Purchase of the subscription online includes domestic shipping to a pickup location. Other delivery options are available in the online form . International subscriptions are shipped via Fedex. The current subscription includes two volumes (75-76). Iyyun was established in 1945 as a Hebrew philosophical periodical by Martin Buber, S. H. Bergman and Julius Guttmann and is published by the S. H. Bergman Center for Philosophical Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Iyyun has been rebranded, and as part of this renewal a number of thematic issues are published, aiming to advance contemporary philosophical discourse, primarily in Hebrew, to indicate new paths of thought and lines of original research, and to build bridges between academia and the broader public.‍ Iyyun seeks to give expression to a wide spectrum of writers, and is committed to cultural and ideological pluralism, scholarly excellence, high quality writing, and vitality of thought. This in the belief that philosophical thought has a formative role in local culture, and could be influential in shaping the sociopolitical sphere.

Among the medieval liturgical manuscripts from Ashkenaz, the Nuremberg Mahzor takes a special place. Its size, its extraordinary selection of piyyutim and piyyut commentaries, and its lavish decoration that differs from the model used for many mahzorim in southern Germany make it a spectacular object. This aroused curiosity and interest, as reflected by those who are known to have viewed the manuscript, including Emperor Leopold I (1658–1705), who visited the Nuremberg Municipal Library in 1658, and several 17th and 18th century Christian scholars who wrote about the treasures of Nuremberg. In the 19th century, several Jewish scholars studied the manuscript in Nuremberg, among them Leopold Zunz from Berlin and Rabbi Isaak Meier Eppstein from Jerusalem, culminating in the detailed study and description by Nuremberg rabbi Bernhard Ziemlich (1884–1886). Salman Schocken had hoped to acquire the manuscript already in 1934 and succeeded in adding it to his collection in 1951. The fact that during its 56-year stay at the Schocken Library in Jerusalem the Mahzor was rarely exhibited and not easily accessible to scholars and the wider audience shrouded the manuscript in mystery.

Corner of a Foreign Field portrays the British colonial community in Mandatory Palestine and explores the lives of its members—men, women, and children. The book sheds new light on the British mandatory experience as a set of practices and habits, emotions and sensibilities, identities and relationships. It examines how British everyday lives were an inseparable part of the mechanisms of control and governance in Palestine, intertwining the public with the private, the political with the intimate. The book examines the consolidation of British citizens in Palestine into a colonial community, offering a fresh perspective on the British as a heterogeneous and hierarchical group marked by various internal tensions. The history of this community unfolds through a wide range of themes: bachelorhood and marriage, sexuality, family and education, body and health, domesticity, leisure and cultural institutions, celebrations and rituals—all of which are interwoven with political, ethnic, class, and gender power relations. By focusing on the composition of the British community and the fabric of its daily life, Corner of a Foreign Field is a pioneering study that brings the social and cultural history of the British from the margins to the center, integrating it into the broader history of British colonialism in Palestine.

Neighbors, Neighborhoods, Neighborliness explores the development of urban neighborhoods established during the British Mandate and their pivotal role in shaping the Yishuv and Jewish society in Palestine. Combining “history from above”—planning and legislation—with “history from below”—the everyday experiences of residents—the book shows how neighborhoods emerged not only through planning policies but also through private initiatives and grassroots community efforts. It examines interactions among residents—immigrants, workers, housewives, and entrepreneurs—and between neighborhoods and institutions, from local committees to the Mandate government. The study highlights how processes of modernity intersected with questions of gender and nationalism, tracing the relationships among diverse social groups: women and men, children and adults, immigrants and native-born Jews, Jews from Europe and MENA countries, and Jews and Arabs. Through its analysis of construction patterns, social dynamics, and communal relationships, the book traces the emergence of “neighborhood citizenship”—a sense of belonging rooted in everyday life that shaped both urban development and the broader social fabric. Neighbors, Neighborhoods, Neighborliness is not only a history of places but of people and communities. It offers new insights into the social cohesion of the Yishuv and uncovers the origins of the social divisions that continue to shape Israeli society today.

A letter written during the destruction of the communities of Galicia in the spring of 1943 by Solomea Ochs, née Luft, found among the possessions of a Wehrmacht general and later featured in an exhibition in contemporary Berlin, transforms in the hands of historian Ram Ben-Shalom into a wide-ranging documentary novel. Solomea's letter, in her own handwriting, describes not only the horrors of the massacre and extermination but also touches on the depths of humiliation and devastation felt by the Jews kneeling before their killers. This is the voice of mighty force of nature that has been silenced; something stronger than poetry and lamentation, even if it will surely be remembered alongside the great Jewish laments of the Middle Ages and Bialik's "Upon the Slaughter." Ram Ben-Shalom discovered that this letter is none other than a letter from his aunt to her family before her murder, and that the letter was kept in the drawer of his father's desk at their home in Tel Aviv. From here, a complex search journey emerged, with surprising dimensions that accumulate into a picture of distinctly epic proportions. With craftsmanship, Ben-Shalom weaves a story that is at once a poetics of life, a cultural critique, and an unparalleled delicate analysis of the depths of the selfhood of Israeli Judaism.

The Hebrew University campuses are not just buildings and lawns. They are a huge museum, where walls are paintings, sculptures are stories, and every work of art invites the viewer to a conversation. Art at the Hebrew University is present not only physically, but also in spirit. Art at HUJI presents eighty-three artworks selected from the thousands of pieces on display at the Hebrew University – on the lawns and in enclosed spaces – ranging from well-known works by Henry Moore and Yigal Tumarkin to hidden gems by Marina Abramović and Sigalit Landau. The book is an invitation to embark on a journey through time and discover the stories behind each piece, the artists who created them, and the way in which art has influenced the university. Art at HUJI weaves a dialogue between the works of art displayed at the university and its academic faculty, students, and employees. Inspired by Plato's dialogues, these individuals were invited to choose one work that spoke to them and write about it. Each work featured in this book is accompanied by these reflections, alongside commentary written by the editor of the book and curator of the university, Dr. Michal Mor.

The eighty-four years of Zalman Shazer, the third president of the State of Israel (1889-1974), encompass the great drama of Jewish life from the end of the nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century: the growth of the national and cultural movement in Eastern Europe and the Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel, and the establishment of the state and the struggle for its security and beauty. Along Shazer's journey he encountered famous figures such as Berel Katznelson, David Ben-Gurion, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and his three great loves: Rachel Katznelson, Rachel the poet and Golda Meir. Who was this man? A Hasid who disguised himself as a secularist or a secularist who became a Chabad Hasid? A romantic who met a beautiful goose herder and did not forget her for the rest of his life or a husband who distanced himself from his wife and loved to stay away from home? A deep researcher of the Sabbatarian movement or a politician? Since the founding of the state until the end of his life, Shazar acted as a public figure in the State of Israel, and at the end of his public career he became its number one citizen, its third president. The biography In Two Worlds unfolds the story of his life and discusses the internal tensions and his struggles - between religion and tradition and secularism, between politics and research, between the Diaspora and the Land of Israel, and between the women he loved. Together, these created a unique and fascinating character.

Prayer in Israel is not only a personal and occasional expression of man's relationship with his God, but a complete way of life, organized around a set of daily prayers, on weekdays, on Shabbat and on holidays. But many questions hover around the genesis of this system: When was it designed? At what stages? What is the relationship between its different parts and between its different ways - blessing, reading and prayer? What is the difference between public prayer and individual prayer? Extensive literature has already been written on the history of the prayer, but since the main design of the prayer emerged from the Talmudic literature - Tanna'im and Amora'im - it is essential to place the study of the prayer on the basis of a detailed analysis of the Talmudic material, according to the ways of updated Talmudic science. From this a reliable picture of the prayer in Israel may be drawn from within the literature of the Sages. This essay seeks to present basic chapters from this task.

Sabbatian Songs of Faith: Ritual, Community, and Interreligious Encounters in the Late Ottoman Empire unveils the hidden world of the Ma’aminim—followers of the 17th-century Jewish messianic figure, Sabbatai Tzvi. After Tzvi’s dramatic conversion to Islam in 1666, many of his followers returned to mainstream Judaism. However, a dedicated group followed in his footsteps, converted to Islam, and established a new path, blending Sabbatian, Jewish, and Islamic elements within a distinct Ottoman-Sephardi cultural framework. For centuries, the Ma’aminim maintained secrecy, forming distinct communities (known as the Dönme) and playing a multifaceted role in Jewish and Ottoman histories. This book sheds new light on their social life and esoteric traditions through a comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis of previously mostly unexamined mystical manuscripts in Ladino, Hebrew, and Ottoman Turkish. It explores their sacred songs, radical theology, rituals, folklore, and musical practices as reflections of communal reality and developments. By placing the Ma’aminim within a broader historical and cross-cultural perspective, Sabbatian Songs of Faith offers fresh insights into religious transformation, intercommunal exchanges, and the interplay between faith, ritual, and popular culture in the late Ottoman world and beyond.

The New Arabic-Hebrew Dictionary is a comprehensive reference of the Arabic language throughout history, with a focus on its use in spoken and written media. Given Arabic's rich literary tradition spanning over 1,400 years, the language naturally incorporates words and expressions rooted in ancient literary strata, including the Qur'an, classical poetry, proverbs, the Hadith, jurisprudential literature, Adab literature, and historical texts. Terms and expressions from the realm of Islamic theology and jurisprudence, which were considered archaic 50 or 60 years ago, have regained prominence with the rise of fundamentalist Islam in the 1970s. This dictionary offers translations and explanations for these terms as well. After publishing the full dictionary in a large, 700-page edition, we decided it would be useful to publish a more concise version—smaller, portable, and easier to handle. This edition differs from the full dictionary in that it omits examples and comments, as well as archaic entries from ancient poetry, the Hadith, and jurisprudential literature. To the full edition of The New Arabic-Hebrew Dictionary

Sovereignty in Miniature examines the formative period of Israel’s relations with the United Nation through the lens of Jerusalem’s history. According to the UN resolution, Jerusalem was to become a demilitarized international city. Yet following the results of the war, the city was divided de facto between Israel and Jordan. An exception was the exclave of Mount Scopus, which remained demilitarized under UN control. Drawing on documents from four continents, this study investigates Israel’s actions vis-à-vis Jordan, the UN and other international actors to assert its claim to sovereignty over its share of the exclave. The book uses the vantage point of the absolute exceptional – a demilitarized zone under UN control – to expose the Israeli understanding of sovereignty. Telling a largely forgotten story, Sovereignty in Miniature demonstrates how, once Israel recognized the potential significance of the Jewish institutions on Mount Scopus – the Hebrew University, National Library and Hadassah Hospital – it leveraged their ownership to consolidate its grip on the exclave. For similar reasons, Israel attempted with varying degrees of success to claim direct or indirect control over sites beyond its immediate possession, including the British military cemetery, the German Augusta Victoria compound and the Palestinian village of Issawiya.

MA‘ARAG: The Israel Annual of Psychoanalysis is a democratic, refereed annual publication, evaluated and edited by academicians, intellectuals in related fields, and clinicians. The journal, dedicated to research in psychoanalytic theory, practice and criticism, is the fruit of the initiative and cooperation of the Sigmund Freud Center for the Study and Research in Psychoanalysis of the Hebrew University, the Israeli Association for Self Psychology and the Study of Subjectivity, Israel Society for Analytical Psychology, Israel Psychoanalytic Society, Clinical Division of the Israel Psychological Association, Israel Institute for Group Analysis, Israel Institute of Jungian Psychology, The Sigmund Freud Chair of Psychoanalysis of the Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University, Tel-Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, The Winnicott Center in Israel and the New Israeli Jungian Association. From this issue: Dana Amir | “ALL LANGUAGES OVERLAP OR SPILL INTO EACH OTHER”: ON REVENGE, PARDON AND FORGIVENESS Raanan Kulka | SELFOBJECT PSYCHOLOGY: ETHICS OF TRANSFORMATION Anat Tzur Mahalel | THE EDGE OF BREAKDOWN: SIGMUND FREUD AND WALTER BENJAMIN ON HISTORY AND REMEMBRANCE Naomi Govreen | MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL: A LITERARY AND PSYCHOANALYTICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE FEMALE SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE IN MIDLIFE – SNOW WHITE’S MOTHER AS A CASE STUDY Anat Baram | WAKING UP FROM A DAYDREAM: REFLECTIONS ON CLINICAL WORK WITH PATHOLOGICAL DAYDREAMING Itzhak Benyamini | THE MOSES COMPLEX: FROM THE EMERGENCY CONDITION OF EUROPEAN JEWRY IN FREUD’S TIME TO THE INSCRIPTION OF THE REAL OF LACAN Orna Reuven | “BENEATH THE DESPAIR AND BEHIND THE LONELINESS WE ARE BOTH STILL HERE”: ANALYSIS OF A PERVERSION Chana Ullman | WITNESSING AND ITS IMPLICATIONS IN PERSONAL AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY

The economy of symbolic goods is at the heart of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology. In Le marché des biens symboliques , published in 1971, Bourdieu lays the foundation for his theory of the conditions of production and distribution of cultural products. This text is of crucial importance for understanding his later writings on artistic fields and cultural practices. Against the illusion that artworks are independent from social conditions, Bourdieu reminds us that these are the results of a production process that involves not only the individual artist or writer, but a whole system of intermediaries (galleries, publishers, etc.) and institutions of consecration (criticism, prizes, academies, etc.). However, in contrast to the Marxist approach, which reduces works to a "reflection" of class relations, Bourdieu argues that the fields of cultural production enjoy relative autonomy. In this text, Bourdieu constructs the concept of the field for the first time systematically, using Max Weber's concept of legitimacy and his sociology of religion: the symbolic value of cultural works is based on trust and the accumulation of symbolic capital. Bourdieu also combines the concept of the field here for the first time with other concepts that he was developing then - "reproduction," "symbolic violence," "habitus." Drawing on art historians and on examples from empirical research he was conducting, the text also proposes a socio-historical study of the conditions for the emergence of the fields of art and literature as relatively autonomous worlds.

