The book Hebrew: Take 2 , for Level II, grew out of the need for instructional material that reflects Israeli society with its cultural heterogeneity, using narrative characters to express the texture of everyday life in today’s Israel . The book has ten chapters dealing with various topics, such as the status of women, ecology, landscapes, the home, education, language and more. The student learns about the Israeli experience while acquiring the language and increasing proficiency in its use. Topics range from light to heavy in terms of difficulty (vocabulary, syntactic structures, etc.) and in terms of textual complexity . Each chapter ends with a story chosen to reflect on the subject matter of the chapter and according to the linguistic topics studied in it. At the end of each chapter, various reinforcement exercises are introduced to implement the subjects studied, to deepen knowledge and to enrich the students’ experience . At the end of the book is a glossary for each chapter, accompanied by Arabic and English translations . Dana Spector and Dalia Roth are senior instructors in the Hebrew Language Unit of the Rothberg International School for Overseas Students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. They have previously collaborated in teaching and formulating an audio-learning program for intermediate level students. This book also has an accompanying Teacher's Guide , offering teaching methods, grammatical explanations and references to videos, which is purchased separately.

Argonautica (the voyage of the ship Argo), is a Hellenistic epic poem by Apollonius of Rhodes written in the third century BCE. It is one of the few remaining epic poems of ancient Greece, recounting the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts who sailed aboard the Argo to Colchis in order to retrieve the Golden Fleece. Much importance has been attributed to this work owing to its artistic qualities and complex narrative. Argonautica has had an immense influence on prominent Roman and modern writers alike, including Ovid, Virgil, and Robert Graves. The Hebrew translation retains the original meter of the work and accurately reflects the content and spirit of the original Greek.

ARITCLES Arnon Azmon - Editing and Meaning in Pesikta de-Rav Kahana, Pesikta Rabbati and Midrash Tanhuma on ‘Vayehi Beyom Chalot Moshe’ (Num 7:1) Yuval Fraenkel - The Hand-Leaning Controversy: Controversy and Authority Noam Samet - ‘The Wise Shall Inherit Glory’ (Prov 3:35) - The Redaction of the Sugya on Human Dignity Rachel Hitin-Mashiah and Tamar Lavi - Two Supplications (בקשות) by Rabbi Yedidya Monsoñego Amir Banbaji - The Maskilim as ῾Defenders of the Text’: A Third Paradigm of Jewish Enlightenment Tamar Salmon-Mack - The Weakening of the Parents’ Home and the Development of Other Kinship Relations in Epistolary Hebrew Literature in the 19th century Einat Baram Eshel - The Story of the Flood and its Representations in Hebrew Children’s Literature Shira Stav - Be My Mother and Brother: Rachel and Bialik Lilach Nethanel - Zalman Shneour’s Book of Wanderings Haya Shacham - ‘The World is a Riddle but the Riddle is a World’ Tal Holz - Slave of Time: The Work of Mourning in Israeli Holocaust Literature of the ‘1948 Generation’

This book examines a particular aspect of the hatred of women in nineteenth and twentieth century Russian literature. A man is involved in a romantic relationship with a woman. He feels he is superior to the woman and almost divine, deserving the woman's admiration or even worship. But instead of demonstrating her esteem and respect toward him, she treats him as if he were inferior to her. He feels humiliated and despised by the woman. He feels castrated by her, because she behaves like a man and assigns him the role of a woman. He wishes to restore his own self-respect and avenge himself on her for the bad feelings she gives him. He wants to murder her, and if it is not in his power to hurt her, he harms himself. He becomes an alcoholic, mentally ill or commits suicide. The book discusses the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Lev Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Michail Zoschenko, Yuri Trifonov, Nikolai Leskov, Ivan Turgenev, Alexandr Kuprin, Michail Bulgakov, Boris Vasilyev, Vasily Grossman, Valentin Rasputin, Sergei Dovlatov, Yiri Nagibin, Yuri Polyakov, Galina Tcherbakova, Dina Rubina, Lyudmila Ulitzkaya, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya and Irina Grekova.

