The Italian commedia dell’arte troupes roamed across Europe for two hundred years, captivating wide and diverse audiences. The performances of the commedia dell’arte were improvised, as the actors executed on stage a concise outline of a play, called "scenario". This book presents, for the first time in Hebrew translation, complete scenarios written by one of the greatest men of the Italian Renaissance theater, Flaminio Scala. The scenarios are accompanied by annotations and a comprehensive essay that reviews Scala’s life and work, and presents his scenario as a perfect recipe for comic improvisation. The book will therefore be of interest to theatre enthusiasts and scholars alike, and will provide directors, actors, and acting students with new and refreshing tools for staging comedies.

Muslim beliefs have inspired charitable giving for over fourteen centuries, yet Islamic history has rarely been examined from this perspective. In Charity in Islamic Societies , Amy Singer explains the basic concepts and institutions of Muslim charity: the obligatory annual payment of zakat together with voluntary donations of all sizes, undertaken at every level of society, and across the span of individual lifetimes. Charitable endowments – established by rulers, wealthy individuals, and even those of more modest means – shaped Muslim societies, cultures, and landscapes in ever era. This book demonstrates how historical circumstances, social status, gender, age, and other factors interacted with religious ideals to produce a vast array of charitable practices, from the early days of Islam to the present. Relying on evidence from written texts, buildings, images, and objects to anchor the discussions in each chapter, the author explores the motivations for charity, its impact on the rich and the poor, and the politicization of giving, arguing that the study of philanthropy affords a unique prism through which to examine the past.

In this issue: Diego Rotman | The Sukkah and Its Double: Copies, Variants, and the Stereoscopic Image Shani Tamari Matan | The First Hebrew Dance-Gathering at Kibbutz Dalia (1944): Decoding of an Archival and Choreographic Event Hagar Salamon and Carmela Abdar | Glory of the “Sets”: Praxis and Meaning of Dressing Children in Haredi Families in Israel Ravit Raufman | The October 7 Massacre in Light of the Folktale “The Wolf and Kid”: A Realization of Primal Fantasy Ronni Shaked | Commemoration and Conflict: How the Palestinian Calendar Shapes Identity and Resistance

The Last Trial deals with the trial of Ivan Demjanjuk, who was tried in the State of Israel in 1986 on charges of being "Ivan the Terrible," the operator of the gas chambers at the Treblinka extermination camp, and was acquitted after a seven-year legal process. The book is based on in-depth archival research and reveals for the first time a rich collection of historical documents from the legal authorities in Israel, the United States, and Germany. The book is also based on in-depth interviews with senior members of the legal system who were involved in the trial – judges, attorneys, and witnesses. The Demjanjuk case was considered both a case with a high chance of conviction and a potential for severe punishment, and a case that was expected to bring the memory of the Holocaust back onto the public agenda, some half a century after the Eichmann trial. It was chosen from among the cases of other suspects to be the first test case for the possibility of extraditing Nazi criminals from the United States to Israel. The results of the trial therefore had a decisive impact on the continued activity of the State of Israel in bringing Nazi criminals to justice. When Demjanjuk was acquitted, it became clear that not only had the prosecution failed to achieve the desired result of convicting the defendant, but also that the legal process in his case had failed to fulfill the educational, documentary, and historical goals that were attached to it. In the final analysis, this resounding failure brought the prosecution of the Nazis and their accomplices in the State of Israel to an end. The tension between the legal field and the historical field, and between legal judgment and factual truth, runs throughout the book. The greatest danger of blurring the lines between "law" and "history" lies in the fact that the legal outcome of a criminal proceeding – "guilty" or "not guilty" – may mistakenly be linked to the historical determination of "did happen" or "did not happen." A misunderstanding of legal acquittal as historical acquittal is one of the biggest obstacles to the influence of criminal law, which ends in acquittal, on collective memory. As the book shows, the case of Demjanjuk's extradition and trial in Israel illustrates the difficulties inherent in dealing with the Holocaust within the courtroom, and also sharpens the problematic nature of using criminal law tools to establish historical truths.

Usury: Moneylending, Money and Society in Rabbinic Literature is a study of the moneylending norms in the early stratum of rabbinic literature. It shows how these norms use the language of legal formalism to construct a community of status-equals, into which rabbinic adherents can buy their entry by making the correct investment choices. Placing these norms in a broad historical and intercultural context, it is a fresh look at Jewish moneylending norms, the first in over 30 years.

Yehuda Jud Ne'eman's latest book, Auschwitz Capital of the 20th Century , presents the work of one of the most important scholars of Israeli cinema, who was also a groundbreaking director and creator. In this book, Ne'eman shares with his readers his involvement as a creator and intellectual in the establishment of Israeli cinema as a space for central artistic, cultural, and political discourse, whose significant contribution to Israeli culture and society is beyond doubt. The book includes two parts that complement each other. The first part contains an innovative and original discussion that maps the history of Israeli cinema by comparing it to cinema that began during the yishuv period. During this period, cinema was committed to the Zionist narrative, and the work is characterized as a continuous conflict between avant-garde and ideology, similar to Soviet avant-garde cinema. Within the framework of this comparison, Ne'eman emphasizes the preoccupation with modernist cinema of the "New Sensibility," a term coined years ago, and refers to films created by Israeli directors following the French "New Wave," including his own films. In doing so, he claims that between Israeli folk film and the modernism of the "New Sensibility" films, there was in fact cooperation in opposition to the establishment and Zionist ideology. The second part of the book discusses films made in the State of Israel and during the yishuv period that deal with the representation of the Holocaust as a central test case. Among other things, Ne'eman shows that the attempt to heal the horrors of the Holocaust in a simplistic national way expresses feelings of guilt and offers a limited solution to the problems of the survivors.