In The Taste of Hidden Things Sara Sviri weaves a tapestry in which Sufi motifs and images are highlighted: the perfume of Attar's and Rumi's poetry, the boldness of Ibn al-Arabi's mystical speculation, the ecstatic experiences and dreams of old and modern seekers, and the richness of the Naqshbandi masters, past and present. A special place is given to al-Hakim at-Tirmidhi, a ninth century mystic from Central Asia. Many passages from his work, including his wife’s teaching dreams, are published here for the first time in Hebrew.

This book is the first in Israel to be dedicated to the work of Bauhaus photographer Moshé Vorobeichic-Raviv (Moï Ver, 1904–1995) and accompanies an exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Moï Ver, who studied in Wilna, Germany, and Paris with some of the most prominent artists of his time, engaged with contemporary avant-garde and modernist movements. His work is linked to New Photography, also known as New Vision, which ignited European imaginations and paved the way for revolutionary modes of creation and thought. For two and a half decades (1925–1954), Moï Ver oscillated between documentation and the creation of reality, deconstructing and reassembling the subjects he documented. While a documenting photographer captures moments, a creator of reality constructs experimental visual statements and original modes of perception. Moï Ver moved between documenting the traditional Jewish community in Wilna, life in modern Paris, the traditional Jew in Poland, and Zionist photography. In the past decade, the Moï Ver Archive has enabled further research on this innovative photographer, situating his work in relation to other European immigrants who heralded modernism. This book presents new research findings on his work with Zionist organizations and showcases works and photographs from all his periods, many of which are published for the first time.

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The Other War articulates the anatomy of World War II. For that purpose, it takes an unusual perspective: instead of following the conventional horizontal historical axis, from Nazi Germany eastwards and westwards, it directs the view from the global south to the north. Both axes, the continental and the colonial, were, of course, not disconnected; to expose their intersections, this book lays the focus on Jewish Palestine. The focus on Palestine, as part of a broad British defense parameter protecting the Indian subcontinent, reveals the entanglement of two conflicts: the European war, that escalated into a world war, and the Jewish-Arab-British war over Palestine. In their discreet competition, each of these conflicts remained, for its rival, a foreign war.

Iyyun was established in 1945 as a Hebrew philosophical periodical by Martin Buber, S. H. Bergman and Julius Guttmann and is published by the S. H. Bergman Center for Philosophical Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Iyyun has been rebranded, and as part of this renewal a number of thematic issues are published, aiming to advance contemporary philosophical discourse, primarily in Hebrew, to indicate new paths of thought and lines of original research, and to build bridges between academia and the broader public.‍ Iyyun seeks to give expression to a wide spectrum of writers, and is committed to cultural and ideological pluralism, scholarly excellence, high quality writing, and vitality of thought. This in the belief that philosophical thought has a formative role in local culture, and could be influential in shaping the sociopolitical sphere. The articles in this volume: On the Possibility of Universal Love | Sharon Krishek The Creative Force of Desire in Classical Indian Thought | Nir Feinberg Modality and the Limits of Sense in Spinoza’s Metaphysics | Yogev Zusman A Kantian Approach to Aesthetic Methodology: 'Manner' instead of 'Method' | Moran Godess-Riccitelli Finding One’s Way in Language in Wittgenstein’s Later Thought | Oren Roz Film and the Flow of Life: Toward the Non-Human | Orna Raviv Naïveté and Liberation in the Philosophy of Education: A Conversation with Zeev Degani | Ori Rotlevy Review Probing the Discontents of Identity On Jacob Golomb’s Identity and Its Discontents | Warren Zev Harvey Notes on Contributors

Einstein’s revolution traces back to his key papers of 1905 in which he questioned the classical understanding of our concepts of space, time, matter, gravitation, and radiation, shaking the foundations of classical physics. These papers challenged the idea of light as a wave, gave striking proof for the existence of atoms, led to a new understanding of space and time, which came to be known as the “special theory of relativity,” and identified mass as a form of energy. Ten years later, Einstein completed his relativity revolution with his masterpiece, the general theory of relativity, which became the source of modern cosmology. Albert Einstein : Creator of a Worldview deals with these developments, with the ideas which led to them and with their consequences. It also describes briefly Einstein’s activity outside the world of physics and his reaction to major issues on the agenda of mankind in his time.

The book offers a new reading of Israeli prose written primarily in the 1980s and 1990s. During these decades, Hebrew literature freed itself from the aspiration to address a general (male) audience and began cultivating a new, more diverse readership. This audience was constructed through the direct address of literary texts to their readers. For women, who are often culturally directed to identify with the position of the (seemingly) passive listener of the story rather than the protagonist, this strategy offers a vital mode of engagement. Through close readings of contemporary Hebrew literature—including works by Orly Castel-Bloom, Yoel Hoffmann, Lea Aini, Yuval Shimoni, and Eda Zoritte—the book reclaims this position and demonstrates how it can be both productive and active.

This is a groundbreaking book in the field of inner biblical allusion. Using methodologies from the field of literary studies the book examines the Song Ha'azinu (Deut 32) and the Book of Isaiah and uncovers the fascinating connections between the two. The recognition of this relationship sheds new light on the subject of inner biblical allusion, the Song Ha'azinu and the Book of Isaiah.

This book examines the overt and covert engagement with the immigrant experience in American cinema in the decade preceding World War II. It presents the story of a gallery of creators, mostly Jewish, who had emigrated to the United States, some by force and others by choice. An examination of the films they created reveals their attitudes towards their countries of origin, the nation that gave them a new home, and the Jewish identity they were forced to rediscover. This Jewish identity was at times a burden, sometimes a painful reminder of their past, and at other times a source of great inspiration and hope.

A Ramble in the Hive is an eco-philosophical text that deals with the relationship between humans and honeybees from the dawn of humanity to the present day, interlinking mythology, folklore, literature, art and science from different historical periods. A Ramble in the Hive works as both popular science and philosophy, combining a study of the history of beekeeping and its multitude of inventions, with a philosophical and poetic view of the human encounter with honeybees as reflected in the imagination of our culture. It suggests approaching the hive as an archetype of living mythology that works on our collective imagination. A Ramble in the Hive presents the planetary honeybee crisis as a fascinating window through which to observe wide-ranging ecological issues. How did the honeybee get such a lofty and critical role – holding responsibility for both the future of humanity and the earth? What do the bees tell us in their current state? This book is an attempt to answer these questions.

The book relates the story of the Jewish movement in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s as perceived by its participants. On the basis of interviews with almost 300 activists from over 60 cities, it portrays the movement's evolution in all its facets. It examines the activist's personality and background and the path he or she took prior to becoming active, including the presentation of documents to the authorities, that branded him or her as a social pariah and potential traitor. The book discusses the emergence of a refusenik community that enabled their struggle with the all-powerful regime to leave the country while maintaining a "normal" existence for an unpredictable duration. Two chapters view the variety of instruments to which the activists had recourse as they developed the tactics and strategy of that struggle, while three final chapters review specific topics that were an inseparable part of the movement's story. They cover the confrontation with the KGB – the persistent shadowing, interrogations, arrests, trials and camps; the return to Judaism in the search for roots and identity; and the movement's links with the Jewish and non-Jewish world outside.

The book traces the changes that have taken place in the world views of Josef Zelkowicz, a modern Jewish intellectual, after he was imprisoned for more than four years in the Lodz ghetto under extreme living conditions. The book follows Zelkowicz and a fascinating group of intellectuals who struggled to understand life in the ghetto. The book presents the events as perceived by those intellectuals at the time of their occurrence. The readers get to know Zelkowicz's work through stories that were translated into Hebrew for the first time and are included in the book.

Can literature be given a concrete home? The story of the establishment of the Gnazim Archive of Modern Hebrew Literature recounts the attempt to institutionalize this body of literature in the context of the founding of the State of Israel—while simultaneously challenging its demands. This book reveals the persistent tension between the “Republic of Letters” and the nation-state, as well as the painful cost of realizing the ideal and embodiment of the metaphor of “a home for literature” within the “national home.” The Stitches of Hebrewness traces the history of the Gnazim Archive both in its own right and as a mirror of the formation of the canon of modern Hebrew literature. Like any mirror, the archive reflects reality as it is—and in reverse: The canon is thus revealed in a new light, with its erasures, rewritings, and repressions. Perhaps more than anything, the book unfolds the story of a culture and society grappling with a moment of crisis between three overlapping yet conflicting temporal frameworks: Jewish time, Hebrew time, and Israeli time.

The Devil's Renaissance describes the early modern period in Europe as a time of terrible bloodshed and persecution of minorities such as the Moriscos, the Gypsies, heretics, the Cagots and the imaginary sect of satanic witches. It was the age of fear of conspiracies and of the devil undermining the Christian commonwealth.

In the 1940s, Erwin Schrödinger attempted to tackle the eternal question "What is Life?" from the perspective of the "naïve physicist." The result is this short book, which has influenced generations of scientists, sparked much controversy and become a classic. What Is Life? appears in Hebrew for the first time, accompanied by an epilogue by Prof. Avshalom Elitzur, who demonstrates to what extent Schrödinger's insights are relevant eighty years after the first publication of the essay.

The thirteenth-century Franciscan pilgrim Philip of Savona wrote that “the whole Trinity has declared that river [Jordan] to be fortunate and most worthy, above which the Father was heard, the Holy Spirit was seen in the form of a dove, and the Son was baptized in human nature.” Since the Middle Ages, Christian pilgrims from many countries have traveled to the Holy Land in order to immerse themselves in the Jordan River and to take some of its water back to their homelands. Hundreds described their experiences from the blessed river, and in the nineteenth century also began exploring and documenting its history. This volume contains a selection of the accounts of pilgrims and tourists, who describe their impressions, expectations, and sometimes also their disappointments when encountering the Jordan River. It includes descriptions of pilgrims from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, amongst them well-known authors such as Mark Twain, François-René de Chateaubriand and Gustave Flaubert. The book also contains chapters on the geography of the Jordan River, historical events associated with it, and the literature that developed around it.

Since the early 2000s, Israeli television drama has become a highly sought-after product in the global TV market. Israel is indeed an intense and dynamic place that offers drama creators a wealth of diverse and compelling stories. In 1971, three years after the establishment of Israeli television, the first drama series in Hebrew Hedva and Shlomik aired—still in black and white—based on the literary novel by Aharon Megged (1953). The evolution of television drama in Israeli television from its inception has not been thoroughly documented until now. This book aims to fill that gap and provide readers with tools for watching, interpreting, and understanding television series in general, and Israeli ones in particular . The story of Israeli television drama in this book is set within broad socio-political and cultural contexts. Drama consistently engages with reality and responds to it in various ways, even if not always overtly. It also addresses the foundational myths of Israeli identity—sometimes reinforcing them, other times questioning or subverting them. Like other popular cultures, it often fulfills desires or offers imagined solutions to the contradictions underlying these myths . Through the prism of Israeli television drama, this book reveals a self-portrait of the people and society—both as they were and as they might've like to be seen .

Korot publishes original articles related to medical history covering medicine in Jewish and Hebrew sources, the history of Jewish physicians, medicine in Palestine and Israel and medicine during the Nazi era. There are shorter historical notes on these topics, book reviews and comments on important developments in medical history. Articles are mainly in English but with a significant Hebrew section.

Against the backdrop of war and the political crisis in Israel, volume 73 of Iyyun turns a philosophical spotlight on the concept of law, which has become acute in contemporary Israeli discourse. The articles in this volume deal with a variety of systems of laws, which stress the fundamental difference between theoretical and normative laws, and the understanding that the validity of the law and its compulsory nature are heterogenic by nature.

The treatise Scechina is a manifesto of Renaissance Christian-Kabbalistic messianism. The author, Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo (1469-1532), was a preeminent Christian Kabbalist, both in terms of his position within the ecclesiastical hierarchy and in what concerns the depth and breadth of his acquaintance with Hebrew sources. The treatise was composed in exquisite Renaissance Latin and is hereby rendered for the first time into a modern language. The text articulates the voice of the Jewish Shekinah herself, expounding in first person and with profound insight the doctrine of Kabbalah, fervently calling for the completion of the final stage of universal redemption. This redemption commences with the discovery of distant lands and foreign cultures, and its protagonist is Emperor Charles V, whose motto - plus ultra [further beyond] - refers to surpassing the Strait of Gibraltar and medieval knowledge (the Emperor and Pope Clement VII are among the book's addressees). While this redemption is Christian in nature, it emphasizes integration and synthesis with Greek and Roman wisdom, and particularly Judaism. Despite sharp condemnations of Jews for their non-acceptance of Jesus, Egidio's Shekinah lavishes love upon them, especially the Kabbalists, whom she refers to as "my Arameans" and considers as latent Christians. This even extends to support for Solomon Molkho, the Jewish messiah who apostatized from Christianity. Such an attitude towards Judaism did not survive in the Catholic Church in the generation following Egidio, the era of the Counter-Reformation. The translation is richly annotated by the translators, providing extensive commentary and explication. Furthermore, the volume is prefaced by comprehensive introductory chapters authored by Judith Weiss, elucidating the life, intellectual contributions, and literary corpus of Egidio da Viterbo.

