The book deals with the conceptual and practical transformation of history as modern science and art between 1740 and 1940. The book concentrates on the work of six major historians who turned history from its rhetorical classical models of "teaching by examples" into a meaningful investigation narration of human life. Common to them as was the belief that human life and history are made by human being like themselves, by themselves.

The Babylonian Talmud is the Jewish composition of greatest scope, and its influence on Jewish life is decisive. Jewish sages have devoted more time and energy to its study and halakhic interpretation than to any other book, including the Bible, to the extent that "talmud Torah," Torah study, is mainly perceived as the study of the Babylonian Talmud. Its academic study, in contrast, is still in its initial stages. Critical editions, with the text based on the best manuscripts and an exhaustive and thorough critical commentary, have been published of only a few of the thirty-seven tractates of the Babylonian Talmud. Central questions pertaining to the manner of the formulation of the Talmud, its redaction, and its transmission are still unresolved. This is different from the state of research of other Rabbinic works, the study of which has taken significant strides in recent decades. Critical, balanced, and cautious interpretation of talmudic sugyot (discursive units) will likely illustrate the treasures to be revealed by a scholarly reading of the Babylonian Talmud: illuminating new facets of which traditional study is unaware; the consistent presentation of its meticulous literary fashioning, its contentual depth, and the creative force embodied in this corpus. All these find expression even in sugyot that seem tenuous and bothersome to the traditional student. Tiqqun Olam (Repairing the World) seeks to advance the research of the Babylonian Talmud with an annotated edition of the fourth chapter of Tractate Gittin, which contains various regulations that were enacted "for tiqqun olam." This chapter was chosen for the wide variety of its topics and the redactive methods employed, and for the benefit to be gained from their critical analysis. The widespread study of this chapter in high schools and yeshivot also influences its selection, in the hope it will aid both students and scholars in highlighting his difficulties and in exposing the overt and covert trends of the Amoraim and the redactors of the sugyot. The first chapter of this book examines the meanings of the term "tiqqun olam" in the Mishnah and the Tosefta, along with the structure of the tannaitic units containing regulations "for the repairing of the world" in these two tannaitic works. The main body of the book contains a systematic discussion of these mishnayot and sugyot, using philological-historical methodology, alongside the literary analysis, which has not been sufficiently developed in talmudic research to now. The talmudic text is divided into forty-nine sugyot. For each the book offers a new text based on MS. Firkovich 187, a list of parallels, a selection of textual variants and discussion of their originality, and a commentary. The commentary includes a detailed explanation of the sugyot and an analysis of their strata. A unique attempt is made to glean from within the traces of the difficulties within the sugyot and the dissonance they exhibit the aims of the redactors, who frequently formulated new laws, while devoting sophisticated literary effort in order to mask these innovations, and to impart to the sugyah a harmonious composition. In this book, much effort was invested to reveal the plain meaning of the Talmud, employing the tools of scholarly research - which, for various reasons, are not integrated into the widespread study of the Talmud today. The book undertakes to open a window to the academic world and its methodology, to enable Talmud students to come to know the world of Babylonian Talmud scholarship that is both demanding and profound, but also intriguing, while offering new insights.

According to its Declaration of Independence, the State of Israel "will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex". However, the equality between men and women in Israel was not de facto. What did Israeli women have to say about that? The book presents views and opinions of Israeli women in the 1950s and the early 1960s about their roles and duties in the public and the domestic spheres, based on contemporary women's sections in the press and women's magazines. It shows what women said about women in the Israeli parliament (Knesset) and about Golda Meir; women's service in the Israeli Defense Force and the exclusion of women from the public sphere; motherhood and parenthood, woman's right to choose to have an abortion and women's struggle for peace; women's duties as housewives and the discrimination of women as employees. The book also uncovers a forgotten feminist journal, sheds light on a famous adoption story of a Yemenite baby and discusses a protest of female cadets in the Israeli Air Force flight course that was ignored and silenced for many years. The book unveils Israeli women's voices from the past, which show that in an era of many fateful decisions, Israeli women also made choices that affected their status in society. Readers might find these decisions relevant vis-à-vis women's status in Israeli society nowadays.

MA'ARAG: The Israel Annual of Psychoanalysis is a democratic forum for psychoanalytic research, practice, and criticism published through the initiative and cooperation of the Sigmund Freud Center for Study and Research in Psychoanalysis of the Hebrew University, Israeli Association for Self Psychology and the Study of Subjectivity, Israel Society for Analytical Psychology, Israel Psychoanalytic Society, Israel Institute for Group Analysis, Tel-Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and the Israel Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. This issue contains the following essays: Hila Elyakam and Devora Rosner-Wachs | THE ROLE OF THE BODY EN ROUTE TO BUILDING THE BIONIAN CONTAINER: INTEGRATING SOMATIC EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHODYNAMIC PYCHOTHERAPY Dana Amir | STUDIUM AND PUNCTUM IN PSYCHOANALYTIC WRITING Dana Amir | THE ‘NEWSPEAK’ OF THE PERPETRATOR: REFLECTIONS ON THE PHENOMENON OF SCREEN CONFESSIONS Dorit Ashur | FREUD AS “MIDWIFE TO THE SOUL”: THE RESTORATION OF MATERNAL SEMIOTIC PROFUSION IN H.D.’S ANALYSIS WITH FREUD Micha Weiss | ETHICAL PRESENCE IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC ENCOUNTER: APOLOGY AS A POSSIBILITY Naomi Teller | TWO POEMS: TO CONTAIN DESIRE Moshe Landau | ON TRANSFORMATION FROM CHAOS AND BECOMING TO RHYTHM AND MENTALIZATION, AND THE RHYTHM IN THE TRANSFORMATION PROCESS FROM ‘O’ TO ‘K’ Rivka Matzner | PSYCHOANALYTIC CONSIDERATIONS ON THE MEETING POINT BETWEEN THE LURIANIC CONCEPT OF “LIGHTS AND VESSELS” AND BION’S CONCEPT OF “CONTAINER-CONTAINED” Ruth Netzer | ‘LISTEN TO HER’: POEMS ON THE ANALYST-PATIENT RELATIONSHIP Gila Ofer, Batya Shoshani and Michael Shoshani | WHEN ONE PLUS ONE EQUALS ONE: THE VICISSITUDES OF CHOSING BETWEEN TRUTH AND BLINDNESS IN THE OEDIPAL MYTH, AND THE FILM “INCENDIES” Gal Kachman | SILENT GRAVES AND TRANSIENT LIFE: ON SUBJECTIVITY AND MELANCHOLY IN THE WRITINGS OF ABRAHAM AND TOROK Victor Rubinov | THE CAPACITY FOR SUBJECTIVITY Merav Roth | TEARING UP THE LETTER AND THE URGE TO GET RID OF THE OBJECT Alejandra Sternschein | MY LANGUAGE, MY SPEECH, AND MY EXPRESSION: REFLECTIONS ON MULTIPLE LANGUAGES IN THE PSYCHIC SPACE OF THE ANALYTIC PROCESS Ofer Shinar Levanon | BETWEEN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC AND THE ARTISTIC ENCOUNTER: REFLECTIONS ON THE SHARED WORK OF THE COMPOSER YONI RECHTER AND THE POETS AVRAHAM HALFI, DAHLIA RAVIKOVITCH AND ELI MOHAR

This study delves into Israeli political life in 1947–1952, focusing on several main emphases: the crucial moment when statehood was decided upon, the election campaign for the Constitutional Assembly (which transformed itself into the First Knesset), Israel’s struggle for de facto and de jure American recognition, and Chaim Weizmann’s term as Israel’s first president.