The author of this book argues that Israeli traumas exist in the language, poetics, and politics of Israeli literature. Presenting a comprehensive and methodical study of this phenomenon, this book raises piercing questions concerning the politics behind literature and its moral authority, focusing specifically on the responsibility of the author. Hever tracks the literary processing methods of Israeli traumas in light of the extermination of European Jews, the 1948 war, the Palestinian Nakba, and the 1973 war in the works of S. Yizhar, Leah Goldberg, Avoth Yeshurun, Nathan Alterman, Aharon Appelfeld, Dan Pagis, Erez Biton, Yitzhak Laor, Shimon Ballas, Haim Be’er, and Rivka Ben-Hayim. The book offers a rigorous discussion of the unique manners in which literature deals with representations of traumas. This research presents the traces of Israeli post-trauma represented in the literary text, and tackles the question of responsibility among fictional characters.

Historiography formed an unusually important component of the popular culture and heritage of east European Jewry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was a period of social, economic, and political upheaval, and for the emerging class of educated Jews the writing and reading of Jewish history provided not only intellectual but also emotional and moral sustenance. Facing an insecure future became easier with an understanding of the past, and of the Jewish place in that past. This volume is devoted to the development of Jewish historiography in the three east European centers—Congress Poland, the Russian empire, and Galicia—that together contained the majority of world Jewry at that time. Drawing widely on the multilingual body of scholarly and popular literature that emerged in that turbulent environment, the contributors to this volume attempt to go beyond the established paradigms in the study of Jewish historiography, and specifically to examine the relationship between the writing of Jewish history and of non-Jewish history in eastern Europe. In doing so they expose the tension between the study of the Jewish past in a communal setting and in a wider, regional, setting that located Jews firmly in the non-Jewish political, economic, and cultural environment. They also explore the relationship between ‘history’—seen as the popular understanding of the past—and ‘scholarly history’—interpretation of the past through the academic study of the sources, which lays claim to objectivity and authority. The development of Jewish historical scholarship grew out of the new intellectual climate of the Haskalah, which encouraged novel modes of thinking about self and others and promoted critical enquiry and new approaches to traditional sources. At the same time, however, in response to what the traditionalists perceived as secular research, an Orthodox historiography also emerged, driven not only by scholarly curiosity but also by the need to provide a powerful counterweight in the struggle against modernity. In fact, east European Jewish historiography has undergone many methodological, thematic, and ideological transformations over the last two centuries. Even today, east European Jewish historiography revisits many of the questions of importance to scholars and audiences since its emergence: how Jews lived, both within the narrow Jewish world and in contact with the wider society; the limits of Jewish insularity and integration; expressions of persecution and anti-Jewish violence; and also Jewish contributions to the societies and states of eastern Europe. Many challenges still remain: questions of the purpose of the research, its ideological colouring, and its relevance for contemporary Jewish communities. The fruit of research in many disciplines and from different methodological points of view, this volume has much to offer scholars of modern Jewry trying to understand how east European Jews saw themselves as they struggled with the concepts of modernity and national identity and how their history continues to be studied and discussed by an international community of scholars.

Pygmalion was claimed by Shaw to be a didactic drama about phonetics, and its antiheroic hero, Henry Higgins, is a phonetician, but the play is a humane comedy about love and the English class system. The play is about the training Higgins gives to a Cockney flower girl to enable her to pass as a lady and is also about the repercussions of the experiment’s success.

The Erudite Comedy introduces the Hebrew reader to three saucy Italian comedies. These comic gems were written in the first quarter of the 16th century, the period in which Western classical theatre was reborn. Each of them possesses unique historical and artistic values: Ludovico Ariosto’s ‘La Cassaria’ (1508) is well-known as ‘The first modern play’; Bernardo Dovizi’s ‘La Calandra’ (1513) is remarkable for its ingenious plot, bold erotic allusions and surprisingly feminist soliloquies; Niccolo Machiavelli’s ‘Clizia’ (1525) contains autobiographical elements, reflecting the aging Renaissance genius’ love affair with a well-known young courtesan .