The Emergence of the Mizrahi Middle Class in Israe l focuses on the historical and social conditions that gave rise to the Mizrahi academic mobility movement, with attention to some of its cultural effects and political costs, which socially construct the boundaries of mobile Mizrahi’s’ ethnic behavior. The book deals with the historical and social conditions in which this mobility movement takes place, with an emphasis on the stories of agencies that were involved in blocking mobility or in trying to effect a breakthrough.

The emergence of the Yiddish and Hebrew press in the United States was one of the great cultural enterprises of the Jewish immigrants from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires in the last third of the nineteenth century, and its influence on the lives of individuals and communities was enormous. From the Cellar to the Top Floor traces the journey of the Hebrew Alphabet press across the Atlantic following the Jewish mass migration. Against the background of the American press, the book discusses the development of the Hebrew and Yiddish press from an economic, cultural and political point of view. It traces the ongoing negotiations between the Jewish immigrant society and the American majority society at the end of the nineteenth century. Based on personal correspondence, legal documents, archival evidence, and contemporary press materials ,the book offers the first comprehensive analysis in Hebrew of the formative decades in the emergence of one of the leading cultural institutions in modern Jewish society.

This book investigates Ezekiel's restoration program and the way he describes Israel's future restoration. In addition to new readings of the prophecies and an evaluation of the influence of biblical and Mesopotamian literature on the prophet's message, the book deals with the exiles' daily life, their ideologies, and the way they perceived the exile and its theological role in the history of the People of Israel.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was a polymath of Renaissance culture. His 1710 Essais de Théodicée , the longest work published in his lifetime, was a final and concluding phase in his life-long theological-philosophical journey. It constituted a milestone in the diplomatic and intellectual effort to restore the religious and political peace in Europe, and is, above all, a key philosophical work.

Yiddish in Israel: A History challenges the commonly held view that Yiddish was suppressed or even banned by Israeli authorities for ideological reasons, offering instead a radical new interpretation of the interaction between Yiddish and Israeli Hebrew cultures. Author Rachel Rojanski tells the compelling and yet unknown story of how Yiddish, the most widely used Jewish language in the pre-Holocaust world, fared in Zionist Israel, the land of Hebrew. Following Yiddish in Israel from the proclamation of the State until today, Rojanski reveals that although Israeli leadership made promoting Hebrew a high priority, it did not have a definite policy on Yiddish. The language's varying fortune through the years was shaped by social and political developments, and the cultural atmosphere in Israel. Public perception of the language and its culture, the rise of identity politics, and political and financial interests all played a part. Using a wide range of archival sources, newspapers, and Yiddish literature, Rojanski follows the Israeli Yiddish scene through the history of the Yiddish press, Yiddish theater, early Israeli Yiddish literature, and high Yiddish culture. With compassion, she explores the tensions during Israel's early years between Yiddish writers and activists and Israel's leaders, most of whom were themselves Eastern European Jews balancing their love of Yiddish with their desire to promote Hebrew. Finally Rojanski follows Yiddish into the 21st century, telling the story of the revived interest in Yiddish among Israeli-born children of Holocaust survivors as they return to the language of their parents.

The chapters of this book present the reader with a broad and complex picture of the challenges that Israel’s higher education system is facing today. Despite the impressive contribution of the academic system in Israel to the national culture, economy and society and its value as a prolific creative center for intellectual growth, scientific and technological innovation, it has experienced major upheavals in the past two decades. This book reviews these crises. The chapters of this book examine the growth of Israel’s academic system since the beginning of the millennium, the upheavals it has undergone, and the policy directions that may help stabilize it and improve its ability to cope with the challenges it faces today. Chapter 1 examines historical conflicts that took place during the 1950s about the scope of freedom and institutional autonomy as defined by the Council of Higher Education Law, 1958. The Law followed a decade of dispute in the Knesset, which ended with the establishment of regulatory bodies, the Council of Higher Education and the Planning and Budgeting Committee and the opening of the gates to academic studies to almost half of year book since the 1990s . Chapter 2 examines with the "lost decade" when budget cuts of approximately 25% affected academic standards across academia, but took a heavier toll on the Humanities and Social Sciences. Chapters 3 and 4 examine policies that encouraged the integration of ultra-Orthodox Jews and of Arabs into higher education by removing barriers. Analyzing th e policy tools and steps needed to integrate these two communities into the academic system aimed inter alia, to reduce poverty among them. Chapters 5 and 6 examine disparities in the quality of research and teaching , disciplines based on sixty-one reports by international committees appointed by the CHE to assess the quality of the disciplines in Israeli universities and colleges since 2006. The findings of these committees shed light on the achievements and weaknesses of various areas of research and teaching. A preliminary analysis of the commissions’ reports found that the experts recommended that the CHE and PBC adopt a policy of corrective measures and preferences to support neglected disciplines, which in many cases didn't happened. Chapters 7 and 8 examine the politicization of higher education and its impact on regulatory bodies . For approximately half a century, the CHE and the PBC enjoyed freedom in navigating their roles. Accrediting a new university in Judea and Samaria in Ariel caused upheaval in academia and an ongoing crisis of trust between its senior officials and the government. Once political interference created this rift, and membership of the regulatory bodies was changed so as to ensure that the government could pass resolutions as it wished, it continued to widen and erode the authority of the entity entrusted with planning higher education. Chapter 9 examines the failure of a committee appointed by government . The committee was charged with reviewing and updating the regulatory bodies of the higher-education system, and recalibrating the balance between academia and the state in policy decision-making. The goal was to intensify the state’s participation in planning higher education, while preserving the freedom of the institutions. The government eventually vetoed the committee’s bill, fearing that the governance mechanisms proposed would limit the scope of its influence on the higher education system. Chapter 10 is dedicated to recent efforts to discard traditional teaching models. It reviews preliminary steps toward a new pedagogic model that changes students’ study patterns and lecturers’ teaching styles, by examining policy measures taken by six universities and three colleges. Chapter 11 summarizes the research findings. The Epilogue examines the possible consequences of the attempted regime overhaul by Israel’s 37th government on for the country’s higher education system.

A New Orient is an in-depth historical study on the history of Zionist and Israeli Oriental Studies, particularly the study of Arabic, Islam, and Middle Eastern history, as a field of knowledge rooted in 19th and early 20th century German universities. Most of its founders in Israel were German-Jewish scholars who emerged from the Central European Orientalist tradition, and introduced this field of knowledge to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem – and subsequently to the entire Israeli academic system. Through the analysis of rich archival documentation, the book outlines the complex process of migrating Orientalist knowledge. It focuses on what happened to the research and the researchers themselves when their encounter with the Orient shifted from a textual-philological one, following the traditions of German academia, to an actual encounter, fraught with contradictions and tensions, against the backdrop of the intensifying Arab-Jewish conflict. The book sheds new light on the development of academic research as a whole in Mandate Palestine and the early years of Israel, serving as a rich case study for analyzing the complex relationship between 'pure' scientific work and political, social, and cultural issues. It also offers a new perspective on the roots of the Arab-Jewish conflict and the role scientific knowledge played in shaping it.

Don Quixote de la Mancha was published in 1605, with its second part following a decade later, in 1615. Over four centuries have elapsed, yet this masterpiece of Spanish literature remains one of the most translated and widely celebrated works across various artistic mediums. It has left an indelible mark in literature, visual arts, cinema, theater, music, and dance, captivating not only writers and poets but also philosophers, jurists, politicians, and countless others. What lies behind the enduring success and relevance of this novel? In this book, we endeavor to offer insights into this question, contending that Don Quixote is, above all, a product of its time and milieu: of the Golden Age during the 16th and 17th centuries. We also argue that it stands as a revolutionary work in its narrative and structural innovations. Yet, beyond its literary innovations, Don Quixote features a rich tapestry of characters, who represent the marginalized—peasants, women, Muslims, and more—granting them voice and prominence. It imbues readers with the "madness" of adventure, ideals, and unconditional love. Ultimately, it imparts invaluable lessons, encouraging us not to shy away from doubt or ambiguity but to embrace them as integral aspects of the human experience.

The Twelve Prophets volume of the the Hebrew University Bible Project presents a diplomatic editio maior of the text of the Hebrew Bible, based upon the Aleppo Codex, with variants from other textual testaments recorded in a system of apparatuses. The readings collated in the edition are culled from a broad variety of sources, including the ancient translations (Greek Septuagint and revisions, Latin Vulgate, Syriac Peshitta, Aramaic Targum Jonathan), Dead Sea Scrolls, biblical quotations in rabbinic literature, Genizah fragments, a broad array of medieval Hebrew manuscripts representing the Masoretic text, up to Jacob Ben-Hayyim’s Second Biblia Rabbinica of 1524-25. This extensive documentation reflects the attested transmission history of the biblical text, covering a period of almost two millennia.

The full edition of the secular poems of Yehudah Halevi is published here for the first time, based on the original collection of his poems edited by his contemporary Haya the Maghribean, who met the poet in Egypt. The poems follow Judaeo-Arabic incipits, which are discussed and translated into Hebrew by the modern editor. Variants, as well as a full modern Hebrew translation have been added.

Relations between the new state of Israel and the European Union in the first twenty years of the Community’s existence were a major policy issue given the background of the Holocaust and the way the new nation was established. This book focuses on Israel-European Community relations from 1957 to 1970 - from the signing of the Treaty of Rome (1957), which officially established the Common Market, to the conclusion of Israel’s Free Trade Agreement with the Community. It reveals a new and key facet of Israeli diplomacy during the country's infancy, joining the many studies concerning Israel's relations with the United States, France, Germany and Britain.

Preludes is the story of the composer and conductor Noam Sheriff (1935-2018), whose life was dedicated to art and music almost from the moment he could think of it. In the first person Sheriff recounts a personal initiation story, which begins in the small Tel Aviv of the days of the British Mandate and the divided Jerusalem of the first years of the State of Israel, followed by the most renown and magnificent concert halls in Israel and around the world. In doing so, he describes some of the personalities who stood at the heart of world of music: Leonard Bernstein, Gary Bartini, Paul Ben-Haim, Arik Einstein and others. This is a story of pioneering musical activity, part of an enterprise of building Israeli culture. This is also the story of an artist who, looking back from a sober, unapologetic and unselfish perspective - recounts his achievements, doubts and personal and artistic choices.

This volume presents a selection of excepts (in the original Arabic and with a Hebrew translation) from the Eretz-Israeli Sefer Horayat Haqore , written by the prominent Karaite scholar Abū al-Faraj Hārūn ibn al-Faraj (also known as Aaron of Jerusalem), in the first half of the 11th century. The selected excerpts represent issues often discussed in the biblical orthoepy discipline, which has two components: grammatical theory and cantillation theory.

A Ramble in the Hive is an eco-philosophical text that deals with the relationship between humans and honeybees from the dawn of humanity to the present day, interlinking mythology, folklore, literature, art and science from different historical periods. A Ramble in the Hive works as both popular science and philosophy, combining a study of the history of beekeeping and its multitude of inventions, with a philosophical and poetic view of the human encounter with honeybees as reflected in the imagination of our culture. It suggests approaching the hive as an archetype of living mythology that works on our collective imagination. A Ramble in the Hive presents the planetary honeybee crisis as a fascinating window through which to observe wide-ranging ecological issues. How did the honeybee get such a lofty and critical role – holding responsibility for both the future of humanity and the earth? What do the bees tell us in their current state? This book is an attempt to answer these questions.

The Jewish Haskalah movement heralded a profound, unprecedented cultural-spiritual revolution in the Jewish world. Beginning in the German lands in the second half of the eighteenth century and subsequently spreading to central Europe, it called for reconstituting traditional Jewish society in line with maskilic values. This volume spotlights the early-nineteenth-century Galician Haskalah. Although a backwater annexed to the Austrian Empire from Poland but two generations earlier, Galicia’s impressive gallery of outstanding individuals and literary activity has granted the Galician Haskalah its place as one of the most productive, influential centers of the Haskalah movement. This collection of articles is based on lectures delivered at the "Revealers of Secrets—200 Years of Galician Haskalah" conference. Held in Jerusalem in 2013, this fifth annual conference for the study of the Haskalah movement aimed to submit the Galician Haskalah to renewed scholarly examination. Organized in five sections, the volume’s twenty-three essays by outstanding scholars portray the variegated aspects of this movement, which ranged from attempts to preserve Jewish identity by nurturing modern Jewish culture in Hebrew to radical attempts to reform traditional Jewish society.

Pygmalion was claimed by Shaw to be a didactic drama about phonetics, and its antiheroic hero, Henry Higgins, is a phonetician, but the play is a humane comedy about love and the English class system. The play is about the training Higgins gives to a Cockney flower girl to enable her to pass as a lady and is also about the repercussions of the experiment’s success.

