Mandragola – known in English as The Mandrake – is Niccolo Machiavelli’s most renowned comedy. It is widely considered the greatest stage play of the Italian Renaissance, and one of the most brilliant comedies ever written. Mandragola is admired for its blunt and sober portrayal of human nature and the prominent role of deceit in the shaping of reality. This new Hebrew translation is accompanied by a comprehensive introduction and interpretative notes. The introduction documents the rebirth of western theatre in the Italian Renaissance, and examines the relation between Machiavelli’s comedy and his ‘serious’ writings.

The articles in this volume: Naama Alfasi-Weiss The Biblical Story of the Announcement of Isaac’s Birth : A Structural Analysis Avraham (Rami) Reiner On the Origins of the Expression Amen, amen, amen sel Rella Kushelevsky Between the Heritage of the Middle Ages and the Winds of the Renaissance: The Midrash of the Ten Commandments in the Parma Manuscript 2269 (De Rossi 473) Tal Goitein Elijah’s Cup: An Unknown Fifteenth-Century Depiction of the Custom in the Erna Michael Haggadah Noga Rubin ‘ The Legend of Three and Four’: An Account of Jewish Story-Telling Tradition in Prague of the Seventeenh Century Tsila Zan-Bar Tsur ‘ A woman is like a stew, warm and nourishing’: Kitchen and Femininity in the Folk Culture of Afghan Jews Yael Zilberman ‘ I would have died had God not sent me Elijah the Prophet’: Class, Body, and Sexuality in the Life Stories of Elderly Oriental (Mizrahiot) Women of Beer Sheva Noga Libi Cohen ‘ In the merit of a woman – the miracle happened’: Conformism and Subversion in the Story of Judith as Told by an Ultra-Orthodox Woman Towards a History of Folkloristics Rina Benari Blessing Scrolls and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: The Case of the Blessing Scroll from Mława – 1925 Book Reviews Yael Guilat Material-Culture Research in Israel [On: Aviva Muller-Lancet, Garments with a Message: Ethnography of Jewish Wear in Islamic Lands, Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 2010, 389 + 67 pp. (in Hebrew)] Haim Weiss Current Aspects of Folklore Research [On: Regina F. Bendix & Galit Hasan-Rokem (eds.), A Companion to Folklore (Blackwell Companions to Anthropology, 15), Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 660 pp. (Paper edition, 2014)] Dani Schrire Encyclopedic Knowkege and Jewish Folklore [On: Raphael Patai & Haya Bar-Itzhak (eds.), Encyclopedia of Jewish Folklore and Traditions, Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2013, 2 volumes, 680 pp.] English abstracts at the end of the book.

MS Zurich, Jeselsohn 5, is the first half of a Sefardi Masoretic Bible completed by Moshe Ibn Zabara in 1477, which was later heavily glossed, especially in the Pentateuch, by Menahem de Lonzano. The other half of the manuscript is preserved in MS Sassoon 1209. This study first examines Zabara’s work in the manuscript, in comparison with his other manuscripts. The main part of this study is devoted to Menahem de Lonzano: his biography and bibliography, his wide-ranging text critical work, and his detailed work on the Zabara Bible. The volume is illustrated with approximately 150 color photos, with a concentration of 32 photographs in appendix 1 of folios in MS Jeselsohn 5 with micrography. Two other appendices by specialists are devoted to the decoration program and to the palaeography and codicology of MS Jeselsohn 5; the former by Andreina Contessa, the latter by Tamar Leiter and Shlomo Zucker.

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.

Mount Carmel of Graf von Mülinen is a translated, edited and annotated edition of the monumental Beiträge zur Kenntnis des Karmels , written by Graf Eberhardt von Műinen, a well-known Swiss researcher and diplomat. His book was first published in Leipzig by Baedeker Publishing in 1908 . The work constitutes a meticulous and professional exploration of Mount Carmel in the beginning of the twentieth-century, and an important stepping stone in the chronology of the field. This Interdisciplinary study of the mountain covers a range of fields such as Arabic dialectology, botany, zoology, general geography, geology, climate, anthropology, religion, archaeology and folklore . This book is dedicated to the 44 casualties of the devastating fire on Mount Carmel in December 2010 .

