With the launch of the new “Lamm Legacy Library” we gain access to a treasure trove of archival material from the founder of TRADITION, Rabbi Norman Lamm z”l. Tzvi Sinensky offers a brief guided tour of items in the vast library reflecting on R. Lamm’s concerns and motivations leading up to the creation of our Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought in 1958.

Today’s Daf Yomi (Horayot 13a) implies that halakhic triage obligates one to save a man before a woman. The issue has significant ethical implications for contemporary medicine—who takes precedence for ICU admission in modern hospitals, or who should emergency responders treat first at the scene of an accident or after a terrorist attack? Revisit Alan Jotkowitz’s TRADITION essay surveying a variety of approaches to this complicated case of medical ethics. 

In remembering the renowned educator, R. David Ebner zt”l, who passed away this week, his student David Rozenson paints a portrait of a man who did not “rage against the dying of the light,” but searched, taught, sang, danced, and wrote, and in so doing helped countless talmidim to navigate the Daf of Life.

Sometimes we forget that others looked at problems we face and sugyot we study long before we arrived. Avraham Stav shares the message of the IDF’s really lousy can openers distributed with the army’s combat rations—and its message for anyone sitting in front of an open Gemara, contemplating how the unfamiliar sometimes appears to our naive or cynical eyes as strange.

Rabbi David Ebner zt”l, who passed away today in Jerusalem, was an educator who combined sensitivity, passion, poetry, and warmth with keen intellectual rigor and profound moral integrity. Read his 1992 contribution to TRADITION’s “Divided and Distinguished Worlds” symposium.

Yosie Levine’s “Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate” (Littman Library) is an engaging read, leavening impeccable scholarship with colorful anecdotes. Daniel Yolkut’s review shows the value in understanding the book’s subject in his Early Modern mercantile milieu, and praises Levine for championing the role of “rabbi-scholar.”

Sima Zalcberg-Block’s Hebrew book, “They Are Still Sitting and Sewing: The Toldot Aharon Hasidic Women” (Bialik Institute), opens a rare window into one of Israel’s most closed Hasidic sects. Through years of trust-building and fieldwork, she brings forward women’s voices long absent from scholarship—revealing resilience, meaning, and agency within strict gender roles. Menachen Keren-Kratz reviews what he call “a landmark study of faith, gender, and cultural survival.”