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.

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.

Among the medieval liturgical manuscripts from Ashkenaz, the Nuremberg Mahzor takes a special place. Its size, its extraordinary selection of piyyutim and piyyut commentaries, and its lavish decoration that differs from the model used for many mahzorim in southern Germany make it a spectacular object. This aroused curiosity and interest, as reflected by those who are known to have viewed the manuscript, including Emperor Leopold I (1658–1705), who visited the Nuremberg Municipal Library in 1658, and several 17th and 18th century Christian scholars who wrote about the treasures of Nuremberg. In the 19th century, several Jewish scholars studied the manuscript in Nuremberg, among them Leopold Zunz from Berlin and Rabbi Isaak Meier Eppstein from Jerusalem, culminating in the detailed study and description by Nuremberg rabbi Bernhard Ziemlich (1884–1886). Salman Schocken had hoped to acquire the manuscript already in 1934 and succeeded in adding it to his collection in 1951. The fact that during its 56-year stay at the Schocken Library in Jerusalem the Mahzor was rarely exhibited and not easily accessible to scholars and the wider audience shrouded the manuscript in mystery.

Sabbatian Songs of Faith: Ritual, Community, and Interreligious Encounters in the Late Ottoman Empire unveils the hidden world of the Ma’aminim—followers of the 17th-century Jewish messianic figure, Sabbatai Tzvi. After Tzvi’s dramatic conversion to Islam in 1666, many of his followers returned to mainstream Judaism. However, a dedicated group followed in his footsteps, converted to Islam, and established a new path, blending Sabbatian, Jewish, and Islamic elements within a distinct Ottoman-Sephardi cultural framework. For centuries, the Ma’aminim maintained secrecy, forming distinct communities (known as the Dönme) and playing a multifaceted role in Jewish and Ottoman histories. This book sheds new light on their social life and esoteric traditions through a comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis of previously mostly unexamined mystical manuscripts in Ladino, Hebrew, and Ottoman Turkish. It explores their sacred songs, radical theology, rituals, folklore, and musical practices as reflections of communal reality and developments. By placing the Ma’aminim within a broader historical and cross-cultural perspective, Sabbatian Songs of Faith offers fresh insights into religious transformation, intercommunal exchanges, and the interplay between faith, ritual, and popular culture in the late Ottoman world and beyond.

The economy of symbolic goods is at the heart of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology. In Le marché des biens symboliques , published in 1971, Bourdieu lays the foundation for his theory of the conditions of production and distribution of cultural products. This text is of crucial importance for understanding his later writings on artistic fields and cultural practices. Against the illusion that artworks are independent from social conditions, Bourdieu reminds us that these are the results of a production process that involves not only the individual artist or writer, but a whole system of intermediaries (galleries, publishers, etc.) and institutions of consecration (criticism, prizes, academies, etc.). However, in contrast to the Marxist approach, which reduces works to a "reflection" of class relations, Bourdieu argues that the fields of cultural production enjoy relative autonomy. In this text, Bourdieu constructs the concept of the field for the first time systematically, using Max Weber's concept of legitimacy and his sociology of religion: the symbolic value of cultural works is based on trust and the accumulation of symbolic capital. Bourdieu also combines the concept of the field here for the first time with other concepts that he was developing then - "reproduction," "symbolic violence," "habitus." Drawing on art historians and on examples from empirical research he was conducting, the text also proposes a socio-historical study of the conditions for the emergence of the fields of art and literature as relatively autonomous worlds.

This book examines the overt and covert engagement with the immigrant experience in American cinema in the decade preceding World War II. It presents the story of a gallery of creators, mostly Jewish, who had emigrated to the United States, some by force and others by choice. An examination of the films they created reveals their attitudes towards their countries of origin, the nation that gave them a new home, and the Jewish identity they were forced to rediscover. This Jewish identity was at times a burden, sometimes a painful reminder of their past, and at other times a source of great inspiration and hope.

Since the early 2000s, Israeli television drama has become a highly sought-after product in the global TV market. Israel is indeed an intense and dynamic place that offers drama creators a wealth of diverse and compelling stories. In 1971, three years after the establishment of Israeli television, the first drama series in Hebrew Hedva and Shlomik aired—still in black and white—based on the literary novel by Aharon Megged (1953). The evolution of television drama in Israeli television from its inception has not been thoroughly documented until now. This book aims to fill that gap and provide readers with tools for watching, interpreting, and understanding television series in general, and Israeli ones in particular . The story of Israeli television drama in this book is set within broad socio-political and cultural contexts. Drama consistently engages with reality and responds to it in various ways, even if not always overtly. It also addresses the foundational myths of Israeli identity—sometimes reinforcing them, other times questioning or subverting them. Like other popular cultures, it often fulfills desires or offers imagined solutions to the contradictions underlying these myths . Through the prism of Israeli television drama, this book reveals a self-portrait of the people and society—both as they were and as they might've like to be seen .

