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.”

Today, 3 Elul (August 27) marks the 90th yahrzeit of Rav Avraham Yitzhak HaKohen Kook zt”l. As one of the preeminent figures in Orthodox Jewish thought in the modern era, it is not surprising Rav Kook’s teachings have featured prominently as subjects of articles in the pages of TRADITION—sample them in our archive.

With the arrival of Rosh Hodesh Elul and the “back to school” (and yeshiva) season, Avraham Stav considers the things that pull us away from the benches of the beit midrash, and transformative experiences which help us return to the where we started and know the place for the first time.

Shlomo Zuckier’s recent Tradition essay traces the wide-ranging literary “afterlife” of R. Aharon Lichtenstein’s “Does Jewish Tradition Recognize an Ethic Independent of Halakha?” In a recent response Natan Levin engages Zuckier’s analysis through the lens of the famous debate between R. Lichtenstein and Reform theologian Eugene Borowitz.