The interconnections among music and the visual arts have been a source of inspiration in Western culture for hundreds of years. The medium difference caused artists and theoreticians to investigate analogies, connections and mutual influences among them in diverse artistic and historical contexts. Modernism and technology saw the birth of new ways in combining music, sound and image and open new horizons in the age of multimedia and internet. The interconnections among music and picture are the subject of an extensive research at the last two decades in Israel and abroad. The discourse calls for a wide variety of disciplines, among them the history of art, musicology, philosophy, technology, and cognition, and creates fruitful and updated collaborations. The anthology Ear Sees, Eye Hears: On the Interconnections among Sound and Picture in Art – the first book in Hebrew dedicated to that field – is an example of such a discourse. It contains nine articles, written by expert scholars from Israel and abroad, and four shorter essays written by artists who describe their own creative process. Thus, the book gives a panoramic view of the cutting-age research and combines theory and practice. The book concentrates on Modernism, avant-garde and contemporary art, on the background of wider historical and theoretical contexts, and offers answers as well as questions regarding painting, music, performance art, voice art, cinema, animation, visual music, and multimedia. It is written for scholars, students, teachers, artists of different media and art lovers, and opens a door for additional learning.

Breast-feeding has, throughout the generations, been perceived as a natural and instinctive activity essential for the survival of the human race. And yet, the chosen method, its frequency, and the importance attributed to it depend on varying cultural trends, as demonstrated by the visual representations of breast-feeding that testify to its intricate connection to social, religious, and economic ideologies. A “mania” on the subject of breast-feeding and its significance has become apparent in the Western world over the last few decades. In the book Crying over Spilt Milk , the author investigates the ideological concepts behind the endorsement of maternal breast-feeding in modern Western society. Using diverse visual and textual sources and surveying hundreds of artworks produced from the time of the French Revolution to the First World War,Gal Ventura reveals the historical, political, religious, and economic factorsthat shaped the representations of breast-feeding and its substitutes in French art. She thus sheds lights on the changing attitudes toward maternal breast-feeding in nineteenth-century France, which have had a considerable impact on the glorification of breast-feeding in the Western world to this very day.

This book is dedicated to a comprehensive study of two subjects: crossing the boundaries between earth and heaven, between the visible and invisible realm. The first subject - dreams and their meanings in the literature of the classical world. The second subject - ghosts, daemons and haunting possessions in the culture of the Jewish culture and other religions. In twenty one articles the authors spread for the reader a diverse and Multidisciplinary image which shows how human beings have been attempting to peer behind the curtain and to give a lingual-literal expression to the experience of meeting unreachable worlds.