Man and Nature , the most notable work by A. D. Gordon (1860-1922) was written mostly during the second decade of the twentieth century. It is an original philosophical work, which revolves around the ethics, aesthetics and philosophy of religion. In addition to presenting a comprehensive philosophical theory in Hebrew, Gordon discusses issues which became more and more central in the generations that followed him – like ecology, gender and the rejuvenation of Judaism. By returning to nature Gordon advocates a full life of creation. This new edition contains sections from the Dgania Alef archives, which were omitted from previous editions. In the introduction, the editors describe how the text deviates from the time and place in which it was written, explaining the recent wave of renewed interest in Gordon’s writings.

A dialogue between Michal Zmora-Cohen and Moshe Zuckermann on the development of music in the 20th century. While Zmora-Cohen criticized this development, Zuckermann defended it. The discourse has musicological, historical and philosophical aspects.

Contiruptance: Poetical Fluctuations in Naomi Frankel’s Work is the first book dedicated to Frankel's literary work, offering an in-depth reading of her entire fictional oeuvre. The concept of "Contiruptance," which indicates ruptures and continuity, provides insight into Frankel's poetics; suggesting that it may serve to deepen the analysis of the works of other authors.

In his book History, Literature, Critical Theory (2013), the historian Dominique La Capra presented the ways in which the voice of the narrator in the 19th and 20th century novel came to a collapse, which reflects the modern traumatic experience. This study employs this theoretical prism in order to construct a cultural dimension of 20th century Jewish poetics - a dimension in which trauma is reflected in its linguistic representation, but also shapes this same representation. The book offers an understanding of Jewish literature in the 20th century as a far-reaching cultural experience, in which the human figure is not made possible by words, but rather collapses into the animal, the absence, the broken witness, the Muslim, the eastern, the Arab and the queer.

This is the first comprehensive introduction to India’s history and civilization in Hebrew. It reflects decades of teaching by both authors, often together, at the Hebrew University, as well as long periods of residence in India. The book is structured chronologically, from prehistoric times to the twenty-first century, and includes, within a historical framework, numerous anecdotes, stories, and poems never before translated into Hebrew. Taken together, these are meant to give the lay readers--backpackers, couch travelers, India lovers, and other curious minds--a savory taste of India’s rich cultural menu.

In the few years after his retirement from public life and before he was sentenced to suicide, the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote the majority of his texts, which included over one hundred letters of wisdom (espistulae morales) sent to his friend Lucilius. These letters are considered the first appearance of literary letters in Roman prose. The letters are philosophical essays written by a very wise and witty old man concluding his life, an autobiography of our spiritual world. The issues that interested Seneca are eternally relevant.

This book sheds new light on the history of the sanctity of Jerusalem in Islam. It is noticed already in the Quran which describes Muhammad's vision of a nocturnal journey from the "sacred mosque" (al-masjid al-ḥarām) in Mecca to the "far-off mosque" (al-masjid al-aqṣā) namely, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. In his night journey to the site of the demolished Temple, Muhammad signaled to his contemporary Jews the course of salvation in which already Moses had led the Children of Israel to their promised land. On the other hand, the Quran praises also the Abrahamic sanctity of Mecca, especially in sūras which reflect the polemical rift with the Jews who eventually refused to recognize Muhammad as their messianic savior. After the death of Muhammad, when the first Muslims came from Arabia to Palestine, their awareness of the Quranic sanctity of al-Masjid al-Aqṣā resurfaced. This book elucidates major aspects of the renewed and growing sanctity of Jerusalem and al-Sham at large, as reflected in the available Islamic traditions. These traditions show also how patterns of the sanctity of Jerusalem were eventually adapted to Mecca in reaction to the growing prestige of Jerusalem, especially during the Umayyad period.

The book deals with challenges to the identity and stability of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. The first part of the book deals with the challenges that arise from all cultural groups in Israeli society: Arabs, migrant workers, religious Zionists, ultra-Orthodox, traditionalists, Olim from the former Soviet Union, Jews of Ethiopian origin, secular Jews. The second section deals with the ideological challenges that arise from the radical left and the religious and secular nationalist right. The third section deals with the significant issues in which there is a conflict between the Jewish and democratic identity of the State of Israel: the minority status of Arab Israeli citizens; Israeli control of Judea and Samaria; religious and state relations in Israel and the possibility of presenting an outline to strengthen Israel's Jewish and democratic identity at the same time.

Aron Menczer (1917-1943) was an active member of the Zionist youth movement Gordonya. After the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938, he became deeply involved in the efforts of the Youth Aliyah to enable Jewish youngsters to emigrate from Austria to Palestine. Menczer postponed his own Aliyah in order to continue to work for the exit of Jewish youth from Nazi Austria, and became in September 1939 the director of the Youth Aliyah in Vienna. His absolute devotion to the emigration efforts and to the educational work with the remaining Jewish youngsters in Vienna made him their recognized leader. Menczer was deported to Ghetto Theresienstadt in September 1942, where he continued his educational work. In October 1943 he was transported to Birkenau with a group of 1196 children, who were brought to Theresienstadt from Bialistok, and with 52 adults who, like him, volunteered to take care of them. They were all murdered there. The personality and deeds of Aron Menczer are the center of the book. A couple of chapters deal with the historical background: the Nazi policy of pressuring Jews to exit the country, prior to the phase of deportation and murder, and the efforts by the Youth Aliyah and other organizations to rescue them. The book is based on the original German version edited by Joanna Nittenberg und Benjamin Kaufmann. Two new parts were added to the current Hebrew version, edited by Jacob (Kobi) Metzer . One is a comprehensive introduction which examines Menczer’s activity in light of some general issues raised in the research literature. The other part consists of archival sources which were added to the book for additional insights.

The Hebrew Bible is the cornerstone of Judaism and Jewish culture; as such, it also provides the foundation for the other two monotheistic religions, Christianity and Islam. It is a book that embodied numerous revolutions, the most prominent of which was the Monotheistic Revolution, the replacement of polytheism with the belief in one all-powerful God who both created the world and governs it. Among the other revolutionary ideas that are put forward by the Bible we find the establishment of the Sabbath, the granting of one city — Jerusalem — a monopoly over holiness, the opposition to human kingship, and the moral dimensions of prophecy, to name just a few. Over the centuries and millennia, these revolutionary ideas have continued to attract and inspire readers, believers, interpreters and artists.

The Quran is the holy scripture of a religion that has changed the world. It contains the speech of God unto Muhammad the prophet, and through him unto his entire generation -- Idolatrous Arabs, Jews and Christians. This book delineates the major issues which are discovered as one reads through the Quran: How God was revealed to the prophet; in what manner he speaks to him; how he guides the prophet to enlarge the community of believers and face his opponents; how he defines the community of believers; what are the moral and ethical codes which he lays down for them; what is the image of God; what is the religion of Islam which God calls the people to follow; what are the practical ways for expressing the belief in the unity of God; the Abrahamic faith to which one must adhere so as to become a true Muslim. The present book also reviews God's polemics with Jews, Christians and idolaters; the status of the scriptures of the Jews and the Christians; the conditions of war and peace with the unbelievers at large; the descriptions of the resurrection and the day of judgment, as well the colorful descriptions of paradise and hell.

