The Stroum Center is delighted to launch its very first e-book publication: Prof. Marty Jaffee’s new translation of the fascinating Sifre Devarim, a 4th-century compilation of rabbinic oral commentaries on Deuteronomy. Jaffee’s masterpiece uniquely captures the spoken dimension of the original text, bringing a fresh, often poetic perspective to a seminal piece of the biblical canon.

Parts of the Sifre Devarim were found in the Cairo Geniza, a hidden cache of sacred texts and fragments discovered in a storage room in Cairo, Egypt. The scholar Solomon Schechter, pictured above in 1895, helped to bring these valuable texts to light and is pictured on the cover of Prof. Jaffee’s e-book.
Read a news piece about this exciting digital project: Marty Jaffee Brings Rabbinic Voices from the Cairo Geniza to the E-book.
Our event celebrating Prof. Jaffee’s new work will feature a panel and discussion with two of Seattle’s premier Jewish educators: Beth Huppin of Jewish Family Service, and Rabbi Adam Rubin of Congregation Beth Shalom. They will address how to utilize the book as a resource from the dual perspectives of teacher and student.
A light kosher luncheon will be served at this event.
 
Marty Jaffee, Professor Emeritus at the UW, is a renowned scholar of the Oral Torah and rabbinic Judaism. He received his PhD in Religious Studies from Brown University and began teaching at the University of Washington in 1987. Over the course of four decades of teaching and publishing, he put the UW Jewish Studies and Comparative Religion programs on the national map. Jaffee was elected to the American Society for the Study of Religion in 2004, and was named a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research in 2010.