The translation of a rare Jewish text is almost done, thanks to Berkeley scholar Daniel Matt. This May, publishers will release the final volume of the authoritative English translation of the Zohar.

A Yiddish translation of “Arabian Nights” sounds like the set-up to a Borscht Belt joke. Yet, as a recent finalist for a National Jewish Book Award shows, such a work is not only real, it testifies to ...

(JTA) — If you read the “Harry Potter” series in Hebrew you may have noticed a curious Jewish fact: Though Sirius Black isn’t Jewish, the character sings a Hanukkah song in one scene. In an interview ...

The Bay Area scholar concludes decades of work on what a colleague calls the "best translation of the Bible into English ever made." So begins a monumental new literary translation of the Hebrew Bible ...

Translating a Bible has always been risky, and today the language of gender often fires up public opinion. Now entering the lists of controversy is a “gender-sensitive” English translation of ...

Alter, professor emeritus of Hebrew and comparative literature at UC Berkeley, embarked on his own translation of the Hebrew Bible in 1999 with “The David Story,” a translation of and commentary on ...

The Jewish Literary Foundation, in partnership with the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), has launched the inaugural Freudenheim Translation Prize, “highlighting the power of Jewish literature to ...

After two years of pondering how to unlock the basic meaning of Hebrew Scripture, this is how far I’ve come. Part 1: my assumptions. Let’s begin with a few sentences in lay-philosophical terms about ...

If you haven't read Hebrew since the rite-of-passage ceremony known as the bar mitzvah, customarily conducted at the age of 13, then a willfully obscure text of ancient Jewish mysticism is probably ...

The difficultiesof translating the Hebrew Bible begin with the first word of Genesis. The King James Bible of 1611 translates Genesis 1:1 as “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” ...