David Biale’s Gershom Scholem traces Scholem’s tumultumous life, tying together his scholarly studies with his political activism and cultural criticism. By mining a rich trove of diaries, letters and other writings, Biale shows how Scholem’s inner life must be understood as the necessary background to understanding his most important writings. Far from a dry, ivory-tower scholar, Scholem emerges as a passionately engaged man of his times, whose life encompassed the most significant events of the Jewish twentieth-century: World War I, the rise of Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust, and the creation of the state of Israel.

The book is concerned with the main trends in Jewish Liturgy during Late Antiquity and its connections and inter relations with Aramaic Targum, Midrash, mysticism, popular beliefs, structure and rhyme patterns as performed amid Late Antique Synagogues in Palestine, as well as the later spread of these fertile products to Southern Italy and then to the rest of Europe. The book discusses the different layers of poets and performers as presented in ancient manuscripts which were preserved in the Cairo Geniza collections and later in European Mahzorim, and the fascinating struggle of survival of the different liturgical cycles.

This is a book on one of Buenos Aires's neighborhoods, Villa Crespo, considered by many a Jewish district, and its football team Club Atletico Atlanta. Through the lens of this neighborhood institution, Rein offers an absorbing social history of Jews in Latin America. Since the end of World War II, there has been a conspicuous Jewish presence among the fans, administrators and presidents of the Atlanta football club. For the first immigrant generation, belonging to this club was a way of becoming Argentine. For the next generation, it was a way of maintaining ethnic Jewish identity. Now it is nothing less than a family tradition for third generation Jewish-Argentines to support Atlanta. The book offers a rare window into the rich culture of everyday life in the city of Buenos Aires, created by Jewish immigrants and their descendants.

The question of theodicy has preoccupied philosophers and theologians throughout generations. Roughly: If God is moral, how can there be evil in the world? Or: Is the existence of evil not evidence against the existence of a righteous God? This question became the greatest philosophical challenge for the believer, and the main device in the hands of atheists. The question of theodicy also raises a second-order discussion, about the nature of the challenge: Is there a logical contradiction between a moral God and the existence of evil? If not, what sort of tension is this? Can the attributes of God be thought of in a coherent manner? Does the very existence of evil give rise to the challenge, or only the existence of unnecessary evil? The present research addresses Kant’s take on theodicy. It focuses mainly on two Kantian assertions that seem to disaccord with Kant’s theory of freedom: 1. That evil is entrenched in mankind, and 2. That if all-inclusive moral-order is impossible, the moral-law is erroneous. The conclusion, based on close examination of Kant’s argumentation, is that Kant did not exclude theodicy from rational discourse, but rather redefined the challenge enclosed in the question of theodicy.

The articles in this volume originated, in large part, as papers presented at a conference convened by the Melton Coalition for Creative Interaction in December 2014 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The Melton Coalition is a consortium of the three Melton Centers established over the years by the visionary philanthropist Samuel Mendel Melton: at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Ohio State University. The conference was devoted to the various forms of interaction that obtain between the oral and the textual modes of discourse in Jewish history and contemporary Jewish life. Some of the essays dwell on oral and textual media in historical context – while others place more emphasis on the contemporary educational implications of the phenomena under discussion. All the essays in this volume articulate patterns of oral and written discourse that can greatly enrich our knowledge of both the history of Jewish culture and the theory and practice of Jewish education.

In this book, the complicated relationship between religion and nation, as well as the relationship between nationalism and the process of secularization are discussed from a multidisciplinary perspective. In the last decades these issues attracted considerable research and public interest throughout the world. The book consists of articles from renowned scholars dealing with the relations between religion, secularism and nationalism in general, in prominent historical patterns as expressed in German, English, American, Turkish, Polish and Russian nationalism, and in the Jewish-Israeli context . The book's articles shed light on the phenomena of nationalism and secularization, in light of contemporary research on these two fascinating fields .

It has been said: " No two people have ever read the same book." This is true for literature where the reader has to imagine a world presented by words. It doesn't seem appropriate for cinema which presents a world ready-made to be seen and heard. But films, almost since their early beginnings, and especially in the recent decades, have been capable not to present, not to show, but to allude to off-screen events and images. One could say about most of the movies discussed in this book: " No two people have ever watched the same film ".

In 2018, some 770 health technology systems costing 3 billion shekels were submitted to the Israeli Health Basket Committee as candidates for public funding. The committee chose 107 of them, amounting to 460 million shekels, the total sum of its state budget. The need to prioritize medical technologies exists in most health systems worldwide. A Basic Course in Health Technology Assessment provide the tools for making tough decisions faced by such committees.

This book is an updated Hebrew translation of The Modulated Scream: Pain in Late Medieval Culture . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. The subject of this book is human pain in the later middle ages (13 th - 15 th centuries) in Western Europe. The author surveys and analyzes the ways people wrote about pain in different situations (like the difference between childbirth and toothache), and the ways people described their own pains. In a world with very few pain-killers and nothing at all to make surgery bearable, people suffered much more pain than we do today. Consequently, since they could not banish pain, they sought meanings for it. Physicians claimed that one should not try to soothe pain, since pain was an indicator of disease and as such, it was useful. Lawyers and judges claimed that the infliction of pain by torture was a tried-and-true method for eliciting true confessions from criminal suspects. Experts in Christian theology debated the nature of Christ’s pain during his Crucifixion, and mystics tried to identify with it, even to feel it. The common people were exhorted by preachers to bear their illnesses with patience, since pain on earth saved them future sufferings in the afterworld. In conclusion, medieval attitudes towards pain were radically different from modern ones: while we try and conquer pain, seeing it as a challenge, people in the past, who were often in constant pain, gave reasons for suffering and adopted pain as part of their lives.

In his article entitled “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness”, David Chalmers divides the study of consciousness into two parts: the easy problems and the hard problems. The easy problems are those related to neurological/functional/cognitive processes. In contrast, the hard problem is the study of consciousness which is related to the subjective experience. In recent decades brain researchers have joined the race to understand consciousness. Most of them adopt an approach according to which any advance made in the study of neurological activity is also an advance in the study of consciousness. I contend that the gap between brain activities and the subjective experience cannot be bridged, among other things because consciousness is not confined within the brain. This book hence proposes that consciousness extends from the brain to the body and from only from there does it burst forth into the world. One of the book’s main arguments is that the world itself serves as our best model, without any need for representation or a central control system within our brains. Therefore, to better understand the subjective experience we must examine how human beings are present and act within the world.

