This book deals with the cultural and emotional world of Jewish schoolchildren in the “Tarbut” school network in Poland between the two World Wars. It is based on a unique corpus of about 80 letters, written between 1934-1935 by 10-11-year-old fifth graders in the Tarbut school in the town of Nowi Dwόr in Poland to their beloved teacher who had immigrated to Eretz Israel – the place and destination they too dreamed about. In these letters – all composed in Hebrew – the children write about their class, their school, but also about themselves and their families. The pupils’ letters are analyzed in light of the educational practice of pen-pal culture which was developed in and encouraged by “Tarbut” schools, especially between pupils in the Diaspora and their cohorts in Palestine. The letters are also examined as ego-documents that reveal personal stories about the intimate and private world of children, their experiences, fears and hopes, their relationship with their teacher, their families and their friends. Studied as a corpus, they reflect the complexities of the educational experience in a Hebrew Zionist school in Poland. The uniqueness of this book is that it is attentive to children – not teenagers or adults – in their own voice and in real time, telling about their lives, and not from a place of retrospection or later memory. Sources that allow us to hear the authentic voice of a child in real time are very rare indeed. The letters, which were critically edited and published in full next to a clear photograph of the letter, are discussed from various perspectives including Jewish, Hebrew and Zionist education, the history and culture of the child, and the relationship between the Diaspora and Eretz Israel. The book also offers a short history of the influential, now almost forgotten, school network – Tarbut. Finally, the book presents a detailed history of one class in one town in Poland a few years before this world vanished.

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.

Uri Zvi Greenberg’s early poetry, composed between 1912 and 1923, offers both a key to understanding his later work, and a means for re-conceptualizing modern lyrical discourse in general and modern Jewish lyrical discourse in particular. Often callow, this early work testifies to the poet’s quest for a way of writing poetry that would give voice to the Jewish experience in Europe just before and after World War I. Like many other Jewish poets of the period, Greenberg was aware of the pressing need to express Jewishness in a way that would allow for the continued existence of Jewish national identity, among nations jostling for independence in a Europe rife with tensions. Similar to many of these poets, Greenberg also knew that this expression would have to be, of necessity, grounded in modern subjectivity. Paying attention to the various literary, historical, and political contexts of Greenberg's writing, Green Mountain and Love traces the poet’s valiant attempt to come to terms with modern subjectivity, and in so doing, reinvestigate the mechanisms of modern lyrical discourse. It yields fresh insights into the nature of poetry; its aims and functions in the cultural, political, and historical arenas; and the reader’s relationship with the poetic word.

The essay presents the lost archive of the Jewish author Zalman Shneour (Shklov 1887 – New York 1950). It was found in May 2018 at Calle Eraso 21 in Madrid – the city through which he had passed in the summer of 1941. Four carton boxes survived in the apartment of his late daughter, Renee Rebecca Shneour, who fled to New York together with her father but returned to live in Madrid in her adulthood. The essay offers a reading of Shneour's correspondences with three women - his mother in Shklov, his friend and lover in Berlin, and his daughter.

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

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.

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 .

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.

Zionists without Borders tells the story of the Halutz movement in Poland and its role in helping the Labor movement rise to the leadership of the Zionist Movement in the interwar period. It describes the founding of a mass national and socialist movement, which changed the face of the Zionist map. The leaders of the Labor movement in Israel established strong ties with pioneers from Poland, thus making the Halutz a cross-border movement, connecting Jews by means of politics, nationalism and socialism.

This anthology is a collection of stories, written by women at the turn of the twentieth century and published in the Yiddish press at that time. The have been translated to Hebrew for the first time. From its beginning the Yiddish press enabled all levels of society to sound their voices. Women too were quick to meet this challenge, and until the First World War more than ninety of their works were published: novellas, plays, fiction and a wide variety of short stories. This collection of nineteen stories represents this abundance and its unique qualities. It sounds anew the voices of forgotten women authors, who disappeared even from the eyes of critics and researchers: Maria Lerner, Isabella, Rokhl Brokhes, Yente Serdetsky, Salome Perl, Rokhl Feigenberg and others. Their stories open a window to the world of women at a time of dramatic changes in the lives of Jews in the Russian Empire. They portray conflicts between the generations, especially between the authors and their mothers, the dilemmas of love, and the anguished movement between the small town and the big city, between maintaining traditions and breaking free of frameworks. These stories highly enrich our knowledge of Jewish society at that time and are a fundamental expression of the part women played in that society.

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.

Rabbi Judah Leib Alter of Ger, a famed nineteenth-century Hasidic master, wrote an influential collection of Hebrew homilies. But it seems that R. Judah Leib’s sermons were also transcribed by his students, some of whom recorded their teacher’s words in the original Yiddish rather than Hebrew translation. This monograph is based on a newly-discovered Yiddish manuscript of sixty pages. It presents a synoptic edition of the Yiddish text alongside the Hebrew version, thus enabling comparison of the witnesses and demonstrating the development of the various texts. The introduction uses this manuscript to explore broader historical and theoretical issues such as the relationship between written texts and oral culture, the development of written Yiddish, the nature and boundaries of translation, and the complex pathways of transmission from teachers to their students.