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Category Archives: R. Daniel Sperber
Halakhic Liberal Democracy 3.0: Expert Capture in Sperber’s Project and Hollander’s Analysis
R. Daniel Sperber’s Modern Orthodoxy project wants to give more power to experts with elite secular educations such as himself. Stephen Turner’s work on expertise and democracy is a good tool for examining the expert capture of a communal practice. … Continue reading
Posted in R. Daniel Sperber, Stephen Turner
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R. Daniel Sperber and the Historicization of Halakha
R. Daniel Sperber (b. 1940) occupies an unusual position in postwar Orthodox Jewish scholarship. He combines the sensibility of a classical philologist with the responsibilities of a working halakhist, and the result is a body of work that has reshaped … Continue reading
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Strange Bedfellows in the Beit Midrash: Coalition Politics in Sperber’s Project and Hollander’s Analysis
David Pinsof, David O. Sears, and Martie G. Haselton’s “Strange Bedfellows: The Alliance Theory of Political Belief Systems” gives the reader the tools to see what Hollander cannot see and what Sperber cannot afford to admit. The framework is simple. … Continue reading
Posted in R. Aviad Hollander, R. Daniel Sperber
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Convenient Beliefs in the Halakhic Beit Midrash: Sperber, Hollander, and the Sociology of What Cannot Be Said
Applying Stephen Turner’s frame of convenient beliefs to the Daniel Sperber controversy yields reinterprets a beit midrash that has become methodologically aware of itself. Convenient beliefs, in Turner’s account, are the beliefs that survive within a profession because holding them … Continue reading
Posted in R. Aviad Hollander, R. Daniel Sperber
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The Humanistic Halakha and the Crisis of Rabbinic Authority: On Aviad Hollander’s Study of Daniel Sperber
R. Aviad Hollander’s study of Rabbi Prof. Daniel Sperber’s (b. 1940) halakhic methodology, “The Humanistic Halakha: Clarifying the Nature of Rabbi Prof. Daniel Sperber’s Approach to Halakha,” recognizes that the contemporary crisis of halakhic authority is about power as expressed … Continue reading
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