Therapeutics and Salvation: Freud and Schelling on Freedom proposes a new conceptual perspective on the history of the philosophy of freedom. The book focuses on Sigmund Freud’s theory of freedom, and its fundamental, yet uncharted, connection with the groundbreaking philosophy of the unconscious of F.W.J Schelling. The analysis radically challenges conventional liberal and rationalistic conceptions of freedom in psychoanalysis. The main argument of the book is that Freud formulated his theory of human nature with Schelling’s basic philosophical architecture, in particular Schelling’s concept of freedom, but, at the same time, subverted Schelling’s search for a new theology at the end of the latter's philosophical career. The detailed comparison of Freud’s work with the philosophy of Schelling backtracks a momentous shift from Schelling’s late theo-philosophy, at the endpoint of German Idealism, to the secular system of Freud, in which human reality ousted godly revelation and therapeutics replaced divine salvation. By delineating the move from Schelling’s God-subject relations to Freud’s human-subject relations, the book offers a new perspective on the historical evolution of German Idealism into modern secular thought.

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.

A letter written during the destruction of the communities of Galicia in the spring of 1943 by Solomea Ochs, née Luft, found among the possessions of a Wehrmacht general and later featured in an exhibition in contemporary Berlin, transforms in the hands of historian Ram Ben-Shalom into a wide-ranging documentary novel. Solomea's letter, in her own handwriting, describes not only the horrors of the massacre and extermination but also touches on the depths of humiliation and devastation felt by the Jews kneeling before their killers. This is the voice of mighty force of nature that has been silenced; something stronger than poetry and lamentation, even if it will surely be remembered alongside the great Jewish laments of the Middle Ages and Bialik's "Upon the Slaughter." Ram Ben-Shalom discovered that this letter is none other than a letter from his aunt to her family before her murder, and that the letter was kept in the drawer of his father's desk at their home in Tel Aviv. From here, a complex search journey emerged, with surprising dimensions that accumulate into a picture of distinctly epic proportions. With craftsmanship, Ben-Shalom weaves a story that is at once a poetics of life, a cultural critique, and an unparalleled delicate analysis of the depths of the selfhood of Israeli Judaism.

This book explores the early days of Jewish education in the Russian Empire, especially from the socio-economic perspective. Various chapters describe the world of the lonely scholar, emergence of the enlightenment groups, the employment sphere of the educated, education systems founded, the cultural space they shaped and their relationship with the traditional society circles.

The book offers a new reading of Israeli prose written primarily in the 1980s and 1990s. During these decades, Hebrew literature freed itself from the aspiration to address a general (male) audience and began cultivating a new, more diverse readership. This audience was constructed through the direct address of literary texts to their readers. For women, who are often culturally directed to identify with the position of the (seemingly) passive listener of the story rather than the protagonist, this strategy offers a vital mode of engagement. Through close readings of contemporary Hebrew literature—including works by Orly Castel-Bloom, Yoel Hoffmann, Lea Aini, Yuval Shimoni, and Eda Zoritte—the book reclaims this position and demonstrates how it can be both productive and active.

The Intention of the Torah and the Intention of Its Readers surveys how traditional Jewish exegesis throughout the ages has coped with the literary and topical difficulties found in the Torah, in the context of the belief in the Torah’s divine source and sanctity. “All problems stem from expectations.” Readers and exegetes of the Torah throughout the ages supposed, and many continue to suppose, that the Torah is perfect and flawless. They expect the Torah to reflect superior and timeless standards of morality, as well as precise and eternal theological principles. They believe that everything written in the Torah is true, essential, and well thought out. The history of Torah scholarship from the end of the Second Temple period until our day can be conceived of as an uninterrupted continuum of challenges which this unique and, frankly, impossible level of expectations has imposed upon its readers and exegetes. These are glorious attempts to bring the Torah nearer to the time and place of its devotees and to adapt its meaning to theirs. This book is the first attempt of its kind to examine the history of the enterprise of Torah exegesis from a distance. It contains an examination of dozens of key texts from the end of the Second Temple period, from Talmudic and Midrashic sources, dicta of medieval Sages, and the reflections and research penned by scholars of the Enlightenment (Haskalah) and the modern era. A bird’s eye view blurs the details which differentiate between these texts, enabling us to more easily focus upon the similarities; this point of view also allows us to note the central crossroads of change and development which characterize each period. This is an indispensable book for anyone interested in the changing nature of biblical exegesis over the generations.

This book collects rewritten articles and essays by the author related first and foremost, but not exclusively, to the catastrophe of the Holocaust as an epistemic crisis – qualified as a “rupture in civilization”, i.e. the destruction of concepts deeply rooted in a common anthropology of humankind, while focusing on methodological as well as conceptual questions. The composition of the volume runs roughly chronologically along several layers of interpretation – embracing questions of German constitutional law, the formation of Continental expansionist geopolitical thinking, the epistemology of the Holocaust, the assertion and transformation of paradigms of historical interpretation in the second half of the 20th century, especially the turn from social history to memory studies, as well as the turn from a Western- and Eurocentric approaches into the direction of colonial and global history.

Cinema is the most democratic form of art, dependent on the taste of millions of viewers. Within the cinematic historical genre in Arab cinema one finds a rich intellectual discourse, in a constant dialogue with state, censorship and audience. The book Back to the Past: Filmed History in Arab Cinema invites the readers to know the Arab cinema industry, mainly the Egyptian one, through the historical genre, and "medieval" films as its core. In films taking place in Middle Ages , the viewers meet warriors and poets, besides the leaders and founders of Islam. These films present also the images of Mongol and Crusaders invaders, slaves and concubines, Mamluks, Christians and Jews. The book surveys also the transition from a situation of Egyptian cinema exported to the Arab world, into the creation of Pan-Arab historical discourse within the satellite channels.

The book presents an innovative research on the Holocaust in 'Second Generation' Israeli artists' artworks. The Israeli uniqueness is clearly reflected in their artworks influenced by the cultural-educational connection of the subject of the Holocaust in Israel as well as by the link to significant events in Israeli history. The book explores a wide variety of topics and questions that occupied the artists and presents various ways they chose to express the workings of their inner world, effected by their parents' experiences during the Holocaust.

This book offers a cultural biography of Maimonides as a product of his multi-cultural and multi-religious background. It studies “the great eagle” in his multi-faceted historical and cultural context, and highlights the deep impact on him of Islamic culture as a whole: not only his philosophy, but also his legal and scientific writings as well as his correspondences. The aim of the book is twofold. On the one hand, it highlights universal patterns in Maimonides’ thought. On the other hand, it shows Maimonides’ relevance to the study of Medieval Islam. The presentation of Maimonides as a Mediterranean thinker elucidates his consistent interpretation of his own Jewish tradition in contemporary terms, as they were shaped by his Mediterranean legacy.

The book traces the changes that have taken place in the world views of Josef Zelkowicz, a modern Jewish intellectual, after he was imprisoned for more than four years in the Lodz ghetto under extreme living conditions. The book follows Zelkowicz and a fascinating group of intellectuals who struggled to understand life in the ghetto. The book presents the events as perceived by those intellectuals at the time of their occurrence. The readers get to know Zelkowicz's work through stories that were translated into Hebrew for the first time and are included in the book.

The book deals with the conceptual and practical transformation of history as modern science and art between 1740 and 1940. The book concentrates on the work of six major historians who turned history from its rhetorical classical models of "teaching by examples" into a meaningful investigation narration of human life. Common to them as was the belief that human life and history are made by human being like themselves, by themselves.

When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfill Kafka’s last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted his life to championing Kafka’s work, rescuing his legacy from both obscurity and physical destruction. Nearly a century later, an international legal battle erupted to determine which country could claim ownership: the Jewish state, where Kafka dreamed of living, or Germany, where Kafka’s three sisters perished in the Holocaust? Benjamin Balint offers a gripping account of the controversial trial in Israeli courts—brimming with dilemmas legal, ethical, and political—that determined the fate of Kafka’s manuscripts.

The Other War articulates the anatomy of World War II. For that purpose, it takes an unusual perspective: instead of following the conventional horizontal historical axis, from Nazi Germany eastwards and westwards, it directs the view from the global south to the north. Both axes, the continental and the colonial, were, of course, not disconnected; to expose their intersections, this book lays the focus on Jewish Palestine. The focus on Palestine, as part of a broad British defense parameter protecting the Indian subcontinent, reveals the entanglement of two conflicts: the European war, that escalated into a world war, and the Jewish-Arab-British war over Palestine. In their discreet competition, each of these conflicts remained, for its rival, a foreign war.

The Hebrew University campuses are not just buildings and lawns. They are a huge museum, where walls are paintings, sculptures are stories, and every work of art invites the viewer to a conversation. Art at the Hebrew University is present not only physically, but also in spirit. Art at HUJI presents eighty-three artworks selected from the thousands of pieces on display at the Hebrew University – on the lawns and in enclosed spaces – ranging from well-known works by Henry Moore and Yigal Tumarkin to hidden gems by Marina Abramović and Sigalit Landau. The book is an invitation to embark on a journey through time and discover the stories behind each piece, the artists who created them, and the way in which art has influenced the university. Art at HUJI weaves a dialogue between the works of art displayed at the university and its academic faculty, students, and employees. Inspired by Plato's dialogues, these individuals were invited to choose one work that spoke to them and write about it. Each work featured in this book is accompanied by these reflections, alongside commentary written by the editor of the book and curator of the university, Dr. Michal Mor.

The book Praise of Fools , which was printed twice - in 1880 and 1910 - is an unusual satire/parody in Hebrew satiric literature. It is intended not only for certain circles or people in the Jewish context, but also has a universal character: it makes fun of and derides a long list of philosophers, writers, intellectuals and scholars a nd others , presenting them as useless, plagiarists and fools. All this i s done in order to supposedly praise ignorance and stupidity and to propose finding within them security and peace. The book accorded to Rubin the title "the Jewish Erasmus," however, the introduction places the book within the extensive European "fool literature".

Sovereignty in Miniature examines the formative period of Israel’s relations with the United Nation through the lens of Jerusalem’s history. According to the UN resolution, Jerusalem was to become a demilitarized international city. Yet following the results of the war, the city was divided de facto between Israel and Jordan. An exception was the exclave of Mount Scopus, which remained demilitarized under UN control. Drawing on documents from four continents, this study investigates Israel’s actions vis-à-vis Jordan, the UN and other international actors to assert its claim to sovereignty over its share of the exclave. The book uses the vantage point of the absolute exceptional – a demilitarized zone under UN control – to expose the Israeli understanding of sovereignty. Telling a largely forgotten story, Sovereignty in Miniature demonstrates how, once Israel recognized the potential significance of the Jewish institutions on Mount Scopus – the Hebrew University, National Library and Hadassah Hospital – it leveraged their ownership to consolidate its grip on the exclave. For similar reasons, Israel attempted with varying degrees of success to claim direct or indirect control over sites beyond its immediate possession, including the British military cemetery, the German Augusta Victoria compound and the Palestinian village of Issawiya.

A collection of war stratagems selected from ancient historians, arranged according to their content in four books, with an introduction and a commentary, and an appendix of selected passages from the books of Julius Caesar and Livius. Frontinus, an outstandingly talented man, made his name and career under five Roman emperors (1st and 2nd century AD), he fought with distinction in Britania, was a senator, managed provision of water for Rome, was a writer and intellectual. He wrote several books, but only two of them survived entirely, The Aqueducts of Rome and The Stratagems , a sequel to his technical book on warfare that was lost. In the preface to Stratagems he writes: 'I feel obliged, in order to complete the task, to summarize excelent operations of generals, examples of wisdom and foresight, to serve and foster the generals' power to conceive and execute stratagems of their own, and not to fear their result , if they could be compared with achievements already successful. Introduced, translated from Latin and annonated by Prof. Dwora Gilula.

This book examines the overt and covert engagement with the immigrant experience in American cinema in the decade preceding World War II. It presents the story of a gallery of creators, mostly Jewish, who had emigrated to the United States, some by force and others by choice. An examination of the films they created reveals their attitudes towards their countries of origin, the nation that gave them a new home, and the Jewish identity they were forced to rediscover. This Jewish identity was at times a burden, sometimes a painful reminder of their past, and at other times a source of great inspiration and hope.

In his book History, Literature, Critical Theory (2013), the historian Dominique La Capra presented the ways in which the voice of the narrator in the 19th and 20th century novel came to a collapse, which reflects the modern traumatic experience. This study employs this theoretical prism in order to construct a cultural dimension of 20th century Jewish poetics - a dimension in which trauma is reflected in its linguistic representation, but also shapes this same representation. The book offers an understanding of Jewish literature in the 20th century as a far-reaching cultural experience, in which the human figure is not made possible by words, but rather collapses into the animal, the absence, the broken witness, the Muslim, the eastern, the Arab and the queer.