Volume one: A List of Galit Hasan-Rokem's Publications Intimate Dialogue: A Personal View of Galit Hasan-Rokem's Poetry On the Three 'Who is She...' Questions in the Song of Songs Rabbi Meir, the Babylonian Talmud, and Menippean Satire From Narrative Practice to Cultural Poetics: Literary Anthropology and Rabbinic Sense of Self Noah, his Family, and Other Animals: Midrash, Folklore and the Interpretation of a Biblical Story (or: Homage to Structuralism) 'The Earthquake in the Valley of Arbel': A Galilean Apocalyptic Tradition and its Historical-Liturgical Context The Literary-Parable in Seder Eliyahu Raba, in Light of the Homiletic-Parable in Rabbinic Literature 'Unto the Voice of the Girl's Songs': On Singing Women in Medieval Hebrew Poetry (The Andalusian School and it Offshoots) Intertextual Appropriation as Code: Between Palestine and Spain Jewish and Christian Dispute Poems on the Relationship between the Body and the Soul The Sorcerer Balaam According to Midrash Me'am Lo'ez The Plebeian and the Cultivated Proverb in Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote 'Irme Kero Madre' (Mother, I Wsih to Go): The Concept of Jerusalem in a Judeo-Spanish Folk Song as a Movement between Myth and Praxis Indescribable Female Beauty: Sephardic Wasfs, the Song of Songs, and Baffled Readers The Image of the Jew in Yiddish Proverbs Midrash Eliyahu, Mendelssohn's Version Freud and the Topos of the Wandering Jew The Retum of the Wandering Jews(s) in Samuel Hirszenberg's Art List of Contributors List of Abbreviations English Abstracts Volume two: Mitzvot Hannah: Visual Depictons of the 'Three Women's Commandments' among the Jews of Europe from the Middle Ages to Late Nineteenth Century Magic Dress of Jewish Groom from Rada'A' - a Town in Yemen Trousseaus of Jewish Brides from Izmir: Biographical Objects The Study of Folklore and the Process of Secularization of Modern Jewish Culture The Power of a Proverb - the Role of a Proverb in Agnon's Story Four Sages Who Were in Our Town: The Social Milieu in the Rabbinic Study Hall - from the Babylonian Talmud to S.Y. Agnon Source and Oblivion - Story, Folk and Folktale in Agnon's Writing Agnon's Biblical Ethnographies: Edo and Enam and the Quest for the Ultimate Song The Narrative Sub-Structures of S.Y. Agnon's 'The Lady and the Peddler' Leah Goldberg Meets Brenner 'Deportation Does no Solve Anything' - on 'Khirbet Khizeh' by S. Yizhar Purim in Sheinkin-Carnival in Tel Aviv of the Eighties A Yid Gefint an Eytse (Yiddish: A Jew Gets Advice) - A Reading in the Life History and Proverbs and Sayings of an Israeli Man of Transylvanian Origin in His Life in Communist Romania 'To Make Many More Menachem Mendels': Childlessness, Parturiton, and Creation in Messianic Habad Men and Women Narrating the Myth of the Creation of Woman - Hegemonic and Subversive Message 'Gobelin' Needlepoint: Introducing the Concept of 'Transitional Object; to the Study of Material Culture Jews in the Arabic Map: Hebrew Place Names Spoken by Local Arabbs - a Literary-Cultural Reading The Identity of Israeli Arabs as Reflected in Hebrew-Bases Nicknames The 'Bible Now': Contemporization, Political Satire and National Memory 'The Princess in the Rock': A South Indian Tale 'He That Travels Far Knows Much' English Abstracts

This book highlights a specific feature characterizing some of the short stories of IL Peretz: His transparent and extensive reliance on popular and Hasidic sources. This is the rational for a comparative study of source and its adaptation , adding a critical dimension to the understanding of these stories. This book concentrates on three short stories of IL Peretz belonging to the genre of Hasidic tales: 'If Not Higher', 'Between Two Mountains', and 'The Birds and the Parchments'

This book exhibits a collection of projects designed by the renown Israeli architecture studio, Chyutin Architects, during the period of 1980-2010. The studio was founded by Bracha Chyutin and Michael Chyutin in 1978. It specializes in the architectural design of public buildings, residential spaces, interior design and urban planning. Chyutin Architects has won many open national competitions for public buildings including the Court of Justice in Haifa (1994); Mane Katz Museum in Haifa (2000); Court of Justice in Jerusalem (2007); and Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem (2010) . It is responsible for the Master plans of several academic campuses including the Van-Leer Institute in Jerusalem (2008), and the new campus for the University of Ben Gurion at Beer Sheva (2013), both winning competitions. The studio has won several competitions for academic buildings including the Senate Building in Ben-Gurion University in Beer-Sheva (1994); The Tel-Aviv College (1969); Student House in Haifa University (2002); Polonsky Academy in Jerusalem (2010) and others. In recognition of its architectural achievements, the studio has been awarded the Israeli Architects’ Association Award (1993); The 'Ot-Hitzuv' Award (2005; 2009; 2011); the AIA Academy of Architecture for Justice (AAJ) (2008); the Rechter Award (1996;2006); Dezeen's top ten: Parks and Gardens (2011), and the Architizer A+ Award for the Higher Education Institutions & Research Facilities category (2013). The firm's Designs have been displayed in numerous national and international architectural exhibitions and have been published in the daily press, professional journals and books throughout the world. Bracha Chyutin and Michael Chyutin have also been engaged in academic activity in most of Israel ’s universities. They have published a great number of papers and studies about architecture and urban planning. They have co-authored various books: Architecture and Utopia-The Israeli Experiment (Asghat 2007), Architecture for Justice ( Tel Aviv Museum 2006 ), and Architecture of Ben Gurion University 1990-2006 (BGU Press 2008).