Noah Bickart, PhD

Dr. Noah Bickart was appointed in 2022 as the inaugural holder of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Chair in Jewish Studies. He holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Chicago. After a brief stint in the Jazz recording industry in New York, he studied Talmud at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. Returning to America, he enrolled at the Harvard Divinity School, earning a MA in Hebrew Bible in 2003. The Following year he entered Rabbinical School at The Jewish Theological Seminary as a Wexner Graduate Fellow. After being ordained as a Conservative Rabbi in 2008, he remained at JTS for Doctoral work and received his PhD in 2015. After directing the Prozdor High School, directing the Eisenfeld/Duker Beit Midrash, and teaching Talmud in the Rabbinical School for a few years, he became Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program of Judaic Studies at Yale University. In the Fall of 2018, he moved to University heights to join the faculty of the Theology and Religious Studies department at John Carroll University.

Selected Courses

• TRS 2410: Introduction to Rabbinc Judaism
• TRS 3110/5110: Abraham: Father of Many Nations
• TRS 3412/5412: Jewish Messianism
• TRS 3416/5416: The Rabbis on Sex and Gender

Selected Publications

• The Scholastic Culture of the Babylonian Talmud, Judaism in Context Vol. 31 (Gorgias Press, 2022)
• "Logic and Language in the development of a Talmudic Sugya," [Hebrew], in Hakol Kol Yaakov: Joel Roth Jubilee Volume, ed. Jonathan S. Milgram and Robert Harris (Leiden: Brill, 2021)
• ""He Found a Hair and it Bothered Him:" Female Pubic Hair Depilation in the Babylonian Talmud," Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues, No. 35 (Fall 2019)
• "Overturning the 'Table': The Hidden Meaning of a Talmudic Metaphor for Coitus," Journal of the History of Sexuality 25:3 (September, 2016)