Folk-culture is typically associated with continuity; how can one engage folk-culture in situations of destruction and extermination - the reality Zionist folklorists confronted facing the Shoah? With the first bits of information regarding the destruction in Europe, many of them assembled in Tel Aviv to form the Yeda Am folklore society; in tandem, the Institute for Jewish Folklore was formed in Jerusalem. The two competing organizations dealt with fragmentary lives in the Diaspora in different ways, in their quest to find new meanings from them. This book examines Zionist folkloristics at this dire hour from a perspective that views fractured reality as a fundamental principle in studying cultures in general, by combining approaches from folklore studies and science and technology studies. This book undermines the distinction between individualist scholarly knowledge and collective folklore by examining everyday scholarly habits: Archival practices, the use of letterheads, jubilee celebrations of scholars as well as practices of editing and laying out scholarly publications. The tension between national culture and ethnic cultures is revealed in new ways, as is the relationship between avant-garde and folklore studies.

In the 1940s, Erwin Schrödinger attempted to tackle the eternal question "What is Life?" from the perspective of the "naïve physicist." The result is this short book, which has influenced generations of scientists, sparked much controversy and become a classic. What Is Life? appears in Hebrew for the first time, accompanied by an epilogue by Prof. Avshalom Elitzur, who demonstrates to what extent Schrödinger's insights are relevant eighty years after the first publication of the essay.

Preludes is the story of the composer and conductor Noam Sheriff (1935-2018), whose life was dedicated to art and music almost from the moment he could think of it. In the first person Sheriff recounts a personal initiation story, which begins in the small Tel Aviv of the days of the British Mandate and the divided Jerusalem of the first years of the State of Israel, followed by the most renown and magnificent concert halls in Israel and around the world. In doing so, he describes some of the personalities who stood at the heart of world of music: Leonard Bernstein, Gary Bartini, Paul Ben-Haim, Arik Einstein and others. This is a story of pioneering musical activity, part of an enterprise of building Israeli culture. This is also the story of an artist who, looking back from a sober, unapologetic and unselfish perspective - recounts his achievements, doubts and personal and artistic choices.

With the demise of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, a number of questions regarding the conventional understanding of totalitarianism could now be viewed in the new light. The classical studies of totalitarianism were undertaken when Nazism and Fascism had been vanquished, while the Soviet system still existed: this created an asymmetry which could now be overcome. The ideological Cold War edge which sometimes accompanied debates about totalitarianism was similarly blunted. The impetus which these developments could give to new angles of research and historical perspective was the focus of the conference “Reflections on Europe’s Century of Discontent”, held at the Institute for European Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. More than a dozen participants from eight countries – political scientists, historians, lawyers as well as political activists – took part in what was an exciting exercise in re-evaluation and re-assessments. The results are presented in this volume.

This play is a love story in the shape of a parody. The god Jupiter, father of the gods and humans, a relentless womanizer who never grew up and has a never ending stock of passion. He desired the wife of the warlord Amphitruo who left the city to fight in a war. Jupiter takes Amphitruos' shape and makes love to his wife. When Amphitruo comes back from battle then starts a comedy of mistakes which ends in Amphitruos' wife giving birth to two sons - one for each man.

According to common opinion, in the research of Jewish law and in the Halakhic literature, transactions in incorporeal estates are non-valid. However, economic life and the business world are based on these transactions. As a result, a gap was created between Halacha and reality. The book " Out of Nothing" proposes resolving this problem through Talmudic research methods, various issues which are discussed in the Talmudic law, including Davar She'lo Ba La'olam , Tovat Hanaha , and bills sale. In the course of the discussion it turns out that the Tannaitic ruling recognized these transactions, but Talmudic Halakha refused to recognize them. However, the Amoraim suggest various ways of mediation in order to enable transferring of future estate, debt bonds and so on. The book proposes to take the bridges that the Amoraim proposed based on the Tannaitic law and to use them as tools for Halakhic validation of current market life.

The World of Machiavelli explores his teaching by placing it squarely in its political and intellectual context. Based on a wide range of personal letters, diplomatic dispatches and administrative memoranda as well as on his treatises, plays and poems, it traces the development of his skills, mental habits and unique views from his youth, through his turbulent public career, to his last days. Alongside the formative historical and personal circumstances, the book explores the universal dimensions of Machiavelli’s thought, which forms an integral part of an ongoing conversation about our ability to organize our shared lives and shape our destiny. Thus, The World of Machiavelli differs from most biographies and studies of his thought: focusing on a cluster of themes that are central both in his works and in our modern public life, the book invites the readers to reflect on major issues of our time by engaging with Machiavelli.

How might a poem acquire divine forgiveness? Ariel Zinder’s book Arise and Sing follows medieval Jewish poets from Iraq and al-Andalus as they seek answers to this pressing question. The book presents close readings of liturgical poems (piyyutim) written in the 10th and 11th centuries, and brings them into contact with contemporary literary theory as well as modern philosophical discussions of the possibility of forgiveness.

The author of this book argues that Israeli traumas exist in the language, poetics, and politics of Israeli literature. Presenting a comprehensive and methodical study of this phenomenon, this book raises piercing questions concerning the politics behind literature and its moral authority, focusing specifically on the responsibility of the author. Hever tracks the literary processing methods of Israeli traumas in light of the extermination of European Jews, the 1948 war, the Palestinian Nakba, and the 1973 war in the works of S. Yizhar, Leah Goldberg, Avoth Yeshurun, Nathan Alterman, Aharon Appelfeld, Dan Pagis, Erez Biton, Yitzhak Laor, Shimon Ballas, Haim Be’er, and Rivka Ben-Hayim. The book offers a rigorous discussion of the unique manners in which literature deals with representations of traumas. This research presents the traces of Israeli post-trauma represented in the literary text, and tackles the question of responsibility among fictional characters.

Bilha Shilo unfolds the complex plot of the extraordinary success of the restitution of the collections of YIVO (Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut) – the prestigious research institution of the Yiddish language and culture. A Drama in Acts traces the fragments of post-Second World War YIVO, which meanwhile moved from Vilna to New York - in restituting its cultural property in the West, in the American occupied zone, and documents its bitter failure in the Soviet occupied territory in the East. The book explores, through the question of cultural property ownership, a range of historical issues: the development of modern Jewish culture in Eastern Europe, the advance of Yiddish as a modern literary language, the history of Jewish culture under communist regime, and its extermination under Nazi rule. Other issues addressed are the demise of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe following the division of Europe and the Cold War, and lastly - the conflict between Israel and the Diaspora over the inheritance of Jewish European culture. The book is published in the series "Hefez", which presents the latest research on Jewish cultural property and its demise, in German by the Dubnow Institute, Leipzig, and in Hebrew by Magnes Press.

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

The Book Smugglers is the nearly unbelievable story of ghetto residents who rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts—first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets—by hiding them on their bodies, burying them in bunkers, and smuggling them across borders. It is a tale of heroism and resistance, of friendship and romance, and of unwavering devotion—including the readiness to risk one’s life—to literature and art. And it is entirely true. Based on Jewish, German, and Soviet documents, including diaries, letters, memoirs, and the author’s interviews with several of the story’s participants, The Book Smugglers chronicles the daring activities of a group of poets turned partisans and scholars turned smugglers in Vilna, “The Jerusalem of Lithuania.” The rescuers were pitted against Johannes Pohl, a Nazi “expert” on the Jews, who had been dispatched to Vilna by the Nazi looting agency, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, to organize the seizure of the city’s great collections of Jewish books. Pohl and his Einsatzstab staff planned to ship the most valuable materials to Germany and incinerate the rest. The Germans used forty ghetto inmates as slave-laborers to sort, select, pack, and transport the materials, either to Germany or to nearby paper mills. This group, nicknamed “the Paper Brigade,” and informally led by poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, a garrulous, street-smart adventurer and master of deception, smuggled thousands of books and manuscripts past German guards. If caught, the men would have faced death by firing squad at Ponar, the mass-murder site outside of Vilna. To store the rescued manuscripts, poet Abraham Sutzkever helped build an underground book-bunker sixty feet beneath the Vilna ghetto. Kaczerginski smuggled weapons as well, using the group’s worksite, the former building of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, to purchase arms for the ghetto’s secret partisan organization. All the while, both men wrote poetry that was recited and sung by the fast-dwindling population of ghetto inhabitants. With the Soviet “liberation” of Vilna (now known as Vilnius), the Paper Brigade thought themselves and their precious cultural treasures saved—only to learn that their new masters were no more welcoming toward Jewish culture than the old, and the books must now be smuggled out of the USSR.

Why did the Israeli cinema disregard the Holocaust for many years? Why did it represent the Holocaust survivors as a homogeneous group of passive, detached and problematic people and ignored their enormous contribution to the prosperity of Israel? Was there any change in these representations from the late 40's until the present time? These questions are the center of the book Two Faces in the Mirror , that depicts the representation of the Holocaust, the Holocaust survivors and their rehabilitation in Israeli fiction and documentary cinema during 1945-2009. It is well known that films do not reflect reality, however they reflect cultural and social atmosphere – influence it and are influenced by it. The analysis of Israeli fiction and documentary cinema reveal two different paths of memory, two faces in the mirror: A society that ranges between shallowness and in-depth views, between strengthening superficial stereotypes and shattering them, between implanting distorted narratives and multi-cultural openness towards the "other".

This book is an edited collection of papers, in Hebrew, addressing the unique phenomenon of the collection of testimonies from child survivors of the Holocaust while they were still children or teenagers in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. The instructions for these interviews go as far back as 1945. The book maps the collecting, publication and filming of testimonies and addresses issues of authenticity, methodology dissemination and reception. Who interviewed the children and how? What is the correct way to read these interviews and what can be studied from them? Do the existing interviews faithfully reflect the children's experiences and feelings? What was the cultural and social background of these interviews and their publication? These testimonies teach the strategies Jewish families used to save themselves and especially the children: not passively like 'sheep to the slaughter' but coping with changing situations by struggling . The testimonies also teach us about the relationship between Jews and gentiles; rescue and sacrifice on the part of non-Jews on the one hand, and the persecution and murder on the other. Some of the papers are adapted translation of papers published in English and some were written for this volume by historians, linguists and literati. Included is also contemporary material from the period. Participating researchers: Boaz Cohen, Joanna Michlic, Gabriel Finder, Beate Muller, Rita Horvath, Zuzanna Schnepf-Kolacz, Sharon Geva, Emunah Nachmani-Gafni and Yvonne Kozlovski-Golan

In what way is the German nation like all the other nations? Is there a unique path which German History took? And furthermore- To which people can we liken the German nation? To nations in the Western World or nations from all over the world? This book attempts to answer some of these and other questions about Germany.

In the late fifteenth century, many of the Jews expelled from Spain made their way to Morocco and established a dynamic community in Fez. A number of Jewish families became prominent in commerce and public life there. Among the Jews of Fez of Hispanic origin was Samuel Pallache (circa 1550-1616), who served the Moroccan sultan as a commercial and diplomatic agent in Holland until Pallache's death in 1616. In Samuel Pallache , his world is viewed as a microcosm of early modern society, one far more interconnected, cosmopolitan, and fluid than is often portrayed. Pallache's missions and misadventures took him from Islamic Fez and Catholic Spain to Protestant England and Holland. Through these travels, the authors explore the workings of the Moroccan sultanate and the Spanish court, the Jewish communities of Fez and Amsterdam, and details of the Atlantic-Mediterranean trade. At once a sweeping view of two continents, three faiths, and five nation-states and an intimate story of one man's remarkable life, Samuel Pallache is history at its most compelling.

The New Arabic-Hebrew Dictionary is a dictionary of the Arabic language across the ages, with focus on the language of the spoken and written media. The dictionary also reflects the rich literary history of the Arabic language, of more than 1,400 years, including the Qur'an, ancient poetry, proverbs, the Hadith and jurisprudential literature, Adab literature and historical literature. Terms and expressions from the sphere of Islamic theology and jurisprudence, which were considered archaic 50 or 60 years ago, have come back into use following the rise of fundamentalist Islam in the 1970s, and this new dictionary provides translations and explanations for these terms as well. With over 44,000 entries, this dictionary is today the most comprehensive, up-to-date and reliable dictionary of contemporary Arabic. User-friendly: full vocalization of all Arabic and Hebrew entries. About 6,000 examples from Arabic literature of all eras and from the press clarify the use of words. Over 4,000 grammatical and historical notes. The New Arabic-Hebrew Dictionary is intended for university students and scholars, school pupils and teachers and anyone interested in the Arabic language. To the concise edition of The New Arabic-Hebrew Dictionary

What do we do when we are suddenly subjected to traffic and senseless suffering – suffering we did not bring upon ourselves, that we feel we do not deserve? This book is about the suffering of Jewish men, women and children who were singled out as targets of senseless hatred and ruthless persecution by the Nazi’s during the Second World War. The struggle of Holocaust survivors to come to terms with what happened to them in the Nazi concentration and death camps gives us a poignant picture of the human struggle to understand what life is all about in the face of its tragedies and hardships, and of the evil of man’s inhumanity to man.

