A Jewish school where students study religious texts — above all the Talmud, the great collection of Jewish law and argument. Some yeshivas train men to become rabbis, the way a seminary trains priests, but that is not the whole story: many students go simply to study, because in Jewish tradition studying the texts is itself a religious act, not only job training. The learning looks unlike a normal classroom. Students often work in pairs, called a chavruta, reading a passage aloud and arguing over it for hours, and the room is famously loud. A yeshiva is usually for older boys and men; the parallel school for girls and women is generally called a midrasha or seminary, though the details vary between communities. The plural in English is normally yeshivas; you will also see the Hebrew plural yeshivot or yeshivos, especially in writing from inside the community, and the spelling yeshivah with an h. Where you meet the word, the setting is nearly always Orthodox Judaism — New York, Israel, and older writing about Jewish life in eastern Europe.