In this issue we have articles, in Hebrew, by Professor Avi Ohry, on sanatoria in the Land of Israel, and by Reuven Gafni, on Russian-born Olga Feinberg who served the Arab and Jewish communities in Jericho during the British Mandate until forced to leave, with the destruction of her home, during the riots of 1936–1939. Dror Hubara looks at the example of providing quality medical care in a poor neighborhood in Israel, that of the old Yemenite settlement of Kfar Shiloaḥ close to the Mount of Olives, which came to an end in 1939. Moshe Pinchuk considers Hippocratic and Mesopotamian medicine in the texts of the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds. In her intriguing article Adaya Hadar looks at how the human pulse and its rhythms were understood by the early Hassidic masters, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi and Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, in different spiritual and metaphysical ways. Zipora Shehory-Rubin and Shifra Shvarts contribute an important addition to our understanding of school doctors from the Ottoman period till the end of the British Mandate. This saw the beginnings of provision of health services to students, pioneered by physicians like Dr. Hillel Yaffe (1864–1936) and Dr. Mordechai Brachyahu (1882–1959), first hygienist physician in Israel. In the English section Samuel Kottek also looks at medicine in the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds, reviewing several texts on medicine and hygiene, while Edward Reichman features an unusual medical halachic case tried many times as a ritual murder and focusing, partly, on the religious practices of Jews regarding removing a fetus at the time of death, or soon after. Much has been written about Mordechai Gumpel (Gumpertz) Schnaber Leviso(h)n and his role in the early Haskalah movement but Kenneth Collins’ paper concentrates on the years he spent in London and the links he established there with Christian Hebraists and freemasons, as well as on his medical studies with the famed Hunter brothers and his London medical practice and writings. His short Historical Note examines the question whether the early enlightenment rabbi, Baruch Schick of Shklov, was in London in the early 1770s during the time of Levisohn’s period there. Ephraim Nissan looks at the life and death of the Polish-Jewish neurologist Maksymilian Rose (1883–1937), considering the causes of his sudden death in prewar Vilna, which still has significance some eighty years later. Prof. Avi Ohry offers an important account of the career of Berthe Neoussikine (Batia Nose-Chen), a largely forgotten figure from rehabilitation medicine and electro-physiology in France and Israel. Korot has been carrying articles from the regular workshops and conferences on Medicine and the Shoah organized by Boaz Cohen, Miriam Offer and Shmuel Reis and, following the international event held in Akko last year, we plan to publish several papers on this topic in our next issue.

The dictionary mainly covers the Hebrew component in languages that have not been documented or that have been documented less than that of the prestigious Judeo-languages, Yiddish and Latino. Thus, it encompasses the different dialects of Judeo-Arabic from North Africa, Yemen and Iraq, and to some extent from Syria, Judeo-Georgian and Judeo-Persian. Other languages are included sporadically. It also includes Haketiya (Moroccan Judeo-Spanish), Judeo-Italian and others.

Many Voices in the Prose of Shulamith Hareven by Yael Balaban is the first book-size monograph dedicated to Hareven’s oeuvre. It offers for the first time a deep understanding of Hareven’s fiction, including her early short stories, City of Many Days , and Thirst – the Desert Trilogy . Hareven’s unique voice has been missed by contemporary critics, as both her ideas and her poetics were ahead of her time: She wrote about sexual abuse long before the subject ever entered public discourse; wrote about the “second generation” of Holocaust survivors before the term was established; and created Mizrahi and Arab characters very different from the stereotypic characters in contemporary Hebrew literature. It is time to re-read Shulamith Hareven’s work and discover beautiful stories suffused with moral and social sensitivity and a profound commitment to language and literature .

The Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie (1892-1975) was one of the most fascinating and mysterious figures of the twentieth century; a potent man of small dimensions, a cruel and generous leader, abstinent yet extravagant, a petty politician and statesman who took part in one of the most important junctions in history – the battle against Mussolini. He was a young revolutionist and aging reactionary, worshipped by many as the son of god. He sought asylum in Jerusalem, only to betray it later. A ruthless leader whose life ended in solitude, humiliation, and murder. Time Magazine named Haile Selassie “Man of the Year” in 1935, and he was among the “Top 25 Political Icons in History” in 2011.

16 October 1943 is one of the most intense, troubling and spectacular works ever written on a single event in the Holocaust of Europe's Jews. This text embodies a stylistic combination of almost real-time journalism, powerful poetic and emotional literature and a profound philosophical essay on the Nazi's behavioral patterns. Giacomo Debenedetti, a distinguished Jewish-Italian author, journalist, and literary critic and theorist describes in 16 October 1943 the terrors of the raid of the Ghetto of Rome. The story (for it is first and foremost a story) unfolds, with piercing, terrifying language, the deportation of one Jewish community within the Nazi extermination mechanism.

The book discusses the development of the punishment theory of the Sages. The author traces the formulation course of this law by comparing a historical-philological study of Tannaitic writings and the writings of the Essenes sect .

We are pleased to present the readers with volume 18 of Massorot, published through the cooperation of the Center for Jewish Languages and Literatures and the Jewish Oral Traditions Research Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The present volume contains nine articles and a review (with additional notes) of an unpublished Hebrew–Yiddish dictionary. The contributions include work by established authorities in the field of Jewish language research, as well as the fruit of younger researchers who have recently joined their ranks. The diversity of the scholarship in the present volume is to be seen in the wide variety of languages discussed, the varied linguistic and literary topics analyzed, as well as the diverse periods in which the sources studied were produced. In his article, Moshe Bar-Asher analyzes the Romance component in the varieties of Judeo-Arabic spoken in recent generations in Ksar Es-Souk, Morocco. Chava Turniansky focuses on the Hebrew component in literary Yiddish as an indicator of the level of traditional education of the writers incorporating it in works they composed in the second decade of the 18th century. Michal Held examines reflections of spoken Judeo-Spanish woven into the weave of a contemporary Hebrew novel. Ilil Baum analyzes the use of the productive suffix -ad̠a in Judeo-Spanish as compared with the use of its cognates in non-Jewish languages of Ibero-Romance stock. Hanoch Gamliel argues in his article that some of the lĕ‘azim (or Old Judeo-French explanatory elements) adduced in Rashi’s commentary on the Torah should be understood as examples of grammatical categories rather than as lexical correspondents. Two of the articles in the present volume deal with problems of translation. Michael Ryzhik examines how the Hebrew names of birds and fowl appearing in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 were rendered in Judeo-Italian Bible translations from the 15th and 16th centuries. Shay Matsa focuses on the linguistic characteristics of a modern Arabic translation of the Passover Haggadah produced in 2003 by a Jew from Syria, examined in the light of personal observations made to the author by the translator himself. Ora (Rodrigue) Schwarzwald compares the linguistic features of two texts in Ladino composed by the same author, Rabbi Meir Benveniste of mid-16th-century Salonika. Efraim Hazan presents and analyzes a letter of friendship in Hebrew verse from Morocco; the numerical value of the Hebrew letters of each stanza (except one) is 654, corresponding to the Hebrew year ([5]654 = 1894) in which the letter was written. The closing article focuses on an unpublished Hebrew–Yiddish dictionary written by Meir Berger in the 1970s. This article includes an introduction by Berger’s former student, Chava Turniansky, and personal notes by his son, Yitzhaq Berger. These are followed by Yitskhok Niborski’s review of Berger’s dictionary, in which it is compared with the 1960 Hebrew–Yiddish dictionary of Mordechai Tsanin. Niborski’s review was translated from Yiddish into Hebrew by Moshe Taube. The book features article summaries in English.

This book describes the special customs belonging to the way of life and the communities of Ashkenazi Jews.

This is a platform for scholarly analysis of major issues confronting contemporary Jewish education thus reflecting the new age of examination and research emerging in that world. The list of contributors to these volumes includes experts in the different disciplines of Jewish Studies, academics that apply the scholarly tools of the Social Sciences to the study of Jewish education, scholars interested in the interdisciplinary aspects of Jewish Studies and their implications for Jewish education, educational leaders and directors of visionary educational institutions. Colleagues, students and friends have all contributed enquiries into the issues that have stood at the center of Mike's professional concerns. Languages and Literatures in Jewish Education thus invites the reader to participate in the ongoing dialogue on the key issues of Jewish existence and education today.