The economy of symbolic goods is at the heart of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology. In Le marché des biens symboliques , published in 1971, Bourdieu lays the foundation for his theory of the conditions of production and distribution of cultural products. This text is of crucial importance for understanding his later writings on artistic fields and cultural practices. Against the illusion that artworks are independent from social conditions, Bourdieu reminds us that these are the results of a production process that involves not only the individual artist or writer, but a whole system of intermediaries (galleries, publishers, etc.) and institutions of consecration (criticism, prizes, academies, etc.). However, in contrast to the Marxist approach, which reduces works to a "reflection" of class relations, Bourdieu argues that the fields of cultural production enjoy relative autonomy. In this text, Bourdieu constructs the concept of the field for the first time systematically, using Max Weber's concept of legitimacy and his sociology of religion: the symbolic value of cultural works is based on trust and the accumulation of symbolic capital. Bourdieu also combines the concept of the field here for the first time with other concepts that he was developing then - "reproduction," "symbolic violence," "habitus." Drawing on art historians and on examples from empirical research he was conducting, the text also proposes a socio-historical study of the conditions for the emergence of the fields of art and literature as relatively autonomous worlds.

In The Barbed-Wire College Ron Robin tells the extraordinary story of the 380,000 German prisoners who were brought to the USA during WWII and kept in camps throughout the country. Using personal narratives, camp newspapers, and military records, Robin re-creates in arresting detail the attempts of prison officials to mold the minds of their prisoners. From 1943 onward, despite the Geneva Convention, prisoners were subjected to an ambitious re-education program designed to turn them into American-style democrats. Under the direction of the Pentagon, liberal arts professors pushed through a program of arts and humanities that stressed only the positive aspects of American society. The American educators censored popular books and films in order to promote democratic humanism and downplay class and race issues, materialism, and wartime heroics. However, by the war's end, the curriculum was more concerned with combating the appeals of communism than with eradicating the evils of National Socialism. The re-education program, overall, failed to make these POWs shed their Nazi beliefs and become supporters of a liberal- democratic ethos. It succeeded less than the policies of other nations in indoctrinating prisoners of war or internees. In The Barbed-Wire College Ron Robin shows how this intriguing chapter of military history was also tied to two crucial episodes of twentieth- century American history: the battle over the future of American education and the McCarthy-era hysterics that awaited postwar America.

Neighbors, Neighborhoods, Neighborliness explores the development of urban neighborhoods established during the British Mandate and their pivotal role in shaping the Yishuv and Jewish society in Palestine. Combining “history from above”—planning and legislation—with “history from below”—the everyday experiences of residents—the book shows how neighborhoods emerged not only through planning policies but also through private initiatives and grassroots community efforts. It examines interactions among residents—immigrants, workers, housewives, and entrepreneurs—and between neighborhoods and institutions, from local committees to the Mandate government. The study highlights how processes of modernity intersected with questions of gender and nationalism, tracing the relationships among diverse social groups: women and men, children and adults, immigrants and native-born Jews, Jews from Europe and MENA countries, and Jews and Arabs. Through its analysis of construction patterns, social dynamics, and communal relationships, the book traces the emergence of “neighborhood citizenship”—a sense of belonging rooted in everyday life that shaped both urban development and the broader social fabric. Neighbors, Neighborhoods, Neighborliness is not only a history of places but of people and communities. It offers new insights into the social cohesion of the Yishuv and uncovers the origins of the social divisions that continue to shape Israeli society today.

This wide-ranging book shows how, since the first centuries of the Christian era, gentiles have associated Jews with noise. The study focuses on a “musical libel" - a variation on the Passion story that recurs in various forms and cultures in which an innocent Christian boy is killed by a Jew in order to silence his “harmonious musicality.” In paying close attention to how and where this libel surfaces, Ruth HaCohen covers a wide swath of Western cultural history. The author combines in her analysis the perspectives of musicology, literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology, tracing the tensions between Jewish “noise" and idealized Christian “harmony” and their artistic manifestations from the high Middle Ages through Shakespeare, Bach, Wagner, George Eliot, Kafka, Schoenberg and others. She explores testimonies by outsider visitors of synagogues, operas, caricatures, and Nazi movies. Her analysis shows how entrenched aesthetic-theological assumptions have persistently defined European culture and its internal moral and political orientations. Following the publication of the book, the author received two prestigious awards: the Polonsky Award for Creativity and Originality in the Humanities, and the Kinkelday Award from the American Musicological Society for the best book in musicology published in 2011 .

Walter (1887-1966) and his son Moshe (1922-2017) Wolf, both born in Hamburg, had very unusual life stories. Their autobiographies coalesce and intertwine in this powerful book - the father recounts his Jewish-bourgeoisie childhood in Germany, his military service with the German forces during World War I, his work as a banker and the building of his family; he tells of his escape from Nazi Germany and his new life in the United States. Meanwhile, his son pursues his point of view, continuing the family story from the moment he arrived in Israel, describing his own choices - working the land and joining the British Army in the war against Germany. This outstanding tale enriches even further the fascinating, multi-faceted image of German Jewry, offering a path, now more relevant than ever, into contemporary Israeli society.

This book focuses on a perspective that relatively has been neglected from of study on the history of Polish Jewry: The aspect of coexistence between Jews and Poles, their common history and multicultural influences. The articles in this collection present the complexity of the Polish-Jewish encounter throughout the ages. They examine the various directions that have developed in the study of Polish-Jewish relations since the renewed dialogue between Polish researchers and scholars from the West restarted in the 1990's.

Dr. Amitai Mendelsohn investigates the various appearances of the figure of Jesus in Israeli art as a significant, multifaceted and ever-present phenomenon. Through works by prominent artists from different generations, it discusses in depth the evolving attitudes of Jewish, Zionist pre-state, and Israeli art towards Jesus, from the second half of the nineteenth century until today: from artists laboring "In the shadow of the Cross" to artists who saw Jesus as a symbol of the rebirth of the Jewish people in the land of Israel, and artists whose engagement with Jesus is detached from the complex and fraught relations between Christianity and Judaism, and who see him as symbolizing the suffering artist. The book examines the different directions taken by Israeli artists in portraying the figure of Jesus, and proves the extent of this phenomena and its ever present importance.

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.

This is a major, unprecedented study of the Soviet partisan movements' intelligence activity in 1941-1945, and its impact on the outcome of the war between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. It contributes significantly to the understanding of the Soviet intelligence culture and practice during WWII, as well as to the study of the Holocaust, which is provided with clear well-documented evidence of the Soviet leadership's knowledge about the extermination of the local Jews by the Nazis and their supporters.

The book offers a fresh view on the life of Jews under National Socialism. Focusing on the spatial and temporal aspects of the changes brought about by the new regime, it highlights the “tactics” utilized by German Jews to cope with the new reality, make sense of it, and rethink their position vis-à-vis German nationality. Based on a rich theoretical framework from various fields in social and cultural studies (human geography, environmental psychology, sociology of time and so on) the book examines German Jews’ reflections on their new experiences through the paradigms of "lived space" and "lived time." In discussing two main types of sources—private (diaries, correspondences and memoirs) and public (Jewish press)—the book sheds new light on the topics of maintaining Jewish agency under Nazism; the possibility and forms of Jewish defiance; and scope (and limits) of Jewish awareness of the processes that reshaped Germany’s approach to its Jewish population. The book’s analysis of Jews’ reflections on the spatial and temporal aspects of life under Nazism portrays an intricate endeavor to understand the new reality, adjust to it, and answer its increasing challenges.

Among the medieval liturgical manuscripts from Ashkenaz, the Nuremberg Mahzor takes a special place. Its size, its extraordinary selection of piyyutim and piyyut commentaries, and its lavish decoration that differs from the model used for many mahzorim in southern Germany make it a spectacular object. This aroused curiosity and interest, as reflected by those who are known to have viewed the manuscript, including Emperor Leopold I (1658–1705), who visited the Nuremberg Municipal Library in 1658, and several 17th and 18th century Christian scholars who wrote about the treasures of Nuremberg. In the 19th century, several Jewish scholars studied the manuscript in Nuremberg, among them Leopold Zunz from Berlin and Rabbi Isaak Meier Eppstein from Jerusalem, culminating in the detailed study and description by Nuremberg rabbi Bernhard Ziemlich (1884–1886). Salman Schocken had hoped to acquire the manuscript already in 1934 and succeeded in adding it to his collection in 1951. The fact that during its 56-year stay at the Schocken Library in Jerusalem the Mahzor was rarely exhibited and not easily accessible to scholars and the wider audience shrouded the manuscript in mystery.

This book is dealing with the uses of the memory of the Resistance and of the Holocaust, born in the wake of the war between the years 1945–1985. Italy is used as a case study for the understanding, shaping and the formation of the new European national identities post World War II. This title focuses on the Italian agenda and is shedding a new light on the process of reconstruction and revitalization (including the rebuilding of national self-identity). The book traces the changes in the character and functions of historical memory during this period when national consciousness was u ndergoing a critical development in its search for unity. It leads to a broader venue of the tensions between the memory of anti-fascist resistance on the one hand and the shameful and disturbing awareness of the fascist past on the other. This is the first attempt of a synthesis of this kind of Italian history that combines all interdisciplinary sources: memoir literature and literary sources in general, historiographic debates as well as political discussions.

The book ‘Maskilim’ in the Sciences describes the birth of a new literature concerning science, aimed at Jewish children and young adults that was published from the last third of the 18th century to the last third of the 19th century in the German-Speaking Sphere . The book presents key episodes of the consolidation of the Hebrew children's literature, the development of Jewish textbooks, the changes in the attitude towards Sciences in the Jewish realm , the growth of Hebrew popular science, and the changes that occurred in the Jewish educational system.

This book deals with the arrival of modernity in the Holy Land in the form of the 86 km Jaffa-Jerusalem Railway. Befitting the completion of such a substantial undertaking, the inauguration, in September 1892, was a grand affair, attended by representatives of the Ottoman Empire, consuls, religious leaders, and foreign delegations. The tracks approached Jerusalem from the southwest through the Judean Mountains, taking advantage of the deep, winding river bed of the Soreq Valley. This afforded the least steep route, though even then the grades were a challenge for the locomotives. Since the tracks were of narrow meter-gauge they could easily follow the natural contours of the land on the ascent to Jerusalem, the highest point, at about 700 meters above sea level. . The railroad was the largest civil engineering project ever undertaken in the modern Holy Land. It was built to exploit the tremendous growth of pilgrim traffic and tourism during the second half of the nineteenth century. Though several proposals had been put forward since the 1850s, it was only in the 1880s that two young Jewish entrepreneurs, Joseph Navon of Jerusalem and Joseph Amzalak of Jaffa, backed by the Protestant banker Johannes Frutiger, were enabled to take the first steps leading to the acquisition of a license from the Ottoman government for laying down the iron rails. Unable to raise sufficient capital in Europe, Navon sold the license to a group of Catholic businessmen in Paris, who established the Société du Chemin de Fer Ottoman de Jaffa à Jérusalem et Prolongements. When the first locomotive was tested on a short length of track at Jaffa half the population turned up to witness the event, such was the novelty of the sight and sounds of the horse of fire and iron. Despite difficulties due to the low cost of construction and poor traffic during the early years, the railroad opened up Jerusalem to modern tourism, brought greater numbers of pilgrims, and contributed to the growth of the city. It also delivered fresh water in times of drought. This is the most thoroughly researched publication ever to appear on the first railroad in the Holy Land. Moreover, it relies extensively on the one resource that best captures the spirit of the Jaffa-Jerusalem Railway: magnificent photographs, mainly taken between 1891 and 1914. These early photographs, gathered from archives in Israel, the United States, England and Germany, are supplemented with those taken by British forces from December 1917 on, from Israel, Australia and England, and a number of color images dating from the mid-1980s. Details of locomotives and rolling stock, maps, tables of statistics, track plans, extensive notes, a bibliography, and index are included. The intended audiences, apart from general readers and railway enthusiasts, are historical geographers, historians of the Holy Land in modern times, and transport and tourism historians.

The Goldschmidt Mahzor - Edited by Yonah Frankel, based on the commentary of Daniel Goldschmidt.

Translation from Roman, introduction and comments by Dvora Gilula.

Elijah the Prophet is a remarkably impressive figure whose life is full of dramatic moments: the decree to stop the rain, the fierce tension with King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, the war on idolatry which had its climax on Mount Carmel with the killing of the prophets of Baal, God’s revelation at Horeb, the ascent to heaven in a chariot of fire, etc. These episodes sparked the imagination of readers and commentators, thinkers and artists, who continued to study the figure of Elijah throughout the generations. The book Until Elijah Comes: The Portrayal of Elijah the Prophet in Tannaitic Literature is an examination of Elijah’s multi-faceted character as reflected in Tannaitic sources, the earliest stratum of rabbinic literature. Adiel Kadari presents an in-depth analysis of the major issues related to Elijah the Prophet in the intellectual world of the sages, such as the principles and limits of halakhic discourse, messianism and eschatology, religious and political zealotry, the phenomenon of prophecy and the question of its persistence in the post-biblical era, and the relationship to history, religious piety and asceticism. The analysis of Elijah in this volume is rooted in philological studies concerning the origin and transmission of the text, and branches out to an examination of ideological aspects and worldviews. The synthesis of various approaches employed in the study of rabbinic literature yields a rich and variegated discourse. The book’s various chapters reveal the tremendous importance of Elijah in the eyes of the sages, as well as the exegetical and ideological struggles over the shaping of his image.

