The Department of Art History and Art is delighted to announce the publication of Animalities and Humanities in Medieval Jewish Art, a special issue of Ars Judaica co-edited by Prof. Elina Gertsman. In addition to a broad range of articles, the volume features a roundtable discussion that explores historical and ecological spectra of animalities across Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultural domains. Special congratulations to Reed O’Mara and Luke Hester, doctoral candidates in medieval art, whose articles appear therein! Reed’s article, “Bodies and Boundaries: Exploring Hybridity, Animality, and Gender in the Ambrosian Tanakh,” explores the inherent ambiguity of humanity’s position that informs images of Adam and Eve in this bible, placed as they are in material contiguity with a teeming menagerie of beasts, and suggests that they function as a pictorial commentary on the primordial hybridity of human nature. Luke’s essay,  “Wavering Tongues: Speech and Silence in the Brussels Liturgical Pentateuch,” focuses on the Pentateuch’s unusual iconography to analyze the juxtaposition of speechless human figures whose mouths are sealed with zoomorphic beings who wield hypertrophied tongues–the tongues that serve as a crucial, if contested, ritual instrument. Ars Judaica is the premier peer-reviewed journal of Jewish art, hosted by the Ben-Gurion University and the Liverpool University Press.