מחקרי עוסק בתולדות תרבות הלימוד החז"לית כפי שהיא משתקפת בספרותם ובהשוואה לחברות הלא-יהודיות שסבבו אותם. עיסוק מרכזי שלי הוא הניסיון לשחזר את "סדרי השיח" של החכמים באמצעות ניתוח של מקורות המתארים דיאלוגים בין מורים ותלמידים.
This paper characterizes the preferences over bounded infinite utility streams that satisfy the time value of money principle and an additivity property, and preferences that in addition are impatient. Based on this characterization, the paper introduces a concept of optimization that is robust to a small imprecision in the specification of the preference, and proves that the set of feasible streams of payoffs of a finite Markov decision process admits such a robust optimization.
Roger Ascham's Greek Isocrates records two decades of tutorials at the pinnacle of Tudor politics. At the Imperial court at Augsburg in the early 1550s, Ascham and Sir Richard Morison read ancient Athens into the Reformation, as they shaped the events unfolding around them. And almost twenty years later, just six weeks before his death, Ascham was invited back to Hampton Court for one last tutorial. As Elizabeth and her tutor read Isocrates on free speech, frank counsel, and intervention in foreign wars, an anxious faction of humanist courtiers was peering over Ascham's shoulder, desperate to influence their headstrong queen.
At opposite ends of Reformation Europe, Martin Luther and the Italian Jewish theatre director Leone de’ Sommi both declare that the Jews invented tragedy and the Greeks took the credit. How to explain this unlikely alliance over a still unlikelier account of literary history? De’ Sommi was asserting the value of Jewish culture; Luther was mounting a complex argument against the Catholic canon. De’ Sommi’s sources were Talmudic, Luther’s patristic. Across geography, chronology, and faith, tragedy served as a contested borderland, in which to probe the boundaries between history and fiction, scripture and apocrypha, pagan, Jew, and Christian.