This book examines Israeli-German relations after the fall of the Berlin Wall and during the reigns of three chancellors: Helmut Kohl, Gerhard Schröder, and Angela Merkel. The book is the product of research based on various sources, and primarily on dozens of interviews the author conducted with key figures involved in the relations between the countries. The generational change in Germany and the internal and international normalization process that the Federal Republic underwent following the German unification did not harm the special relations with Israel. On the contrary: At their peak, in 2008, against the backdrop of the worsening nuclear threat from Iran, Chancellor Merkel declared that Israel's security was part of Germany's national interest. The book describes the contribution of the relations between the countries to the development of the State of Israel and its strengthening in vital areas, and even to its close ties with the European Union. These relations have been put to the test in recent decades, after controversy surrounding foreign policy issues between the two countries increased and the negative trend towards Israeli policy in German public opinion polls strengthened. All of this has raised question marks about the future of the special relationship between the two countries.

Martin Buber aroused passionate, often contradictory opinions, both regarding his personality and his thought. Gershom Schocken, editor of Haaretz , said that one day he was walking with S. Y. Agnon: "We were walking around Talpiot and I asked him what his attitude was towards Buber. Agnon stopped in his walk and said: 'I want to tell you something. There are people about whom you have to decide once: do you love them or do you hate them. I decided to love Buber.'" Buber's philosophical and theological writings, including the famous I and Thou , have contributed greatly to religious and Jewish thought, as well as to biblical studies, political theory, and Zionist thought. In this new biography, Paul Mendes-Flor situates Buber's legacy at the crossroads between the intellectual and cultural life of German Jewry and European life in the first half of the twentieth century. This is the first full biography of the groundbreaking modern Jewish philosopher. The book is organized around several key events in his life, such as his mother suddenly abandoning him when he was three years old—a formative trauma that left Buber with a lasting sense of sensitivity to the fragility of human relationships and the need to nurture them with what he would later call "dialogical attention."

The Sages of Yavneh traces the rebirth of Jewish law and thought in the aftermath of the Great Revolt and the destruction of the Temple. In Yavneh the early Sages laid the foundations for post-Temple Jewish life and created the conceptual framework that continues to shape halachic discourse to this day. Through close analysis of early Tannaitic traditions, the book uncovers the sages’ intellectual world, their diverse approaches, and the deep ideas underlying their disputes. At a decisive historical crossroad, the sages of Yavneh bridged second Temple traditions with the emerging Tannaitic corpus, offering a farsighted response to the crisis of their age and charting a path for the future of Jewish law, Halacha.

AMILAT – Asociación Israelí de Investigadores de Judaísmo Latinoamericano se complace en presentar el décimo volumen de la serie Judaica Latinoamericana, inaugurada en 1988. El objetivo de la serie es publicar trabajos expuestos en la Sección de América Latina que forma parte, desde 1985, del Congreso Mundial de Estudios Judaicos realizado cada cuatro años en Jerusalén. Judaica Latinoamericana X incluye los correspondientes al décimo-octavo de dichos congresos, que tuvo lugar en la Universidad Hebrea en agosto de 2022. El volumen reitera el enfoque multi- e interdisciplinario de la serie: sus artículos presentan investigaciones sobre distintos aspectos de la experiencia judía en América Latina, en sus dinámicas intra- y extracomunitarias, nacionales y transnacionales. Todos los trabajos constituyen un aporte original e inédito al respectivo campo de estudio. Este volumen se inicia con las exposiciones presentadas en una sesión especial en homenaje al Prof. Haim Avni y su fructífera labor en su larga carrera académica como pionero del desarrollo de la investigación y la enseñanza académicas del Judaísmo Latinoamericano.

This book contains one hundred and ninety-two written and oral responses by Rabbi Yaakov ben Meir, better known as "Rabbenu Tam," which were not included in the responses section of Sefer Ha-Yashar , compiled by his students. The first introductory chapters will be devoted to a concise presentation of his character, family, the stages of his life, and his teachers, while the other chapters will discuss his responses, their recipients, the sources in which the responses were found, the edition, and its contribution. At the top of each reply is a short introduction that discusses the main contents of the reply and points out historical and other aspects that arise from it.

Anti-Semitism emerged in the late nineteenth century as a political movement that swept the masses. It presented a worldview in which a cohesive tribe called "the Jews" conspired to rule the earth by controlling international capital markets, trade, and money lending, while at the same time working to destroy—through revolutionary plots—the very capitalist system it supposedly controlled. It is easy to draw a straight line from this paranoid thinking at the turn of the century to the murderous delusions of fascism in the twentieth century. But, argues Laura Engelstein, the line was not straight. Anti-Semitism as a political weapon had its opponents, even in Eastern Europe, where its consequences were particularly terrible. Jewish leaders who joined forces in various countries and in cooperation with non-Jewish public figures worked for the rights of Jews and in firm opposition to persecution and acts of violence against Jews. In Tsarist and Soviet Russia, as well as in Poland and Ukraine – regions notorious in the West as centers of hatred for Jews – there were also those who saw anti-Semitism as a harmful burden on society and their movement. In the introduction to the book, Engelstein describes the different ways in which Jews were treated through the ways in which one Jew, Maurice Greenfeld, the author's grandfather, dealt with the upheavals of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the civil war that followed, including the expressions of hostility and sympathy he encountered throughout his life. In the following chapters, she reveals the – sometimes surprising – positions of Russian liberals such as Prince Sergei Urusov, Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura, and Polish émigré in Paris Andrzej Bobkowski. The chapters on the inevitable rise of anti-Semitism thus examine the complex reasons why leaders and intellectuals renounced pogroms and incitement against the Jewish population. Engelstein added a short introduction to the Hebrew edition of the book.