In 1980, the Italian publisher Einaudi wanted to publish a series of personal anthologies of its authors. Primo Levi quickly arose to the challenge and submitted La ricerca delle radici ( The Search for Roots ): thirty excerpts from thirty masterpieces of world literature, accompanied by thirty short introductions he wrote. Every such introduction is a brilliant commentary on the work, and a reflection of Primo Levi himself - as a kind of self-portrait, in which the painter produces his collage from materials created by others. These excepts - published for the first time in Hebrew - reveal some of the important ethical and aesthetic influences on Primo Levi and his work. Levi quotes from Job, Lucretius, Rabelais‏, Babel, Shalom Aleichem, de Saint-Exupéry and more, but also from Darwin's On Origin of Species and even from Practical Organic Chemistry. Thus, it is possible to trace his extensive and diverse, humanistic and scientific education, the roots from which his unique literary work grew.

Armenian Manuscripts of the David and Jemima Jeselsohn Collection is devoted to the five Armenian codices in the Jeselsohn collection in Zurich. Of great importance for Armenian studies and the history of art more generally, they represent various literary types, including biblical, hagiographic, homiletic, and liturgical texts. They also reflect an array of visual and artisanal traditions, connected to artistic centres in the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, Constantinople, and New Julfa, and span a period of over 300 years. A newly identified Sargis Picak manuscript is of exceptional importance for the study of medieval Armenian art, for its images, for Sargis’ colophons, and for a a hitherto unstudied ivory plaque of the Transfiguration. A Ritual of 1586 holds particular importance for scholars of the Armenian liturgy and its development in sixteenth-century Jerusalem. Also presented is a beautiful parchment leaf of the opening of the Gospel of John, studied and published previously by Michael and Nira Stone, and likely originating from a Bible produced in seventeenth-century New Julfa. Two Gospel Books complete this study: one from New Julfa, dated to 1695, and another likely produced in late seventeenth or early eighteenth-century Constantinople. This book was initiated and supported by David Jeselsohn, avid and longtime collector of archaeological artifacts, manuscripts, and Judaica. It was written jointly by Michael Stone and Christina Maranci. Maranci is an art historian and Stone is a specialist in Armenian philology, palaeography and codicology. Maranci bears primary responsibility for research on the miniatures – their art-historical analysis and iconography as well as their attribution, date, and context. Stone contributed the textual, codicological and palaeographical research, including translation of the colophons from the Classical Armenian (Grabar) into English, and catalogued the contents of all five manuscripts.

In 1491 the renowned goldsmith Salomone da Sesso converted to Catholicism. Born to a Jewish family in Florence, Salomone later settled in Ferrara, where he was regarded as a virtuoso artist. But rumors circulated about Salomone’s behavior, scandalizing the Mantuan Jewish community, who turned him over to the civil authorities. Salomone was condemned to death for sodomy but agreed to renounce Judaism to save his life. He was baptized, taking the name Ercole “de’ Fedeli” (“One of the Faithful”). Drawing on newly discovered archival sources, Tamar Herzig traces the dramatic story of his life, half a century before ecclesiastical authorities made Jewish conversion a priority of the Catholic Church. The book explores the Jewish world in which Salomone was raised; the glittering objects he crafted, and their status as courtly hallmarks; and Ercole’s relations with his wealthy patrons. Herzig also examines the response of Jewish communities and Christian authorities to allegations of sexual crimes, and attitudes toward homosexual acts among Christians and Jews. In Salomone/Ercole’s story we see how precarious life was for converts from Judaism, and how contested was the meaning of conversion for both the apostates’ former coreligionists and those tasked with welcoming them to their new faith.

