Israel's recent constitutional political crisis marks the moment when civil duty becomes an existential question: are civilians obliged to obey an administration chosen in a democratic process, even if it means harm to justice, decency or elementary democratic values? The main claim made in this essay is that two types of civil disobedience are to be categorized: disobedience of law or policy, and disobedience of legality.

In this issue: Yiftah Levin | The Key as an Intertextual Symbol in the Six-Day War Shalom Sabar | ‘The Year of the Liberation of Our Holy Sites’ – The Six-Day War in the Mirror of Israeli Folk Art Regina F. Bendix and Galit Hasan-Rokem | Israeli Political Humor: What Was There To Laugh About in 1967? Haim Weiss | ‘The Mountain that Folds Within It All of Israel’s Hopes and Visions’ – Shlomo Goren and the Six-Day War

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.

This beautiful volume is the fruit of almost 40 years of collecting by Vivienne Silver-Brody, one of Israel's few photography collectors. She has written and edited a book, which narrates the shared history of photography in a land that in the last century has seen development alongside war and destruction, and that remains divided and conflicted by the two peoples that call it home. The text is accompanied by some 200 exquisite photographs from Silver-Brody’s collection, and includes a special section inspired by the 1983 volume published by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Personal Choice: A Celebration of Twentieth-Century Photographs . In this section, Silver-Brody invited some 60 writers – photographers, scholars, artists, curators, collectors, lovers of photography and others with a special connection to the land – from different religions, national and political tendencies, to choose a single photograph from her collection and to write a short essay relating to it. The result is a fascinating selection of texts that contributes to the overall narrative in the book. This book could speak to a diversified readership; those interested in photography and its history or in the Middle East and Israel / Palestine, especially in light of the ongoing conflict and public debate surrounding it around the world, and in light of the unique voice that attempts to reach beyond politics and religion, and to present a photographic history of the Land of Israel as a shared place rather than as disputed territory. Translated by Daphna Levy

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.

In this issue: Ohad Abudraham | A New Reading of a Mandaic Incantation Bowl in the Miami University Art Museum Erhard Blum | A “Neglected” Aramaic Dialect: The Literary Idiom of the Kingdom of Aram-Damascus Moshe Bar-Asher | Problems in the Description of the Morphology of Mishnaic Hebrew Haim Dihi | Some Linguistic Innovations in the Book of Ben Sira: The Contribution of MS F from the Cairo Geniza Shai Heijmans | Pretonic Reduction of Greek Loanwords in the Mishna and Its Significance And more...

The articles compiled in this volume are studies by Jacob (Kobi) Metzer, which examine economic and political-economy issues in the Mandate era and the State of Israel. Most of the studies were originally published in scholarly journals and collected volumes in English. Their revision and publication in Hebrew under one volume is aimed at making them more accessible to the Israeli readership. The book consists of nine chapters, grouped into three parts. The first part includes four chapters that present the main socio-economic attributes of the Arab and Jewish populations during the Mandate period and examine them in broad comparative frameworks. The three chapters of the second part take up ethno-national aspects of land and settlement in Mandatory Palestine and Israel, and analyze them in comparative perspective. The third part deals with patterns of immigration and employment of Jews as individuals. It contains two chapters. One documents the socio-demographic profile of the immigrants to Palestine in the first decade of the British Mandate, and compares it with the international migration of the time. The other chapter examines comparatively the patterns of Jewish self-employment in the Diaspora and in Mandatory Palestine and Israel, from the early twentieth century onward.

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 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.

In his autobiography, Abraham Halevi Fraenkel describes growing up as an Orthodox Jew in Germany and his development as a mathematician at the beginning of the twentieth century. In his memoir, originally published in German in 1967, Fraenkel painted a unique picture of the complexity of Jewish life in Germany with special emphasis on the developments in the Orthodox community. He described the world of mathematics in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, in the context of the great mathematicians he met, many of whom were Jews or had Jewish roots. In his personal life, Fraenkel merged the worlds of orthodox Judaism, liberal Zionism and mathematics, in a period of global and national upheavals, which included the two World Wars and the establishment of the State of Israel. The last chapter of the book, which describes his extensive public activity in Israel from the 1930s until his death in 1965, was written by Prof. Jiska Cohen-Mansfield. Introductions were added by Prof. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel and Prof. Menachem Magidor, the former president of the Hebrew University.

The Hebrew community that lived in Acre during the British Mandate period did not leave an actual signature on the urban landscape, and did not record glorious tales of heroism or destruction. This fascinating story, which had been omitted from the collective memory and is currently revealed in depth in this book, illuminates this community's place in the building of the Jewish national society in Palestine. In particular, the book reveals the complex relationships that existed between the Zionist institutions and the Jewish and Hebrew societies in the Arab cities. Despite the decline of the old Jewish communities in the Arab cities, the unusual story of Acre shows how it managed to attract new, nationalist settlers. For a brief moment in the city's history, a Hebrew community existed that combined old and new settlements, had a national Zionist orientation and included Jews with local and Mizrahi recognition. This is a local story, but it seeks to shed light on the complexity and diversity of the Zionist enterprise in relation to the Arab and mixed cities of mandatory Palestine, by raising questions about the relationship between the "history of a place" and the "national history". Through the description of the failure of the Hebrew settlement in Mandatory Acre, the book looks at the Zionist project as a fascinating meeting point between the dreams of those who created the leading narratives and between the local interests and the geographical conditions unique to the region.