This extraordinary commentary by an anonymous late twelfth-century northern French exegete interprets the Song of Songs solely according to its plain meaning as a story of two young lovers and their developing relationship. The exegete pays attention to every detail of the text, offering many enlightening insights into its meaning, all the while expanding upon the 'way of lovers' – the ways that young people in love go about their lovemaking. The French background of the exegete is made clear by many references to knights, coats of arms, weapons, chivalry, and of course, wine drinking, as well as numerous glosses in Old French. The edition is accompanied by an extensive introduction which analyzes the various exegetical, literary, and linguistic features of the text.

Contiruptance: Poetical Fluctuations in Naomi Frankel’s Work is the first book dedicated to Frankel's literary work, offering an in-depth reading of her entire fictional oeuvre. The concept of "Contiruptance," which indicates ruptures and continuity, provides insight into Frankel's poetics; suggesting that it may serve to deepen the analysis of the works of other authors.

For the first time the reader of the Hebrew language is presented with a book uncovering the unique activity of the German-Catholics in 19th century Eretz Israel. Those are the builders, for example, of the Dormition in Jerusalem and the Hospice in Tabgha.

This is a groundbreaking book in the field of inner biblical allusion. Using methodologies from the field of literary studies the book examines the Song Ha'azinu (Deut 32) and the Book of Isaiah and uncovers the fascinating connections between the two. The recognition of this relationship sheds new light on the subject of inner biblical allusion, the Song Ha'azinu and the Book of Isaiah.

Sabbatian Songs of Faith: Ritual, Community, and Interreligious Encounters in the Late Ottoman Empire unveils the hidden world of the Ma’aminim—followers of the 17th-century Jewish messianic figure, Sabbatai Tzvi. After Tzvi’s dramatic conversion to Islam in 1666, many of his followers returned to mainstream Judaism. However, a dedicated group followed in his footsteps, converted to Islam, and established a new path, blending Sabbatian, Jewish, and Islamic elements within a distinct Ottoman-Sephardi cultural framework. For centuries, the Ma’aminim maintained secrecy, forming distinct communities (known as the Dönme) and playing a multifaceted role in Jewish and Ottoman histories. This book sheds new light on their social life and esoteric traditions through a comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis of previously mostly unexamined mystical manuscripts in Ladino, Hebrew, and Ottoman Turkish. It explores their sacred songs, radical theology, rituals, folklore, and musical practices as reflections of communal reality and developments. By placing the Ma’aminim within a broader historical and cross-cultural perspective, Sabbatian Songs of Faith offers fresh insights into religious transformation, intercommunal exchanges, and the interplay between faith, ritual, and popular culture in the late Ottoman world and beyond.

This unique volume, which is sure to engage the attention of both scholars and the general public, is an unparalleled cross-generational and international dialogue among eminent historians about three central aspects of the unfathomable enigma of the Holocaust. In the first section, beyond a seminal overview of sixty years of research, the writers reflect on historiography and historical thought ranging from contemporaries of the Third Reich to the ongoing discussion about the controversial role post-war West German historians played in Holocaust research. This is followed by a section focusing on social antisemitism until the 1950s and the German public’s awareness of the Holocaust, including the posture of the German Resistance Movement. The third major theme is the Jewish society, from its initial attempts to develop new forms of societal life under the Nazi regime until the brink of annihilation during the mass deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka. The concluding chapter sheds light on the unresolved tension between reflective personal memory and impersonal historical research of this dark period in human history.

Who set the time in eighteenth-century Istanbul and how? When did government officials arrive at their offices? How did new technologies like the train and the steamer affect conventions of punctuality and lateness and what were the social and political implications of waiting? This book analyzes the "temporal culture" of the late Ottoman Empire and follows its transformation from the late eighteenth century to the establishment of the Turkish Republic. In an attempt to cope with the rapid changes that swept the region during that period, various bodies of the Ottoman state began to subject work routines to mechanical clocks and schedules in order to achieve higher levels of regularity, punctuality and efficiency. A new time web gradually spread from governmental facilities such as military bases, bureaus and schools to traffic arteries and city centers, subjecting more and more people to clock time and the new conventions linked to it. These changes, in turn, raised difficulties, tensions and even resistance, which were related not only to practical problems of coordination, but also to questions of identity, ideology and cultural orientation. The clocks of the early twentieth century thus showed Ottoman time with all its complexity.

The study of liturgy is intrinsically interdisciplinary and comprises elements of music, drama, theater and devotion that are of great consequence to believers and scholars far and wide. Liturgy is both history and theology, purporting to reflect and propagate values that inform individuals and communities alike, playing a vital role in the construction of sacred and lay memory and identity. As a multi-sensory experience, liturgy maintains a dynamic relationship with the surrounding space and its visual components, including art, artifacts and architecture. The essays in this book examine diverse aspects of liturgy and the arts, and were written by scholars working in the disciplines of musicology, social and cultural history, art history, material culture, and the history of the Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages and beyond. The articles engage in a comparative and interdisciplinary discourse, in order to contextualize the liturgical practices within the production of medieval cultural memory, and within the symbolic traditions expressed through liturgy and the arts. Primary sources include texts, rituals, music and visual media from Western Europe (Christian and Jewish) and the Latin Levant. The study of written, visual and musical constructs identifies the values and ideals conveyed and instilled through Jewish and Christian liturgical commemoration, and explores how these activated the faithful's idea of community and their place within it.

In the past, prayers in the synagogue were adorned with many liturgical poems, piyyuṭim, in all the various Jewish communities, both on the major festivals and on many Sabbaths over the course of the year. Manuscripts preserve thousands of piyyuṭim, only some of which are familiar today, and some of which have never been published until our generation. This book collects more than two hundred piyyuṭim, which the Jews of Ashkenaz (German-speaking lands) and Northern France used to recite on wedding Sabbaths and Sabbaths on which circumcisions occurred. Dozens of poets wrote piyyuṭim for these festive occasions. Most of the piyyuṭim were written by German or French poets (between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries), but some of them were written by poets in the Land of Israel, Italy, or Spain. Some of the compositions were written in honor of lifecycle celebrations occurring in the families of the poets themselves. Aside from the major popular genres of Ashkenazic piyyuṭ (yoẓer, ofan, and zulat, in the blessings surrounding the morning Shema), the corpus in this volume also contains representatives of many unusual genres of piyyuṭ; this prominently demonstrates that on Sabbaths of family celebrations, the poets of Ashkenaz and Northern France wanted to include piyyuṭim in many different positions in the liturgy, more varied than usual. Especially prominent is the large unit of piyyuṭim that were recited surrounding the bridegroom’s ‘aliyya to the Torah: reshut (“invitation”) poems for the bridegroom and his groomsmen to go up for their ‘aliyyot, songs in honor of the bridegroom after his ‘aliyya, poems surrounding the reading of Ve’avraham Zaqen (a passage from the Torah that is read in honor of the bridegroom — today only in Sephardic synagogues, but in the past also in Ashkenazic), and Mi Shebberakh poets blessing the bridegroom after his ‘aliyya. Some of the poems are in Aramaic. The book includes also piyyuṭim that were recited (not specifically on the Sabbath) at the actual wedding and circumcision rituals, and piyyuṭim designated for the Grace After Meals of the festive meals in honor of the wedding and circumcision. The Ashkenazic poets were extremely learned, and they included large amounts of material from the lore (aggada) of the Talmud and Midrash. The late Prof. Jonah Fraenkel was the one that gathered the piyyuṭim for the Sabbaths of the year recited in the Ashkenazic and Northern French communities, as a continuation of his series of Ashkenazic maḥzorim for the Three Festivals and those for the High Holidays edited by Dr. Daniel Goldschmidt. This volume of Piyyuṭim for Wedding and Circumcision Sabbaths is the first in a series whose purpose is to publish all piyyuṭim for all Sabbaths that were recited in the lands of Ashkenaz and Northern France. Dr. Gabriel Wasseman, a scholar of piyyuṭ, completed Fraenkel’s work on this volume, indicating textual variants from many dozens of manuscripts, and writing a detailed commentary on the piyyuṭim. He also wrote a long introduction to the volume, which, among other things, offers a birds’-eye view of all the piyyuṭim, organized into their specific genres, and traces the development of the customs of reciting these piyyuṭim in the various communities over the course of centuries. Avraham Fraenkel added chapters to the introduction, which present a description of the customs of weddings and of circumcisions in Ashkenaz and Northern France, on the basis of books of minhagim (“customs”) and prayerbooks from the Ashkenazic and Northern French communities.

Translated from the Greek with Introduction and Commentary by DWORA GILULA

This book focuses on a cycle of some thirty “praise” stories ( Shvachim ) whose heroes are Rabbi Shmuel the Pious and his son, the famous Rabbi Judah the Pious (died 1217; author of Sefer Hasidim ) – the two main figures of the medieval mystical circle known as Hasidut Ashkenaz. The narrative cycle in praise of these luminaries portrays them as extremely virtuous, as mystics with supernatural knowledge, and as masters of magical practices ( ba’alay shem ). Originating orally in Yiddish, these stories were first written down in Hebrew, the sacred language, and then translated “back” into Yiddish – the more widely understood language of the Ashkenazic community. The book presents all versions of these “praise” narratives, extant in manuscripts and print, both in Hebrew and Yiddish, side by side. A thorough introduction traces the growth of this narrative treasure from its embryonic oral beginnings to its fully developed bilingual written manifestations. A detailed analysis of individual stories sheds light on the cultural mentality of medieval Jewry in general and of Ashkenazic Jewry in particular.

Hasidism is one of the most important-influential movements in Judaism during the modern era. This book shows that the scholarly style of Hasidim abided by the rhetoric that was common within Jewish culture in Eastern Europe in the generations prior to Hasidism and in the generation of Hasidism itself among non-hasidic leaders.

Prof. Dov Levin was one of the first researchers who recognized the value of recording oral history as one of the primary sources for understanding the events of the twentieth century. This book includes brief summaries of 611 interviews, conducted between 1957 and 2008, that were deposited in the archive of the Oral History Division of the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry. Many of the interviews were conducted with Lithuanian Jews, as part of Prof. Levin's important research on the Jews of the Baltic countries in the inter-war period, during the Shoa and under Soviet rule. Other interviews deal with the history of Israel and its culture. Levin's collection of oral histories includes interviews of people from different countries, different social environments, and varied political views, reflecting the wide spectrum of his interests and studies. This book was published by Magnes press for the Avraham Herman Institute of contemporary Jewry.

16 October 1943 is one of the most intense, troubling and spectacular works ever written on a single event in the Holocaust of Europe's Jews. This text embodies a stylistic combination of almost real-time journalism, powerful poetic and emotional literature and a profound philosophical essay on the Nazi's behavioral patterns. Giacomo Debenedetti, a distinguished Jewish-Italian author, journalist, and literary critic and theorist describes in 16 October 1943 the terrors of the raid of the Ghetto of Rome. The story (for it is first and foremost a story) unfolds, with piercing, terrifying language, the deportation of one Jewish community within the Nazi extermination mechanism.

A sociological-historical study of the German Jews in Israel.

The New Arabic-Hebrew Dictionary is a comprehensive reference of the Arabic language throughout history, with a focus on its use in spoken and written media. Given Arabic's rich literary tradition spanning over 1,400 years, the language naturally incorporates words and expressions rooted in ancient literary strata, including the Qur'an, classical poetry, proverbs, the Hadith, jurisprudential literature, Adab literature, and historical texts. Terms and expressions from the realm of Islamic theology and jurisprudence, which were considered archaic 50 or 60 years ago, have regained prominence with the rise of fundamentalist Islam in the 1970s. This dictionary offers translations and explanations for these terms as well. After publishing the full dictionary in a large, 700-page edition, we decided it would be useful to publish a more concise version—smaller, portable, and easier to handle. This edition differs from the full dictionary in that it omits examples and comments, as well as archaic entries from ancient poetry, the Hadith, and jurisprudential literature. To the full edition of The New Arabic-Hebrew Dictionary

Corner of a Foreign Field portrays the British colonial community in Mandatory Palestine and explores the lives of its members—men, women, and children. The book sheds new light on the British mandatory experience as a set of practices and habits, emotions and sensibilities, identities and relationships. It examines how British everyday lives were an inseparable part of the mechanisms of control and governance in Palestine, intertwining the public with the private, the political with the intimate. The book examines the consolidation of British citizens in Palestine into a colonial community, offering a fresh perspective on the British as a heterogeneous and hierarchical group marked by various internal tensions. The history of this community unfolds through a wide range of themes: bachelorhood and marriage, sexuality, family and education, body and health, domesticity, leisure and cultural institutions, celebrations and rituals—all of which are interwoven with political, ethnic, class, and gender power relations. By focusing on the composition of the British community and the fabric of its daily life, Corner of a Foreign Field is a pioneering study that brings the social and cultural history of the British from the margins to the center, integrating it into the broader history of British colonialism in Palestine.

The book Mah Nishtannah: The Passover Night in the Sages' Discourse seeks to provide novel answers, based upon up-to-date methods of scholarly Talmud analysis, to ancient questions raised by the Seder Night, a night at the focus of Jewish culture from time immemorial. The book analyzes the focal points of this night – the Passover meal and its commandments on one hand, and the foundation of the Haggadah and the development of its design and history of its structure on the other.

In The Taste of Hidden Things Sara Sviri weaves a tapestry in which Sufi motifs and images are highlighted: the perfume of Attar's and Rumi's poetry, the boldness of Ibn al-Arabi's mystical speculation, the ecstatic experiences and dreams of old and modern seekers, and the richness of the Naqshbandi masters, past and present. A special place is given to al-Hakim at-Tirmidhi, a ninth century mystic from Central Asia. Many passages from his work, including his wife’s teaching dreams, are published here for the first time in Hebrew.

