literary and intellectual character.

I argue that the Babylonian Talmud's extended discussion of plagues in b. Bava Kama 60b resists the notion of collapsing plagues into covenantal categories, whereby we can see them as acts of divine intervention to punish evildoers, Jews or non-Jews. Rather, as we will see in several glosses to the talmudic sugya, plagues seem to be arbitrary occurrences, indiscriminate, and thus impervious to human devotional intervention. In this sense, they are extra-covenantal occurrences challenging rabbinic convention that natural disasters are in some way divine intervention to punish or facilitate a response.

[...]in the Spring of 1995, when I wrote the first edition of my monograph on Mario Bava, published by the Milan-based “Il Castoro,” there were only two other books on him, both in French: Mario Bava by Pascal Martinet (Paris, Edilig, 1984) and a collection of essays of the same title edited by Jean-Louis Léutrat (Liège, Editions du Céfal, 1994). [...]the cult of Mario Bava had almost become a massive one, thanks also to the blessing of Tarantino—who in the meantime had become the Pope of Italian “B” cinema—and the widespread diffusion of previously little-seen titles through their home-video release. Vittorio Spinazzola, a communist who, having studied Gramsci seriously, didn’t have any prejudice and could appreciate sword-and-sandal and Leone and Tessari flicks; Piero Zanotto, one of the first who popularized comic books in Italy; and Bernardino Zapponi, a small-town intellectual who came to Rome to work in the film industry as a scriptwriter, a Sade scholar who in 1966 planned to dedicate a whole issue of his magazine “Il Delatore” (which unfortunately ceased publications shortly afterward) to Bava. [...]in the new millennium it was necessary to put juvenile enthusiasm aside and explain, in a more lucid manner and more as film historians than as critics, the peculiarities of Bava’s cinema.

The ones I keep in a murky alley of my cinephiliac museum include the white face of a demon surrounded by darkness, an animated headless horseman and a little girl nodding her head while holding a ball. In a single take, Bava shows the audience that there is no humanity left in that body. [...]he emblematizes a Lovecraftian concept of interstellar terror. According to the French scholar, such simple action has a deep meaning.

Despite its reputation as one of the greatest and most influential of all horror films, there is surprisingly little literature dedicated to Mario Bava's Black Sunday (1960), and this contribution to the Devil's Advocates series is the first single book dedicated to it. Martyn Conterio places the film in the historical context of being one of the first sound Italian horror films and how its success kick-started the Italian horror boom. The author considers the particularly Italian perspective on the gothic that the film pioneered and its fresh and pioneering approach to horror tropes such as the vampire and the witch and considers how the casting of British 'Scream Queen' Barbara Steele was crucial to the film's effectiveness and success.