The collective memory is not an innocent conduit carrying the cargo of the "authentic" past into the present, but a subject of constant struggle between different social forces, which have their own history. The discourse of the Holocaust in Israel has also undergone several incarnations during the last decades that reflected the complex interrelationship between "silence" and speech and the various tensions between private memories and collective memory. In this pioneering book - What Shall We Tell the Little Ones? - Yaakova Sacerdoti examines how Holocaust literature for preschoolers developed in light of the recurring questions on this topic over the years: Is it right to expose children to these horrific events of the past? And if so, how can the indescribable be described? The book examines these questions by describing over thirty children's books about the Holocaust, published since the beginning of the 1990s. Thus, Sacerdoti tries to reveal the literary and poetic techniques - both textual and visual - that children's writers used to try to circumvent the difficulties involved in conveying the experiences of the Holocaust to preschoolers.

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 Israel Folktale Archive (IFA), named after founder Dov Noy, was established in 1955 aiming to protect oral traditions at danger of becoming extinct or sinking into oblivion. It currently stores some 25,000 stories told in dozens of ethnic groups, mostly Jewish but also Muslim, Christian and Druze. Poetic Memory deals with the appearance of early Hebrew traditions in the archive tales, from the days of the Bible to the Middle Ages.

Letters can often be spontaneous expressions of their writer's search for meaning, redemption and identity. Such are the letters of Bruno Schulz, one of the most sensitive, and most tormented European-Jewish writers. In this collection of letters - published here for the first time in Hebrew, translated by Miriam Bornstein and edited by Jacob Golomb - Schulz expresses his most hidden thoughts in the most poignant way. These letters were a vital lifeline for him that connected his remote city of Drohowicz to the turbulent cultural and literary centers of Poland in the interwar period. Schulz's desperate need to gain public recognition resonates with them, along with a strong sense of loneliness and existential isolation. These letters can be read as works of art in their own right, and they have the potential to shed new light on Schulz's work, its mysteries and embarrassments. The book includes some of his spectacular paintings and a selection of the review notes he wrote and published. Schultz reveals himself as a sharp, attentive and sensitive critic. Oftentimes, his critical lists not only talk about the works, but reflect his own personality.

It is not an easy task to find in any creative field a person who is both an original and groundbreaking artist and a profound thinker-interpreter, who is well versed in the broad scope of the entire culture. Such is Michael Gurevitch – the playwright of "Happiness", "A Fleeting Shadow", "A Word of Love" and "The Dragon's Beloved" (out of more than eighteen plays) – who presented new, local and extremely challenging concepts about the context of a theatre play within the contemporary Israeli existence. Gurevitch designs a new local theatrical language in his plays and in the way he directs. He is an unforgettable director of classics such as "The King's Clothes" by Nissim Aloni, "Life is a Dream" by Calderón de la Barca, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" by Shakespeare, "Uncle Vanya" by Chekhov or "War on the House" by Aristophanes (adaptation by Ilan Hatsor). His theatrical insights are interwoven to the most contemporary Israeli issues without so much as a sensational wink. His theater is a "passing shadow" in the full sense of the word because it is based on one-time work with certain actors, at certain moments in their lives, and in the life of the country at a certain moment, and for that reason it is profoundly unique to theater alone, because it lives only when it is actually performed, hence it is poignant and unforgettable. Gurevitch was born (1951) and raised in Tel Aviv. He lived, breathed and studied local and international theater all his life, but his main strength is in the depths of the emotional, involving his childhood, his parents and his unique personality. In Two Children in The Field: Reflections on Theatre and Life Gurevitch manages to refine, from his rich experience, a series of lucid insights on the relation between theatrical conceptions and the contexts from which they stem.

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.

The book explores the representations and depictions of old age in the rabbinic Jewish literature of late antiquity. Through close literary readings and cultural analysis, the book reveals the gaps and tensions between idealized images of old age on the one hand, and the psychologically, physiologically, and socially complicated realities of aging on the other hand. The authors argue that while rabbinic literature presents various statements on the qualities and activities that make for good old age, on the respect and reverence that the elderly should be awarded, and on harmonious intergenerational relationship, it also includes multiple anecdotes and narratives that portray aging in much more nuanced and poignant ways. These anecdotes and narratives relate, alongside fantasies about blissful or unnoticeable aging, a host of fears associated with old age: from the loss of physical capability and beauty to the loss of memory and mental acuity, and from marginalization in the community to being experienced as a burden by one’s own children. Each chapter of the book focuses on a different aspect of aging in the rabbinic world: bodily appearance and sexuality, family relations, intellectual and cognitive prowess, honor and shame, and social roles and identity.

Yaakov Shabtai is best known for his path-breaking novel Zichron Devarim (1977; translated into English as Past Continuous ), one of the most important works of prose in Hebrew if not in world literature due to its original structure. Shabtai discovered his gift for the theater in his twenties, and moved from Kibbutz Merchavia to Tel Aviv where he made his living authoring and translating plays and writing songs for entertainment evenings. In 1972 he published a collection of short stories entitled Uncle Peretz Takes Off . His novel-memoire Sof Davar (1984; Past Perfect ) was published posthumously. This biography interweaves a detailed description of Shabtai's life, his ideological evolution, and an analysis of his difficult path to literary achievement. His plays, though considered mediocre by some, emerge as essential for the crystallization of his novels.

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.

The book seeks to examine Trust as a culture-dependant concept, offers a definintion for it, places it within a general framework of the pair of the Overt and the Hidden, and characterises it within Arabic-speaking Islamic culture. The book reviews the expressions of trust in a variety of fields in Arabic-speaking Islamic cultures, distills from them their common principles, compares them to their counterparts in Western cultures, chiefly American, and makes suggestions for making decision about it.

A man wanted a new house, with more and more rooms, for all his belongings. But then he discovered that he needed nothing but a single room and lots of good and friendly neighbors. By the beloved author Haya Shenhav and the award-winning illustrator Yirmi Pinkus.