An Internal-External Journey presents an interdisciplinary educational approach, a toolbox and lesson plans developed by the author on the topic of creative education: integrating the arts in teaching and education. The approach was developed following many years of experience in the field of education, and the lesson plans were passed on to teaching students at Kibbutzim College. The book is intended for educators engaged in guidance, teaching and training of teachers. Creative education and the integration of arts in teaching allow students to embark on a two-way journey: inward to themselves, and outward to the cultural and academic texts. The book describes an initiation process using paint, newspaper clippings, glue and plasticine, and a combination of meditation, writing, reading and the play, knowing that it is important for future teachers to experience the springs of creativity up close. "This is an educational gem. It is a very unusual book with a lot of pedagogical understanding, a very interesting work, based on the wisdom of the field and a lot of experience." - Prof. Anat Zohar, School of Education, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

This collection presents short stories by Yiddish writers who worked in Israel and wrote about it. The stories chosen and translated into Hebrew especially for this book unfold a fascinating mosaic, a synthesis between the literary traditions of Yiddish in Eastern Europe and America and the Israeli language, landscape, characters, and world of images; Between the Jewish home that was destroyed in the Holocaust and the formulating reality in Israel. Yiddish fiction written in Israel confronts the reader with the kibbutz and the urban landscape, Holocaust survivors and Sabars, Arabs, Bedouins, and Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and all over the world. The stories can also be read as an expression of the changes that took place in Israel, from the establishment of the state to the Lebanon War and the first Intifada, from the waves of mass immigration of the Mizrahim and of Holocaust survivors and their settlement in "abandoned villages" to the immigration of Soviet Union Jews in the 1990s.

The collective memory is not an innocent conduit carrying the cargo of the "authentic" past into the present, but a subject of constant struggle between different social forces, which have their own history. The discourse of the Holocaust in Israel has also undergone several incarnations during the last decades that reflected the complex interrelationship between "silence" and speech and the various tensions between private memories and collective memory. In this pioneering book - What Shall We Tell the Little Ones? - Yaakova Sacerdoti examines how Holocaust literature for preschoolers developed in light of the recurring questions on this topic over the years: Is it right to expose children to these horrific events of the past? And if so, how can the indescribable be described? The book examines these questions by describing over thirty children's books about the Holocaust, published since the beginning of the 1990s. Thus, Sacerdoti tries to reveal the literary and poetic techniques - both textual and visual - that children's writers used to try to circumvent the difficulties involved in conveying the experiences of the Holocaust to preschoolers.

This beautiful volume is the fruit of almost 40 years of collecting by Vivienne Silver-Brody, one of Israel's few photography collectors. She has written and edited a book, which narrates the shared history of photography in a land that in the last century has seen development alongside war and destruction, and that remains divided and conflicted by the two peoples that call it home. The text is accompanied by some 200 exquisite photographs from Silver-Brody’s collection, and includes a special section inspired by the 1983 volume published by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Personal Choice: A Celebration of Twentieth-Century Photographs . In this section, Silver-Brody invited some 60 writers – photographers, scholars, artists, curators, collectors, lovers of photography and others with a special connection to the land – from different religions, national and political tendencies, to choose a single photograph from her collection and to write a short essay relating to it. The result is a fascinating selection of texts that contributes to the overall narrative in the book. This book could speak to a diversified readership; those interested in photography and its history or in the Middle East and Israel / Palestine, especially in light of the ongoing conflict and public debate surrounding it around the world, and in light of the unique voice that attempts to reach beyond politics and religion, and to present a photographic history of the Land of Israel as a shared place rather than as disputed territory. Translated by Daphna Levy

It is not an easy task to find in any creative field a person who is both an original and groundbreaking artist and a profound thinker-interpreter, who is well versed in the broad scope of the entire culture. Such is Michael Gurevitch – the playwright of "Happiness", "A Fleeting Shadow", "A Word of Love" and "The Dragon's Beloved" (out of more than eighteen plays) – who presented new, local and extremely challenging concepts about the context of a theatre play within the contemporary Israeli existence. Gurevitch designs a new local theatrical language in his plays and in the way he directs. He is an unforgettable director of classics such as "The King's Clothes" by Nissim Aloni, "Life is a Dream" by Calderón de la Barca, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" by Shakespeare, "Uncle Vanya" by Chekhov or "War on the House" by Aristophanes (adaptation by Ilan Hatsor). His theatrical insights are interwoven to the most contemporary Israeli issues without so much as a sensational wink. His theater is a "passing shadow" in the full sense of the word because it is based on one-time work with certain actors, at certain moments in their lives, and in the life of the country at a certain moment, and for that reason it is profoundly unique to theater alone, because it lives only when it is actually performed, hence it is poignant and unforgettable. Gurevitch was born (1951) and raised in Tel Aviv. He lived, breathed and studied local and international theater all his life, but his main strength is in the depths of the emotional, involving his childhood, his parents and his unique personality. In Two Children in The Field: Reflections on Theatre and Life Gurevitch manages to refine, from his rich experience, a series of lucid insights on the relation between theatrical conceptions and the contexts from which they stem.

