Dr. Rabbi Yishai Kiel is a scholar of Jewish law and religion in the ancient and early medieval periods. His scholarship focuses on the intersection of the Jewish tradition with Zoroastrian, Christian, Islamic, and Manichean traditions in the Sasanian and early Islamicate Near East. He also works on the Iranian and Persian context of the post-exilic strata of the Hebrew Bible. Kiel completed two Ph.D. degrees at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, one in Rabbinics and Iranian Studies (2011) and one in law (2020; LL.D./J.S.D. equivalent). He received his rabbinical ordination from the Chief Rabbinate of Israel. He served as a lecturer in the Religious Studies Department and Directed Studies Program (Historical and Political Thought) at Yale University and in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; he was also a Blaustein postdoctoral associate at Yale’s Program in Judaic Studies; a Harry Starr fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University; a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard, and a Cheshin fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Kiel is the author of Sexuality in the Babylonian Talmud: Christian and Sasanian Contexts in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).