‘Pilpul’ describes what happened to academic writing0
- Education
- January 19, 2016
At one point in Chaim Potok’s classic The Chosen, David Malter—the father of the main character Reuven—discusses the decline of Jewish scholarship in the eighteenth century. In the discussion, he uses a term that accurately describes much of modern academic writing—“pilpul”: “Jewish scholarship was dead. In its place came empty discussions about matters that had no
READ MORE