Is there a justification for continuous debate about Orthodox Judaism? This collection of articles presents Orthodox Judaism as a rich and varied phenomenon, from a new historic, social and geographic perspective.

Peter Singer’s remarkably clear and comprehensive Practical Ethics has become a classic introduction to applied ethics since its publication in 1979 and has been translated into many languages. For this second edition the author has revised all the existing chapters, added two new ones, and updated the bibliography. He has also added an appendix describing some of the deep misunderstanding of and consequent violent reaction to the book in Germany, Austria and Switzerland where the book has tested the limits of freedom of speech. The focus of the book is the application of ethics to difficult and controversial social questions. • Revised and updated second edition • Written in a clear and accessible style tackles topical and controversial personal and social problems

Exploring the military, legal, social and literary aspects of ancient warfare this study examines the multifaceted nature of the siege phenomenon in the ancient Near East. The book is based on Akkadian and biblical (and, to lesser degree, Greek, Aramaic, Egyptian, Hittite and Ugaritic) sources as well as on the depictions on reliefs from Assyrian palaces and Egyptian temples. The analysis incorporates lexical study and military thinking and focuses on the technology of warfare and human behavior is a state of emergency.

This book offers a new theoretical approach to the practice of organization consulting. Following Pierre Bourdieu's Theory of Practice, the new approach, "habitus-oriented organizational consulting", sees thinking and behavior a result of social dispositions (habitus) which develop in the interaction between practice and social structures such as culture, organizing metaphors, power relations and practical knowledge. The habitus-oriented organizational consulting incorporates the social with the individual through habitus .

The Biographies of the Severi emperors are part of a Roman Emperor biography collection known as SCRIPTORES HISTORIAE AUGUSTAE, and in short - 'History Augusta'. Introduced, translated and annotated by David Golan

The religious transformations that marked late antiquity represent an enigma that has challenged some of the West’s greatest thinkers. But the oppositions between paganism and Christianity that characterize prevailing theories have endured for too long. Instead of describing this epochal change as an evolution within the Greco-Roman world from polytheism to monotheism, he argues that the cause for this shift can be found not so much around the Mediterranean as in the Near East . The End of Sacrifice points to the role of Judaism, particularly its inventions of new religious life following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. . The end of animal sacrifice gave rise to new forms of worship, with a concern for personal salvation, for scriptural study, for rituals like praying and fasting, and with the rise of religious communities and monasticism. It is what Christianity learned from Judaism about texts, death, and, above all, sacrifice that allowed it to supersede Greco-Roman religions and transform religion itself.

The State of Israel is a unique phenomenon of a Western state where the majority of lands (more than 90 percent) are still owned by the State and by a public body related to it – The Jewish National Fund. At the root of the national ownership of land lies the divine command stating that the Land of Israel belongs to God and therefore should not be traded in perpetuity. This principle, which was anchored in the Jewish National Fund’s Articles of Association and Regulations, was also adopted by the State of Israel in the first decade after its establishment, in the framework of a Basic Law and three land laws ensuring that most of the State lands would remain in the hands of the State. The book describes and analyzes the history of the ideological, social and legal processes that took place in Israel with regard to the adoption of the national land principle, and is based wholly on primary sources, mainly government and Knesset discussions concerning the legislation process of the above mentioned laws.

This book present for the first time a comprehensive outlook at the field of internationalization in education combining a solid theoretical background with empiric studies within Israeli educational settings. This book contributes to the theory on globalization and education and it provides novel insights for scholars, students and practitioners within the discipline.

Hinneh – a new and revised 3-volume edition A Biblical Hebrew Textbook unlike Any Other Introduction Hinneh balances two major demands of an introductory language program: the presentation of the most frequently occurring lexical and grammatical examples, and the sequencing of the material in a way that allows for easier teaching and learning. · Enables a rigorous yet non-intimidating learning experience for students of different levels. · Provides the skills and tools necessary to allow students to independently access most biblical texts early on. · Gradually builds students’ knowledge through wide exposure to a large number of biblical verses, prose, and poetry, accompanied by translation exercises. · Offers many styles and different possible interpretations of various biblical texts so that students can independently and critically examine and evaluate biblical translations. · Employs learning methods informed by second language pedagogy and related fields (e.g. order of presentation determined by both frequency and “learnability,” “Color by root groups” to internalize the complex verb system, etc.). · A textbook and workbook for both the academic and non-academic classroom, as well as for the independent learner. Rahel Halabe is a designer, developer, and instructor of both Biblical and Modern Hebrew curricula with more than 20 years of experience. For more information on Hinneh: Biblical Hebrew, The Practical Way please visit http://hebrew-with-halabe.com . To contact Halabe email rahel@hebrew-with-halabe.com . Chinese description of Hinneh Articles by Rahel Halabe Halabe on Hinneh as a reference book for Hebrew teachers

AMILAT se honra en presentar el séptimo volumen de su serie Judaica Latinoamericana , que incluye una amplia selección de los trabajos presentados en la Sección América Latina del XV Congreso Mundial de Estudios Judaicos (Jerusalén 2009), por investigadores establecidos en las Américas e Israel, especializados en diversas disciplinas de las humanidades y las ciencias sociales. El volumen enfoca una variedad de temas pertenecientes a las experiencias históricas, sociales y culturales del judaísmo en América Latina, tanto respecto de lo que poseen en común como en cuanto a sus diferencias debidas a los diversos contextos nacionales. A ello se suman renovadoras propuestas metodológicas, necesarias en vista de fenómenos socio-culturales recientes originados en la globalización y el transnacionalismo, que se proyectan hacia el futuro de las investigaciones en el área.

The articles in this volume: The Legislation of War: A Study of the Story of the Israelite War against Midian (Numbers 31) - riel Kopilovitz ‘You shall hamstring their horses and burn their chariots’ (Joshua 11:6): The Identification of Horses and Chariots as the Weapons of Israel’s Enemies in Biblical Literature - Yakov Dolgopolsky-Geva A Complete Root Glossary of Canaanite Words and Forms from the Amarna Tablets - Esther Haber ‘We must have a king over us, that we may be like all the other nations’ (I Sam 8:19): Israelite Kings in Art - Irit Ziffer The Story of the Sons of God and the Daughters of Men (Gen. 6:1–4) in Light of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. Akkadian Itineraries: From the Kingdom of Akkad to the Assyrian Empire - Amitai Baruchi-Unna The Akkadian Wisdom Composition ‘Hear the Advice’: Traditional Wisdom versus Rebellious Skepticism - Yoram Cohen The Leqah Tov Commentary on Song of Songs: Its Place in the History of Biblical Exegesis and its Relationship with the Commentary of Rashi - Jonathan Jacobs Nachmanides’ Exegesis of Midrash in his Commentary on the Torah - Miriam Sklarz Additions and Changes in Nachmanides’ Commentaries relating to the Geography of Israel - David Shneor Book Reviews For contents and article abstracts please press " Sample pages "