Identity and Its Discontents is an intellectual, gothic journey, which explores and interprets for the readers the personal story and thought of fourteen "marginal Jews", Jewish intellectuals from a variety of disciplines who lived in Europe from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Jacob Golomb does a good job of describing the twisted Jewish-European identity of these spiritual giants in the face of the fractured European humanist ideal. The book is structured as a fabric created from the intersecting stories of key thinkers who left a singular intellectual mark on the twentieth century and the shaping of Jewish consciousness in it - from Kafka to Freud, from Bruno Schulz to Gensin, from Ahad Ha'am to Berdichevsky, from Herzl and Nordau to Martin Buber and Zeev Jabotinsky, and from Stefan Zweig to Primo Levi. The original key that Golomb offers to understanding the mechanisms of the identity construction of the "fringe Jews" is the attitude of these thinkers to the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, and the ways in which this illuminates the question of identity politics and the internal struggle in modern Judaism between nationalism and universal humanism. Identity in Discomfort is the fruit of the author's many years of important research work on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and their acception in Hebrew literature and thought. Prof. Hagi Kenaan

In his autobiography, Abraham Halevi Fraenkel describes growing up as an Orthodox Jew in Germany and his development as a mathematician at the beginning of the twentieth century. In his memoir, originally published in German in 1967, Fraenkel painted a unique picture of the complexity of Jewish life in Germany with special emphasis on the developments in the Orthodox community. He described the world of mathematics in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, in the context of the great mathematicians he met, many of whom were Jews or had Jewish roots. In his personal life, Fraenkel merged the worlds of orthodox Judaism, liberal Zionism and mathematics, in a period of global and national upheavals, which included the two World Wars and the establishment of the State of Israel. The last chapter of the book, which describes his extensive public activity in Israel from the 1930s until his death in 1965, was written by Prof. Jiska Cohen-Mansfield. Introductions were added by Prof. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel and Prof. Menachem Magidor, the former president of the Hebrew University.

This is the ninth volume of the series Judaica Latinoamericana , edited by AMILAT – Israeli Association of Researchers of Latin American Jewry. It is based on studies presented at the Latin American Section of the Seventeenth World Congress of Jewish Studies (2017). Former volumes of the series may be accessed at http://amilat.online. The book is a multi-disciplinary collection of 23 articles – 19 in Spanish, two in Portuguese and two in English –in five thematic sections: Jewish communities – internal processes presents studies on identities, migrations and religion in Argentina and Mexico, as well as informal education and the history of a peripheral community in Chile. Migrations analyzes processes of migration, acculturation and integration in different periods in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and Mexico. Antisemitism, Shoah, Memory deals with Peruvian attempts to rescue Jews, silence and memory of the Holocaust in Mexico and Uruguay, as well as visual components of racism and memory in Cuba and Argentina. Zionism and the State of Israel analyzes Socialist Zionism in Uruguay and recent Brazilian policy toward the Middle East conflict. Literature presents a variety of topics, such as history of migration and post-migration literature, Shoah and exile, and contemporary Jewish literature in Argentina, Brazil and the US.

The book examines the psychodynamic significance of body and movement and offers a comprehensive dance movement psychotherapy theory. In its practical part, the book presents for the first time diagnosis and interventions in dance-movement couple psychotherapy. The couple's dance reveals the dynamics of the relationship, the body-mind stories of the partners and the expressions of sexuality, intimacy, communication, power relations, dependency, control and more. In addition, conflicts, needs, wishes in relationship, consequences, transfer from childhood and body defense are also presented. The book is interweave with descriptions from therapies which expose the readers to the complex mental experiences and processes in couple therapy.