This is the story of a nearly forgotten chapter of the Holocaust—of over 16,000 Jewish women, girls and children, their origins, itineraries and fates, who suffered in the horrendous Nazi concentration camp for women, Ravensbrück. As a historian, Judith Buber Agassi was struck by the changing conditions, countries of origin, and fates of these women during 5 distinct periods during the 6 years of the camp's existence. As a sociologist, she studied the social relations of the Jewish prisoners among themselves as well as with the non-Jewish majority. After the mass murder of Jewish prisoners early in 1942, a larger group organization became impossible, but the Jewish women developed a special and effective form of small-group organization, the so-called camp-families. As a sociologist of gender, she surveyed the educational background and patterns of behavior specific to Jewish women, and has produced an impressive study.

Meidias (in Greek Mειδίας; lived 4th century BC), an Athenian of considerable wealth and influence, was a violent and bitter enemy of Demosthenes, the orator. His hostility he first displayed in 361 BC when he broke violently into the house of Demosthenes, with his brother Thrasylochus, to take possession of it,–Thrasylochus having offered, in the case of a trierarchy, to make an exchange of property with Demosthenes, under a private understanding with the guardians of the latter that, if the exchange were effected, the suit then pending against them should be dropped. This led Demosthenes to bring against him an accusation of kakegoria (ie verbal insult), and when Meidias after his condemnation did not fulfil his obligations, Demosthenes brought against him a dike exules (ie a trial for obtaining something already lawfully assigned to the plaintif). Meidias found means to prevent any decision being given far a period of eight years, and at length, in 354 BC, he had an opportunity to take revenge upon Demosthenes, who had in that year voluntarily undertaken the choregia. Meidias not only endeavoured in all possible ways to prevent Demosthenes from dis­charging his office in its proper form; also, their mutual relations were sored more still when Demosthenes attempted to oppose the proposal for sending aid against Callias and Taurosthenes of Chalcis to Plutarch, the tyrant of Eretria, and the friend of Meidias. The breaking point arrived when Meidias attacked Demosthenes with open violence during the celebration of the great Dionysia. Such an act gave Demosthenes a good opportunity for moving a public incrimination against his enemy (353 BC), and on this occasion wrote Against Meidias, still extant, which was never pronounced as the two adversaries found an amicable arrangement under which Demosthenes retired his accusation for thirty minae.

On the morning of June 7th 415 BC the people of Athens woke to find that the statues of the Idol Hermes, which stood in front of private houses and temples where vandalised. Every citizen could see his divine guardian standing at his doorstep damaged and desecrated, and gradually they found that they not alone, the whole city have lost its divine guardian. Trepidation was great. The Athenians wanted to discover the identity of the vandalisers and announced that they will give rewards and immunity to the informers who would provide some information about the blasphemy. The information received included more than information about the damaging of statues, it included information about desecration of Oration ceremonies held in private houses. The scandal was immense, the biggest one in Athenian history. Arrests were made, prosecutions, executions and flights to exile. Andocides, who was one of the accused, lists, in the defence speech he gave, the speech about the Orations, the chain of events and tries, of-course, to prove his innocence. The speech gives important information on the scandal and is an key source for learning about state events at the end of the 5th century BC.

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.

The book discusses religious descriptions of Nazism. In the secular twentieth century, two important German writers perceive Nazism in religious terms: the unprecedented brutality and violence evoked the ancient image of the devil, reincarnated in a new form. Mann and Hochhuth portray the Nazi regime and the Holocaust in the light of the Judeo-Christian devil and the legend of a pact with the devil. Before the war, Klaus Mann interprets the rise of Nazism as a manifestation of devilishness which lies within man. Mephisto became part of the German mind, dictating its thoughts and actions. After the war, as the atrocities of the Holocaust were known, Hochhuth believes that a transcendental power is directing history; Doctor Mengele is yet another incarnation of the ancient devil, dominating the fate of man.

Between Hitler and Churchill reveals an unknown facet in the history of World War II - an attempt by a senior Polish government official to contact the leadership of the Third Reich and a successful effort by British intelligence agencies to thwart this dialogue in its infancy. This surprising and fascinating event is described in the book through the personal stories of its two main protagonists, Jews born in Poland. One of them mediated the said contacts, while the other assisted the British in capturing the mediator, bringing him to Palestine and killing him there without trial. Using this fascinating story, the book challenges the traditional perception of the Nazi occupation of Poland as a sure prologue to World War II. It claims that in the first year and a half after September 1, 1939, European leaders, including Polish and British senior officials, were engaged in feverish diplomatic maneuvers and could actually end the war on the continent before it became the greatest disaster in human history. Due to its ability to shed new light on this topic, the book adds great value to those interested in the theory and practice of international relations.

Tens of thousands of intellectuals - refugees, displaced people, voluntary immigrants and emissaries - have left their homeland in modern times and moved to other countries in Europe and overseas. In a world-wide panorama, Peter Burke describes the important figures in the great waves of immigration since the fifteenth century: starting with the Greeks who came to Italy following the conquest of Byzantium by the Ottomans and ending with those fleeing from the Bolsheviks, the Fascists and the Nazis in the twentieth century. The migrations in the early modern period were mostly for religious reasons - for example, the Jews and Moriscos from the Iberian Peninsula, the Huguenots (French Calvinists) following the cancellation of the Edict of Nantes, and Catholics from Protestant countries. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, the migrations were mainly due to racial persecution and political and ideological reasons. Exiles and Expatriates in the History of Knowledge clarifies the difficulties of the scholars to integrate in the host countries and the choice between assimilation and seclusion in the expatriate community. But mainly he came to point out the enormous contribution of expatriates and immigrants to the creation of new knowledge and its dissemination, not only in immigration countries such as the United States and Israel, but in the entire world - from China in the East to Brazil in the West. Burke especially discusses the contribution of scholars in the humanities and social sciences: historians, researchers of the history of art and literature, philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists. Besides academics who managed to integrate into universities in the host countries, there were also other cultural mediators: printers and publishers, translators, merchants who settled for many years in distant lands, missionaries and scholars who were invited to the courts of rulers who sought to advance their country to modernity. The damage caused by the "brain drain" from the countries of origin eclipsed the gains produced by the world of knowledge as a whole: liberation from provincialism, bridging traditions, mutual fertilization. The detailed review in Peter Burke's book, which was written in 2015 as a warning against Brexit (Britain's exit from the European Union), is intended to convey a very important message even today: the reception of immigrants and refugees enriches the local and global culture and is the main antidote against the depletion of the spirit and narrow horizons.

In the few years after his retirement from public life and before he was sentenced to suicide, the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote the majority of his texts, which included over one hundred letters of wisdom ( espistulae morales) sent to his friend Lucilius. These letters are considered the first appearance of literary letters in Roman prose. The letters are philosophical essays written by a very wise and witty old man concluding his life, an autobiography of our spiritual world. The issues that interested Seneca are eternally relevant.

To the Water , a monograph on the writer Yosef Haim Brenner, seeks to reimagine the conventional perspective on Brenner, shifting the focus from his role as a national prophet to that of a modernist writer. The chapters of the book collectively form a life story, not only of the writer himself but also of his artistic era, the era of early Hebrew modernism. This innovative literary language, forged through the wanderings of Brenner and his cohort of young, provincial writers in early 20th-century Europe, transcended mere "style". It constituted a profound way of thinking and experiencing the world, swiftly captivating its creators, bursting forth in their works with great originality, and, paradoxically, vanishing with the same swiftness with which it had arrived. The book strives to recontextualize Brenner's creative output, asserting that his style does not merely continue the tradition of European realism from the 19th century. Instead, it stands as a bold and uniquely Hebrew creation, distinct from anything that preceded it.

The book The Israeli Sovereign: The Novel and the Discourse 1967 – 1973 explores Israeli sovereignty, nationality and space as represented and constructed in a range of Israeli novels published between 1967 and 1973, in their historical and geographical context and in light of the public discourse between the 1967 and 1973 wars. The research aims to characterize the Israeli sovereign subject and Israeli space represented and constructed in literature, in the context of the public discourse of the period. Some of the questions the study deals with are: What kind of Israeli subject emerges from the novels of the period? What kind of Israeli space is created in these texts? What is the relation between that space and the various points of view that were prominent in Israeli discourse at the time? These issues and others are discussed in light of the historical spatial situation of occupation and massive territorial expansion.

What is Social Leadership? What makes a true leader? The book Social leaders in Israel focuses on life stories of a wide range of social leaders. The stories are based on interviews with social Israeli leaders and their personal stories. The book was written by students pursuing doctorate studies and research while also devoting their time to social agendas.The students are all fellows of the Hoffman Leadership and Responsibility program at the Hebrew University.

According to the conventional understanding, the ultimate goal of Zionism as a national political movement was the establishment of a nation-state. In his new book on the history of the Zionist political imagination from the beginning of the idea of modern Zionism to the establishment of the State of Israel, Dimitri Shomsky challenges a deterministic view by examining unknown writings by the founding fathers of Zionism and by re-examining the known sources, which were interpreted in a tendentious and ahistorical way in the classical literature on Zionism. The author reveals that the leaders of Zionism envisioned the realization of Jewish self-determination in the Land of Israel within a multinational framework. First, they envisioned an autonomous province in the multinational Ottoman Empire, and then - during the British Mandate - a multinational democracy. The book shows that the models of a Jewish state, which were established and developed by the founding fathers of the State of Israel, included recognition of a collective national existence of the Arabs of the Land of Israel. Such political patterns were not the property of marginal figures among Zionists (such as the "Brit Shalom" people), but on the contrary, were presented by the most mainstream Zionists: Yehuda Leib Pinsker, Benjamin Ze'ev Herzl, Ahad Ha'am, Ze'ev Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion. The book focuses on these five figures and presents them and their views in an innovative way, which is known to have an impact on contemporary Israeli discourse.

According to its Declaration of Independence, the State of Israel "will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex". However, the equality between men and women in Israel was not de facto. What did Israeli women have to say about that? The book presents views and opinions of Israeli women in the 1950s and the early 1960s about their roles and duties in the public and the domestic spheres, based on contemporary women's sections in the press and women's magazines. It shows what women said about women in the Israeli parliament (Knesset) and about Golda Meir; women's service in the Israeli Defense Force and the exclusion of women from the public sphere; motherhood and parenthood, woman's right to choose to have an abortion and women's struggle for peace; women's duties as housewives and the discrimination of women as employees. The book also uncovers a forgotten feminist journal, sheds light on a famous adoption story of a Yemenite baby and discusses a protest of female cadets in the Israeli Air Force flight course that was ignored and silenced for many years. The book unveils Israeli women's voices from the past, which show that in an era of many fateful decisions, Israeli women also made choices that affected their status in society. Readers might find these decisions relevant vis-à-vis women's status in Israeli society nowadays.

A Ramble in the Hive is an eco-philosophical text that deals with the relationship between humans and honeybees from the dawn of humanity to the present day, interlinking mythology, folklore, literature, art and science from different historical periods. A Ramble in the Hive works as both popular science and philosophy, combining a study of the history of beekeeping and its multitude of inventions, with a philosophical and poetic view of the human encounter with honeybees as reflected in the imagination of our culture. It suggests approaching the hive as an archetype of living mythology that works on our collective imagination. A Ramble in the Hive presents the planetary honeybee crisis as a fascinating window through which to observe wide-ranging ecological issues. How did the honeybee get such a lofty and critical role – holding responsibility for both the future of humanity and the earth? What do the bees tell us in their current state? This book is an attempt to answer these questions.

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.

When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfill Kafka’s last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted his life to championing Kafka’s work, rescuing his legacy from both obscurity and physical destruction. Nearly a century later, an international legal battle erupted to determine which country could claim ownership: the Jewish state, where Kafka dreamed of living, or Germany, where Kafka’s three sisters perished in the Holocaust? Benjamin Balint offers a gripping account of the controversial trial in Israeli courts—brimming with dilemmas legal, ethical, and political—that determined the fate of Kafka’s manuscripts.

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 View English edition

The New Arabic-Hebrew Dictionary is a dictionary of the Arabic language across the ages, with focus on the language of the spoken and written media. The dictionary also reflects the rich literary history of the Arabic language, of more than 1,400 years, including the Qur'an, ancient poetry, proverbs, the Hadith and jurisprudential literature, Adab literature and historical literature. Terms and expressions from the sphere of Islamic theology and jurisprudence, which were considered archaic 50 or 60 years ago, have come back into use following the rise of fundamentalist Islam in the 1970s, and this new dictionary provides translations and explanations for these terms as well. With over 44,000 entries, this dictionary is today the most comprehensive, up-to-date and reliable dictionary of contemporary Arabic. User-friendly: full vocalization of all Arabic and Hebrew entries. About 6,000 examples from Arabic literature of all eras and from the press clarify the use of words. Over 4,000 grammatical and historical notes. The New Arabic-Hebrew Dictionary is intended for university students and scholars, school pupils and teachers and anyone interested in the Arabic language. To the concise edition of The New Arabic-Hebrew Dictionary