The collection of articles in 'The Hebrew Language in the Era of Globalization' is designed for researchers and teachers of Hebrew in Educational frameworks, and allows for a comprehensive study of varied aspects of the Hebrew language. The volume brings to center stage research issues regarding Hebrew in its cultural, social, and linguistic contexts; discusses the state of Hebrew in Israel and in the world; and looks into current curricula for the teaching of Hebrew as a Second Language. The volume is unique in that it combines theory and practice; deals with Hebrew as a first, second, and heritage language; and relates to learners of different ages and from a number of different populations – native speakers of Hebrew, the Arab sector in Israel, and Jewish communities in the Diaspora. The volume is comprised of three sections. The first section covers the following topics: The state of Hebrew in the context of Israel-Diaspora relations; Hebrew in European and American universities; the dilemma of the language of prayer; challenges confronting the modern reader of a classical text; linguistic and socio-linguistic trends in modern Hebrew; achievements of new immigrant students in academic Hebrew; the theoretical basis for the development of curricula for the teaching of Hebrew as a first and second language; and a model for a language policy in a multilingual and multi-cultural society such as Israel. The second section presents the new curriculum for learners of Hebrew in the Arab sector as well as curricula for the teaching of Hebrew in the Diaspora for kindergarten children, elementary school students and junior-high and high school students. The third section expresses concern about the future of Hebrew both in Israel and in the Diaspora in the era of globalization.

The public discourse in Israel relates to girls mainly in connection to their body and associates their body with appearance, sexuality, vulnerability and victimization. The book Girls and their Bodies calls attention to the social construction of girls' bodies in Israel which tend to disavow, disregard, objectify and expose them simultaneously. This is the first time a book about the developing field of Girlhood Studies is published in Hebrew. The book chapters, written by a group of researchers and professionals who work with girls and are interested in advancing the understanding and support of girls, create a fascinating interdisciplinary mosaic regarding girls' bodies in Israel. They investigate from a critical gendered perspective, how the body is present, active, confined and silenced within cultural, educational, social, health and legal arenas. This collection illustrates a possible roadmap for future research in this field that will enrich the academic discourse and professional knowledge about girlhood, and in this way facilitate social action with and for girls.

The present volume is being published on the sixty-ninth anniversary of the Farhūd , the pogrom committed by religious and nationalist Arabs against the Jews of Iraq on the Jewish holiday of Pentecost ( Shavu‘ot ), 1–2 June 1941. The Hebrew edition of this book was published in 1992 by the Research Institute of Babylonian Jewry in Or Yehuda, Israel . This volume is a revised version of the Hebrew edition. The title consists of papers on the pogrom and on the events leading up to it which were originally published in English, others which were written in Hebrew and now appear in English for the first time, and documents which have not been previously published, including an updated list of the names of victims of the Farhūd and a map indicating the places in Baghdad where rioters attacked Jews. This book thus provides the English reader with comprehensive and updated information on the Farhūd and constitutes a memorial to the innocent victims killed during these pogroms and whose only crime was that they were Jews.

Samuel David Luzzatto (Italy, 1800-1865) stood at the head of the Rabbinical College of Padua for many years. He was a poet and researcher of literature, Bible commentator and philosopher, essayist and critic. In addition he corresponded with the major Jewish thinkers of his day on the Enlightenment, Reform movements, and nationalism. In all these areas he distinguished himself through his originality and honesty. These papers were delivered at a conference marking his bicentennial, where scholars from Israel, Italy, and France presented his contributions in the above fields. Anyone interested in Jewish studies, Italian Jewry, or intellectual currents of the nineteenth century will benefit from this collection.

MA‘ARAG: The Israel Annual of Psychoanalysis is a democratic forum for psychoanalytic research, practice, and criticism published through the initiative and cooperation of the Sigmund Freud Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis of the Hebrew University and the Israeli Association for Self Psychology and the Study of Subjectivity, the Israel Society for Analytical Psychology, the Israel Psychoanalytic Society, the Israel Institute for Group Analysis, the Israel Institute of Jungian Psychology, and the Tel-Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. The articles in this Volume: Efrat Even-Tzur - MORAL ACTION BY WAY OF FREE WILL FROM A PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEWPOINT: A LACANIAN READING OF FREUD AND KANT Dudi (Yehudah) Alon - “IDENTIFICATION” AND “CANNIBALISM” IN FREUD’S THOUGHT: CONCEPTS THAT ILLUSTRATE DELEUZE’S AND GUATTARI’S NOTION OF RHIZOMATIC THINKING Rivah Altman - “WHO IS COMING AFTER ME?” TWO MODES OF SIBLING TRANSFERENCE IN PSYCHOANALYTIC PSYCHOTHERAPY Rony Alfandary - DREAMING IN ALEXANDRIA: A PSYCHOANALYTICAL STUDY OF LAWRENCE DURRELL’S THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET Ruth Gat-Dubrov - ‘WETTING’ IN A SEA OF TEARS: THE JOURNEY FROM SYMPTOM TO THE OTHER Ditza Hananel - THE RAPE COMPLEX AND THE FEMININE OEDIPUS COMPLEX Joseph Triest - SEXUALITY AND ITS UNIQUE ROLE IN CONSTITUTING THE PSYCHOANALYTIC SUBJECT IN TERMS OF BODY-EGO AND OBJECT-EGO Refael Yonatan Leus - THE PRE-TRAUMATIC ZIONIST DREAM: A FREUDIAN STUDY OF BIBLICAL ETYMOLOGICAL INTERPERTATIONS OF THE NAME ‘ZION’ Ruth Netzer - FROM THE “TOTEMIC FEAST” TO THE “PEACHES OF ETERNITY:” FOOD SYMBOLISM FROM THE KITCHEN OF THE SOUL FROM A JUNGIAN PERSPECTIVE Shani Samai - THE LINES PLAY THEMSELVES: READING ‘THE THREE-LEGGED CHICKEN’ BY Y. KENAZ IN THE LIGHT OF DELEUZE’S AND GUATTARI’S CONCEPT OF ‘BECOMING’ Inbal Raz Brakin - REGARDING THE NAME-OF-THE-FATHER, THE DISCOURSE OF DESIRE, AND DEBT: A LACANIAN INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLICAL STORY OF MIRIAM THE PROPHETESS Michael Shoshani and Batya Shoshani - A TWISTED MOTHER-SON COALITION LEADING TO PERVERSE NARCISSISTIC SELF-CONFIGURATION

This dictionary is the outcome of a over 20 years fieldwork. It presents over 4000 entries and over 12000 subentries of the Hebrew component in Jewish languages, most of which were recorded from the mouth or informants. The research was focused on languages that were not studied at all or poorly studied: Judeo-Arabic of North Africa, Yemen and Iraq, Judeo-Georgian, Judeo-Persian and some Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects. The dictionary refers to thel literature relevant to this field and has systematic references to a dictionary on the Hebrew component in Judeo-Italian in the making by Prof. Maria Mayer-Modena. In some entries the dictionary functions merely as a bibliographical index. The examples are transliterated and translated into Hebrew. In parenthesis are given the intitals of the informants. Based on Shlomo Morag's records.

This book is the most comprehensive and complex study of reading that has taken place in Israel.

