Jenny R. Labendz, "Beyond Hope: Rabbinic Eschatology of Late Antiquity in Comparative Perspective" (Oxford UP, 2026)

July 28, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In 2014, Jenny R. Labendz was teaching an independent study with an undergraduate at Barnard College when they came across a text in the Babylonian Talmud that surprised her. “I thought, well, that’s weird,” she recalls. The text was about rabbinic eschatology—the rabbis’ ideas about the end of the world or the world to come. That moment of surprise launched a twelve-year research project that became Beyond Hope: Rabbinic Eschatology of Late Antiquity in Comparative Perspective (Oxford UP, 2026). What Labendz found was that the rabbis of late antiquity were deeply concerned with eschatology, but not in the ways most people assume—and certainly not in the ways that would make for a neat, tidy system of beliefs.

Why the rabbis got a bad reputation

Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.

Read Full Summary →

Free • No credit card required

Listen to Audio Summary Open in App

Never miss an episode of New Books in Jewish Studies

Get every new episode summarized in your inbox — free, ~5 minutes to read.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

What you'll learn

1 (02:54) **Why This Project?** - Labendz explains how a surprising Talmud text sparked a twelve-year investigation into rabbinic eschatology.
2 (04:39) **Defining Eschatology: The "Best of All Possible Worlds"** - Labendz offers a flexible, comparative definition that avoids narrow Christian or apocalyptic assumptions.
3 (07:05) **Why People Think Rabbis Weren't Into Eschatology** - Two key reasons: a terminological mismatch and a long history of differentiating Judaism from Christianity.
4 (10:14) **The Book Cover: Cézanne's "Pines and Rocks"** - The painting captures the rabbis' struggle to articulate a shifting, hard-to-pin-down concept of the world to come.
5 (13:18) **The Sources: Talmudic Literature (2nd-6th Century CE)** - A description of the "sea of Talmud" and why it's the anchor for all subsequent Judaism.
6 (19:07) **Rabbinic Eschatology vs. Apocalypticism** - Labendz introduces "post-apocalypticism" to describe rabbinic narratives that resist neat, perfect endings.
7 (24:06) **Imperfect Eschatology: The Core Difference from Christianity** - The rabbis' best possible world is not perfect, and that's the point.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

In Beyond Hope: Rabbinic Eschatology of Late Antiquity in Comparative Perspective (Oxford UP, 2026) Jenny Labendz addresses distinct patterns within rabbinic eschatology that have been overlooked in scholarship and in Jewish thought. Contrary to what is usually expected of eschatology, this book demonstrates that the rabbis held a sustained eschatology of irresolution. While the rabbis occasionally waxed poetic along the lines of a perfected new world in the eschaton, a vast store of rabbinic texts depicts a deeply imperfect eschaton. This is the profound difference between rabbinic and early Christian eschatology.
Despite its differences from the Christian doctrine of perfection, rabbinic eschatology aligns neatly with a different Christian concept, namely inaugurated eschatology. The eschaton is not only be hoped for in the future, but can be attained in the present. The best of all possible worlds has not yet been entirely actualized, but it has been inaugurated, in the rabbinic view by the exodus from slavery in Egypt, the revelation of the Torah at Sinai, and the construction of the Tabernacle in the wilderness. This is a paradigm shift for thinking about rabbinic eschatology, which rejects the dogmas and binaries that generations of scholars have taken for granted.

In this new book, Jenny Labendz explores the relationship between this world and the best possible world, the limits of that best possible world, and asks a crucially grounding question--what are we talking about when we're talking about the end of the world?

Interviewee: Jenny R. Labendz received her PhD from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2010 and was Associate Professor of Religious Studies at St. Francis College until 2025. She is also the author of Socratic Torah: Non-Jews in Rabbinic Intellectual Culture, published by Oxford University Press in 2013.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism and Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies