Two focal points are at the center of this book: the history of German Jews during the Holocaust and the involvement of the Foreign Ministry of Nazi Germany. The process of "solving the problem of the German Jews" consisted of stages of escalation that are exemplified in 175 translated documents written by or addressed to German diplomats. The narrative that is placed in the historical context, demonstrates the course that began with the deprivation and dispossession of German Jews of their civil and economic rights, continues with their forced immigration and finally with their deportation and extermination. Included are the reactions of the German Jews, the responses that came from outside Germany, and the role of the Foreign Ministry, who was eager to participate in “solving the Jewish Question”. The book opens with a preface by Prof. Moshe Zimmermann.

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.

Jacques Lacan’s teaching lasted about three decades. Like Freud before him, Lacan was profoundly interested in the arts, particularly in painting. Lacan not only turned to specific artworks to clarify psychoanalytic concepts but also addressed theoretical aspects of painting. Like scholars from other fields, such as philosophy or cultural studies, who have turned to Lacan’s thinking throughout his career, art scholars often make use of Lacan’s teaching while analyzing various notions in art. These arguments deal mostly with Lacan’s early teaching or his seminars from the sixties. Yet, his late teaching and its relation to the visual arts remains relatively unknown, even though Lacan’s most radical views are presented for the first time during his late teaching of the seventies, and these conceptualizations carry immense value for theoretical discourse on contemporary art. Lacan’s late teaching and its relation to art fashions the cornerstone of this book, it is the wrap thread that runs through it. The other thread, the woof, which this book weaves into the psychoanalytic discourse, is of a different kind and nature: the discourse of art which analyzes specific instances of the works of art of contemporary Israeli artists: Michal Na’aman, David Ginton, Joshua Borkovsky and Shahar Yahalom.

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.

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.

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.

This book examines the nature, methods, and contribution of Jewish feminist art to the various spheres of art, society, and religion and proposes a theoretical framework for its understanding. The Jewish religious feminist art movement has developed since the late 1990s in the two major Jewish centers—the United States and Israel. This is the first book to treat this phenomenon in a broad and systematic manner and discuss its critique of Jewish tradition, Halakha (religious law), and Jewish religious institutions. The works are analyzed in light of Jewish feminist thought and in comparison with religious Jewish feminist activist practices. The main tool for examining the social effect of the art works is analysis of their reception and of the public discussion that followed. Devoted Resistance focuses on the works of a number of prominent women artists who critique the Jewish religious text, establishment, and rituals. The religious text is the subject of the work of Helène Aylon (US, b. 1931), who marked problematic biblical passages with a pink highlighter, and Nechama Golan (Israel, b. 1947), whose work is critical of the Talmudic debate over women as property in the contraction of marriage (kiddushin). Nurit Jacobs Yinon (Israel, b. 1972) and Hila Karabelnikov Paz (Israel, b. 1984) confront the religious establishment and in particular the exclusion of women from the religious court that oversees the ritual immersion of women converts. The work of Andi Arnovitz (born in the US, 1959, immigrated to Israel, 1999) points up the pornographic dimensions of the extreme modesty laws as interpreted by contemporary halakhic decisors. Hagit Molgan (Israel, b. 1972) demonstrates the male structuring of religious laws regarding menstruation, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles (US, b. 1939) breaches the religious taboo by presenting ritual immersion following menstruation as a dignified ritual to be embraced. The combined study of Jewish feminist art created in the United States and in Israel and the comparison of these artists with other feminist artists, both Jewish and non-Jewish, illuminates local contexts, similarities and differences in the development of Jewish feminist art in Israel and in the US, and the influences of globalization, diasporism, and immigration on the art.

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.

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 book Shamanism and Literary Criticism deals with the unique attention that scholars of art and literature pay to the object of their study. This specific attention is based on a communitarian approach, a special type of research empathy, and a contemplation radically focused on literature, art, and the community of its readers. What do scholars of literature do in a community where literature is created, read, and interpreted by them? What is the attitude of these scholars to literature and its readers? What is the role entrusted to them by their community? This book offers a new theory about the attitude of the study of literature toward literature, art, and communality. It illustrates the theory and its features as a method of research and interpretation in the works of Uri Nissan Gnessin, Micha Yosef Berdyczewski, Shimon Halkin, A. B. Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Ronit Matalon, Orly Castel-Bloom, and Anna Hermann.

The Western Wall—Judaism’s holiest site—occupies a prominent position in contemporary Jewish and Israeli discourse, current events, and local politics. In Holiness in the Eye of the Storm: The Judaism and Israeliness of the Western Wall, 1967–2000 , Kobi Cohen-Hattab and Doron Bar offer a detailed exploration of the Western Wall plaza’s evolution in the late twentieth century. The examination covers the role of archaeology, attempts to design the space, the Wall’s transformation as an Israeli and Jewish symbol, and the movement to open it to a variety of Jewish denominations, studying the central processes and shifts that took place at the Western Wall during the three decades that followed the Six-Day War, a relatively short yet crucial chapter in Jerusalem's extensive history.