The Temple Mount is the most sacred site in Judaism and the third most sacred site of Islam in, after Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. The sacred nature of the site has made it one of the main foci of tension and friction in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Jewish fundamentalism and the Temple Mount is original and pioneering research on a number of radical and messianic movements in Israel that wish to, and at times, are making preparations to rebuild the Temple. The manuscript examines the theological roots and historical circumstances that have given rise to the movement of Temple Builders. It places the different movements within larger political, social and religious developments, offering the readers a context to understand the place of such groups within the larger Israeli, and global realities of our time. The research is described in the context of the fundamentalist phenomenon – a wave whose ramifications go far beyond the context of the Middle East. The research gives special attention to the connection between Jewish Temple Builders and Christian fundamentalist supporters and presents the theological exchanges that have taken place. The Book points to the Six Day War as a watershed event that has given rise to messianic interpretations of the Israeli victory and its significance for Jewish history. Israel’s’ overtaking of Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, resurrected and enhanced messianic convictions of Zionist Orthodoxy. However, the crystallizing during the 1980s-2000s of contemporary Messianic groups and their Temple oriented Messianic beliefs has driven not the euphoria of victory, but form the fear of disappointment. Those aspiring to build the Temple are afraid of an imminent loss of the territorial gains of made in the Six Day War, due to the peace process, and the theological implications of such setback to their messianic hopes.

Sifre is a Tannaitic midrash on the book of Numbers, and is rightfully considered to be one of the fundamental assets of our ancient literature. Its previous edition was published about hundred years ago by R. Hayyim Shaul Horovitz. Since then, additional manuscripts have been discovered of Sifre, its first commentators, and medieval collections and midrashim that cite it. This was accompanied by the significant development of the methodological conceptions of the study of the Rabbinic literature, and of the ways to publish critical editions of this literature. All these factors justify the publication of a new scientific edition of this midrash . The text of the new edition, that is based on MS. Vatican 32, includes many versions that differ from the earlier version, and that occasionally shed new light on the exegeses and halakhot of the Sifre. It is accompanied by the scholarly apparatus that lists and explains all of the edition's changes from the version of MS. Vatican. The number of direct and indirect textual witnesses presented in the "Textual Variants" section of the new edition is twice, and at times even triple, the number of textual witnesses that were available to Horowitz. In the detailed commentary on the expositions in Sifre, I made considerable use of all the Sifre commentators who preceded me, and who made a decisive contribution to the literal explanation of the midrash's exegeses and the clarification of their meaning. Thanks, however, to the diverse textual witnesses available to me and the great progress made in recent generations in the study of the language and teachings of the Tannaim, I believe that I have succeeded in recreating the original version of many expositions, in giving them a new and straightforward explanation, and in advancing the research of their redaction . The edition is intended, first and foremost, for the scholars, in Israel and throughout the world, who are engaged in the research of all aspects of the Rabbinic literature. Additionally, the new edition will likely aid the community of Torah scholars who teach and study in yeshivot, and the educated public at large. The first half of the work, comprising the portions of Naso and Beha'alotekha, was published by Magnes Press in 2011. Contents Part I: The Edition Volume 1 Preface Symbols of the textual witnesses of Sifre on Numbers List of symbols in the edition Introduction Editing rules for the text and the accompanying scholarly apparatus Textual variants Parallels passages in Talmudic literature The commentary Edition of Sifre on Numbers, portions of Naso and Beha'alotekha (the base text, and below it: 1. Scholarly notes to the base text; 2. Talmudic parallels; 3. Textual variants) Volume 2 Preface Edition of Sifre on Numbers, portions of Shelach till Masei (the base text, and below it: 1. Scholarly notes to the base text; 2. Talmudic parallels; 3. Textual variants) Part II Commentary on Sifre , Piska‛ot 1-58 (portion of Naso ) Part III Commentary on Sifre , Piska‛ot 59-106 (portion of Beha'alotekha ) Part IV Commentary on Sifre , Piska‛ot 107-161 (portions of Shelach – Masei ) List of abbreviations of the primary sources and the scholarly literature Indices

The Pensées is simply the compelling "Thoughts" of mathematician, physicist, and religious thinker Blaise Pascal. Originally intending to publish a book defending Christianity, Pascal died before he could complete it. The thoughts and ideas for his book were collected and compiled, posthumously, and then published as the Pensées. Pascal's thoughts are as powerful as they are comprehensive. He discusses with great wonder and beauty the human condition, the incarnation, God, the meaning of life, revelation, and the paradoxes of Christianity. He passionately argues for the Christian faith, using both argumentation and his famous "Wager." His ideas and arguments are sometimes developed and intricate, at other times, abrupt and mysterious.

This book offers an account of a key event in Jewish intellectual history that is also an important chapter in the history of Western philosophy: the dissemination of Maimonides’ chief philosophical work, the Guide of the Perplexed, through Samuel ibn Tibbon at the beginning of the 13th century in Southern France. Whereas Maimonides interpreted Judaism as a philosophical religion, Ibn Tibbon turned this interpretation into the foundation of Jewish philosophy up to Spinoza, making it into a systematic justification for studying Greco-Arabic philosophy and science in a religious setting. If Maimonides’ work was the gate through which philosophy became an important component of Jewish culture, Ibn Tibbon built the hinge without which this gate would have remained shut. The book examines Ibn Tibbon’s relationship to Maimonides in all its facets: how he translated Maimonides’ work from Arabic into Hebrew, explained its technical terminology, and interpreted and taught its doctrines. Due attention is also paid to Ibn Tibbon’s comprehensive criticism of Maimonides. The book includes the edition of what may be called the first commentary on the Guide: about 100 glosses attributed to Ibn Tibbon that were discovered through examining 145 manuscripts of Ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew translation. The glosses illustrate the different aspects of Ibn Tibbon’s relationship to Maimonides and the complex transition of Maimonides’ work from one cultural context to another.

Sifre on Numbers: An Annotated Edition Abstract Menahem Kahana I concluded the Preface to my work, Prolegomena to a New Edition of the Sifre on Numbers , that was published in 1982, by writing: "It is my hope that just as I was privileged to finish this Prolegomena , so, too, may I, aided by Heaven, be privileged to publish the edition itself". During the years that have passed since writing those lines, despite my concentrating on other topics, I continued to search for textual witnesses of the Sifre that were concealed in libraries throughout the world, in the East and the West, and I continued my efforts to interpret its expositions and decipher its hidden treasures. Now, after having completed the preparations for the entire edition and the commentary for the first half of the work, comprising the portions of Naso and Beha'alotekha , I decided the time has come to publish them. Sifre is a Tannaitic midrash on the book of Numbers, and is rightfully considered to be one of the fundamental assets of our ancient literature. Its previous edition was published about ninety years ago by R. Hayyim Shaul Horovitz. Since then, additional manuscripts have been discovered of Sifre , its first commentators, and medieval collections and midrashim that cite it. This was accompanied by the significant development of the methodological conceptions of the study of the Rabbinic literature, and of the ways to publish critical editions of this literature. All these factors justify the publication of a new scientific edition of this midrash. The text of the new edition, that is based on MS. Vatican 32, includes many versions that differ from the earlier version, and that occasionally shed new light on the exegeses and halakhot of the Sifre . It is accompanied by the scholarly apparatus that lists and explains all of the edition's changes from the version of MS. Vatican. The number of direct and indirect textual witnesses presented in the "Textual Variants" section of the new edition is twice, and at times even triple, the number of textual witnesses that were available to Horowitz. In the detailed commentary on the expositions in Sifre , I made considerable use of all the Sifre commentators who preceded me, and who made a decisive contribution to the literal explanation of the midrash's exegeses and the clarification of their meaning. Thanks, however, to the diverse textual witnesses available to me and the great progress made in recent generations in the study of the language and teachings of the Tannaim, I believe that I have succeeded in recreating the original version of many expositions, in giving them a new and straightforward explanation, and in advancing the research of their redaction. The edition is intended, first and foremost, for the scholars, in Israel and throughout the world, who are engaged in the research of all aspects of the Rabbinic literature. Additionally, the new edition will likely aid the community of Torah scholars who teach and study in yeshivot, and the educated public at large. To view and purchase volume 4 please press here Contents Volume 1 Preface Symbols of the textual witnesses of Sifre on Numbers List of symbols in the edition Introduction Editing rules for the text and the accompanying scholarly apparatus Textual variants Parallels passages in Talmudic literature The commentary Edition of Sifre on Numbers, portions of Naso and Beha'alotekha (the base text, and below it: 1. Scholarly notes to the base text; 2. Talmudic parallels; 3. Textual variants) Separate supplement of the edition of Sifre , portions of Shelah - Masai (text and scholarly notes to the base text) Volume 2 Commentary on Sifre , portion of Naso Volume 3 Commentary on Sifre , portion of Beha'alotekha List of abbreviations of the primary sources and the scholarly literature אקדמות להוצאה חדשה של ספרי במדבר