Preludes is the story of the composer and conductor Noam Sheriff (1935-2018), whose life was dedicated to art and music almost from the moment he could think of it. In the first person Sheriff recounts a personal initiation story, which begins in the small Tel Aviv of the days of the British Mandate and the divided Jerusalem of the first years of the State of Israel, followed by the most renown and magnificent concert halls in Israel and around the world. In doing so, he describes some of the personalities who stood at the heart of world of music: Leonard Bernstein, Gary Bartini, Paul Ben-Haim, Arik Einstein and others. This is a story of pioneering musical activity, part of an enterprise of building Israeli culture. This is also the story of an artist who, looking back from a sober, unapologetic and unselfish perspective - recounts his achievements, doubts and personal and artistic choices.

Armenian Manuscripts of the David and Jemima Jeselsohn Collection is devoted to the five Armenian codices in the Jeselsohn collection in Zurich. Of great importance for Armenian studies and the history of art more generally, they represent various literary types, including biblical, hagiographic, homiletic, and liturgical texts. They also reflect an array of visual and artisanal traditions, connected to artistic centres in the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, Constantinople, and New Julfa, and span a period of over 300 years. A newly identified Sargis Picak manuscript is of exceptional importance for the study of medieval Armenian art, for its images, for Sargis’ colophons, and for a a hitherto unstudied ivory plaque of the Transfiguration. A Ritual of 1586 holds particular importance for scholars of the Armenian liturgy and its development in sixteenth-century Jerusalem. Also presented is a beautiful parchment leaf of the opening of the Gospel of John, studied and published previously by Michael and Nira Stone, and likely originating from a Bible produced in seventeenth-century New Julfa. Two Gospel Books complete this study: one from New Julfa, dated to 1695, and another likely produced in late seventeenth or early eighteenth-century Constantinople. This book was initiated and supported by David Jeselsohn, avid and longtime collector of archaeological artifacts, manuscripts, and Judaica. It was written jointly by Michael Stone and Christina Maranci. Maranci is an art historian and Stone is a specialist in Armenian philology, palaeography and codicology. Maranci bears primary responsibility for research on the miniatures – their art-historical analysis and iconography as well as their attribution, date, and context. Stone contributed the textual, codicological and palaeographical research, including translation of the colophons from the Classical Armenian (Grabar) into English, and catalogued the contents of all five manuscripts.

In 1491 the renowned goldsmith Salomone da Sesso converted to Catholicism. Born to a Jewish family in Florence, Salomone later settled in Ferrara, where he was regarded as a virtuoso artist. But rumors circulated about Salomone’s behavior, scandalizing the Mantuan Jewish community, who turned him over to the civil authorities. Salomone was condemned to death for sodomy but agreed to renounce Judaism to save his life. He was baptized, taking the name Ercole “de’ Fedeli” (“One of the Faithful”). Drawing on newly discovered archival sources, Tamar Herzig traces the dramatic story of his life, half a century before ecclesiastical authorities made Jewish conversion a priority of the Catholic Church. The book explores the Jewish world in which Salomone was raised; the glittering objects he crafted, and their status as courtly hallmarks; and Ercole’s relations with his wealthy patrons. Herzig also examines the response of Jewish communities and Christian authorities to allegations of sexual crimes, and attitudes toward homosexual acts among Christians and Jews. In Salomone/Ercole’s story we see how precarious life was for converts from Judaism, and how contested was the meaning of conversion for both the apostates’ former coreligionists and those tasked with welcoming them to their new faith.

An Internal-External Journey presents an interdisciplinary educational approach, a toolbox and lesson plans developed by the author on the topic of creative education: integrating the arts in teaching and education. The approach was developed following many years of experience in the field of education, and the lesson plans were passed on to teaching students at Kibbutzim College. The book is intended for educators engaged in guidance, teaching and training of teachers. Creative education and the integration of arts in teaching allow students to embark on a two-way journey: inward to themselves, and outward to the cultural and academic texts. The book describes an initiation process using paint, newspaper clippings, glue and plasticine, and a combination of meditation, writing, reading and the play, knowing that it is important for future teachers to experience the springs of creativity up close. "This is an educational gem. It is a very unusual book with a lot of pedagogical understanding, a very interesting work, based on the wisdom of the field and a lot of experience." - Prof. Anat Zohar, School of Education, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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.