The book examines the ideological motivations behind the selection of representations for Israeli banknotes and coins. The research is based on the proceedings and correspondence of the Bank of Israel Banknotes and Coinage Planning Committee from its inception in 1955 to 2012. The study reveals the mechanisms in which the legal tender is exploited as an expression of banal nationalism, implementing national emblems in an unnoticed manner. Banal nationalism is one of three theoretical frameworks we adopted. The other two are the long history of the Jewish people in the territory which today is the State of Israel; and selective tradition as a means for designing a nation. The book comprises eight chapters: theoretical overview; analytical portrayal of the working methods of the Bank of Israel Banknotes and Coinage Planning Committee; a study of the first designed “Allegoric Figures Series” (1959); analysis of the selection of human figures; the construction of the state borders through an array of landscape images; the reflection of the shifting boundaries in the changing representations in Jerusalem; the selection of archaeological emblems as a proof for national continuity; and the symbolic role of flora as identification with the land.

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.

Imagine 100 high school-aged teens – boys and girls, city and suburb dwellers, “heavy smartphone users” and regular users – disconnecting from their smartphones for one whole week. It may sound fictional, but this exactly is what occurred as part of a fascinating experiment that we recently conducted, which serves as the basis of this book. For a long and challenging week, these teenagers documented their experiences in personal diaries, and described them in personal and group interviews. They described their physical and psychological feelings about life without their devices, the effect that disconnecting from their devices had on their social life, their family life, and their management of time and routine tasks. The participants described how their lives looked without a smartphone in school and during their free time, how they missed their device and felt its absence upon waking in the morning and in the moments before falling asleep, and how they even felt it in their dreams, which were filled with longing for the digital friend that had been taken from them. This book provides deep insights into the role of the smartphone in the daily lives of teenagers, and the culture of “cellphones natives,” members of Gen Z. The book offers a new point of view on questions occupying researchers, parents, educators, and professionals: how and why did the smartphone become the dominant medium of communication in the lives and culture of teenagers? How does it shape and influence their daily lives? Can the relationship with the smartphone really be characterized as dependence and perhaps even as an addiction, as many claim, or is it relationship of a completely different nature? In a world full of technology, the aspiration to better understand teenagers and even ourselves requires acknowledging the ways in which these technologies are woven into every moment of our daily lives, for good and for bad.

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.

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 book examines the relations between Oriental, local Jews and Palestinian Arabs in Mandatory Palestine. It focuses on the role of Oriental Jews as possible mediators from a cultural, political and social perspective, as those who sought to bridge Jewish-Arab culture, Jewish-Arab nationalism, and Jewish-Arab identity. Examining these relations from the perspective of Oriental and local Jews sheds new light on the history and historiography of Zionism, the Yishuv, and the Jewish-Arab conflict.

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.

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.

Commedia dell’arte, originating in Italy and proliferating on European stages from approximately 1650 to 1750, is one of the most significant and long-lasting phenomena in theatre history; its influence on all performing genres is notable throughout Western Drama to this very day. The new study From Carnival to Theatre: Structure and Chaos in the Commedia Dell'arte provides a comprehensive, deeply-researched study of the development of the genre, the establishment of the first professional troupes in Europe, their organization, their patrons and wide variety of popular and elite audiences. The study traces all aspects of the unique improvised performance: the show's space, dramatic patterns, dramatis personae, acting style, costume and stage design are re-interpreted by the attachment of the commedia dell’ arte to its double roots: the heritage of written literature, and manifestations of popular oral tradition in seasonal festivities. The book explores especially the interaction of the commedia dell'arte with the phenomenon of carnival, in its very existence as an opposition to the social structure within the liminal time and space related to the celebration. Being an authorized event, containing metaphors of annihilating the existent order, in which subversion could be substituted by amusement, the carnivalesque combined time, place and creative means into a new theatrical form: the commedia dell'arte.

Question of Place: Architecture between the Poetic and the Ethical calls for a re-understanding of the foundations of the architectural act while exposing it to phenomenological thought. Through a return to the first - and failed - encounter in the late 1970s, between phenomenology depicting phenomena in the light of human experience and architectural discourse, Edna Langenthal offers a new reading of discourse, embracing the thought of philosopher Martin Heidegger and discussing the influence of the architectural theoretician Christian Norberg-Schulz, who in her opinion missed Heidegger's contribution to her understanding. To emphasize the potential inherent in Heidegger's thought in understanding the question of place and the possibilities of dwelling in it, the author discusses the meaning of the poetic as a constitutive axis in understanding key concepts in contemporary architectural discourse. But the poetic dimension, for her, cannot exist without the ethical dimension. Through a study of the thought of Heidegger's student and critic, the philosopher Emanuel Levinas, the structure that connects an affinity between the ethical and the home and the possibilities of settling in it.

The Second Commandment’s injunction against making graven images and likenesses resonates in all facets of Jewish visuality throughout the generations. Although Jews have always created and consumed art, the attitude to figural art –anthropomorphic and zoomorphic representations – has oscillated, like a pendulum, between strict prohibition and full permissibility. Figureless Art traces a lesser-known chapter in the history of Jewish art – a period governed by the swing to extreme stringency that left its mark on Late Antique synagogues in the Land of Israel. This anti-figural trend manifested in the avoidance of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic depictions and in the deliberate obliteration of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures on stone carvings and mosaic carpets that adorned the synagogues. What is the meaning of this strict trend? Did it emerge from within the Jewish world or was it stimulated, conversely, by external influences? Who was responsible for the effacement of the figures in the synagogues and when did these iconoclastic events occur? This book examines these phenomena through a broad historical, religious, and cultural perspective, based on visual and literary sources from Late Antique and early Muslim Palestine.