The cover of Barry Scott Wimpfheimer's new book The Talmud: A Biography features a work of feminist protest art that resembles a rainbow tapestry shading from red to blue, composed of thousands of small pieces of paper rolled up intro scrolls. Each of those pieces of paper is a small section of a printed Talmud page. The work, created in 2010 by American-Israeli multimedia artist Andi Arnovitz, is titled If Only They Had Asked Us. As Arnovitz writes on her website, “The piece suggests that had women been involved in helping to write these books, the laws would be far more colorful and vibrant.”
This piece of art is one of the many approaches to Talmud that Wimpfheimer considers in his book, which is part of Princeton University Press' series Lives of Great Religious Books—a collection of more than a dozen books that also covers the Book of Mormon, the Book of Job, and the Bhagavad Gita. “As soon as I heard about this series, I knew I wanted to write about the Talmud,” Wimpfheimer, a professor of Talmud at Northwestern University, told me in a telephone conversation. “The Talmud really lends itself to a biography because it's had various many periods of existence, and it has lived in various types of ways, and it continues to live in various types of ways: There is the text as it is interpreted and understood in quite different ways and the symbolic register of the Talmud having meaning beyond the meaning of the words inside it. The Talmud can mean so much beyond what is contained within it.”
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