Aristotle's "Poetics" is the earliest surviving work of dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory.

JUDGES AND LAWYERS IN ERETZ-ISRAEL tells the story of the local Judicial System – Judges, Courts, Lawyers – in the last 18 years of the Ottoman rule (1900-1918) and the first 12 years of the British rule (1918-1930) in Eretz-Israel (Palestine). The book answers, amongst others, the following questions: • Why is the Israeli Judicial System built in its present structure? • Who was the first Jewish lawyer in Eretz-Israel (Palestine)? • Was the Ottoman Judicial System really so infested with corruption? What were the relations between David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett (Shertok) when they were Law students in Constantinople before the First World War? • Who established the new Judicial System in Jerusalem after the British conquest of Eretz-Israel (Palestine) in 1918? • How were “Native” judges – Arabs and Jews – nominated for the first time in Eretz-Israel (Palestine)? • Who was the first President of the Supreme Court of Eretz-Israel (Palestine) and why he was forced to resign? • How did the Judicial System of Eretz-Israel (Palestine) fight for its independence? • Who was the Jewish judge that was dismissed from the Judiciary in 1930? • What is the connection of the Eretz-Israel (Palestine) Judicial System and the love-affair between an elderly millionairess from Philadelphia (U.S.A.) and a dashing farmer-politician from Zichron-Yaakov who was 25 years youngrer than her ? The book is based mainly on primary sources – letters, documents, protocols etc. - discovered by the author in public and private archives in Israel and England.

Jewish thought and rhetoric may have dominated the Jewish people's way of life for years, but what happens when a Jewish state is established, whose laws and authorities are not necessarily based on that same Jewish tradition? Jewish-Israeli Political Thought is a collection of studies exploring the tension between Israeli and Jewish political philosophy, the relationship between the Jewish people's collective and personal past and present, individual identity and its place in the traditional Jewish collectiveness, and the intermediary role of the ancient Hebrew language in the dialogue between the past and the present. The chapters in this book were written by young scholars of different religious, and sometimes cultural and lingual backgrounds; however, they all live in modern-day Israel, and they all question the relation between traditional-Jewish and modern-Israeli political thought. The diversity of the writers enables a broad and unique perspective on the status of Jewish tradition in contemporary political thought in Israel. The book provides a window into various spatial and temporal horizons in the course of a Jewish tradition that is constantly being re-examined and re-discovered.

This book illustrates the close link between the development of the national ideal in Egypt, and the development of the new written Arabic, and studies the Academic activities in Cairo following the historical and social changes in the Arab world in the 20th Century.

Why did the Israeli cinema disregard the Holocaust for many years? Why did it represent the Holocaust survivors as a homogeneous group of passive, detached and problematic people and ignored their enormous contribution to the prosperity of Israel? Was there any change in these representations from the late 40's until the present time? These questions are the center of the book Two Faces in the Mirror, that depicts the representation of the Holocaust, the Holocaust survivors and their rehabilitation in Israeli fiction and documentary cinema during 1945-2009. It is well known that films do not reflect reality, however they reflect cultural and social atmosphere – influence it and are influenced by it. The analysis of Israeli fiction and documentary cinema reveal two different paths of memory, two faces in the mirror: A society that ranges between shallowness and in-depth views, between strengthening superficial stereotypes and shattering them, between implanting distorted narratives and multi-cultural openness towards the "other".

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.

This is the story of a nearly forgotten chapter of the Holocaust—of over 16,000 Jewish women, girls and children, their origins, itineraries and fates, who suffered in the horrendous Nazi concentration camp for women, Ravensbrück. As a historian, Judith Buber Agassi was struck by the changing conditions, countries of origin, and fates of these women during 5 distinct periods during the 6 years of the camp's existence. As a sociologist, she studied the social relations of the Jewish prisoners among themselves as well as with the non-Jewish majority. After the mass murder of Jewish prisoners early in 1942, a larger group organization became impossible, but the Jewish women developed a special and effective form of small-group organization, the so-called camp-families. As a sociologist of gender, she surveyed the educational background and patterns of behavior specific to Jewish women, and has produced an impressive study.

This collection, already translated to many languages around the world, now appears in Hebrew for the first time. The Art and Science of Dance/Movement Therapy has proven to be a useful collection that explains the basic concepts of dance/movement therapy, written by practicing clinicians from several countries and perspectives. It develops these concepts into an understanding of practices, which are illustrated through case studies. The topics cover a range of human needs including children and oncology, problems such as eating disorders, brain trauma, psychiatric problems, dementia and more. Integral to the practice are systems of observation, understanding of cultural differences and research, which are also discussed. The breadth and depth will be of interest to those already practicing as well as to those new to the field or in related disciplines including education.

Un véritable courant de vie parcourt ces pages que Perspectives consacre au cinéaste Marcel Ophuls. La vie, le vivant dominent. Il n’est pas étonnant qu’une des contributions de ce numéro s’intitule “Liberté, vitalité, spectacle” (Sophie Brunet). Dès lors, la division du volume s’est faite d’elle-même: 1-Un homme vivant; 2-Une oeuvre vivante. Au départ, le portrait d’un homme se dessine. Dans une “interview imaginaire.” On savoure son franc-parler, non que l’on adhère à toutes ses idées – en particulier en ce qui concerne Israël – mais on admire l’aisance et la liberté totale qui anime ses propos. Le comportement professionnel du cinéaste, son comportement tout court, trouvent leur place dans cette première partie. Parfois même, l’homme est saisi dans le feu de l’action. Les grands problèmes qui occupent le coeur et la pensée d’un homme de notre temps se retrouvent dans la seconde partie du volume. Là encore, au plus près de la vie . Le cinéaste interpelle les spectateurs lorsqu’il traite de la Shoah, de l’Occuption, ou de la Résistance, de la place que ces sujets tiennent dans la mémoire d’un Français ou d’un Allemand. On s’interroge avec le cinéaste : se doit-il d’être objectif? Mais “dès le début de sa carrière, remarque Pierre Beylot, un style documentaire original fondé sur la parole de témoignage et le montage des sources dont il assume de plus en plus ostensiblement le caractère subjectif” marque son oeuvre. C’est dire aussi que souvent le regard s’attarde sur le traitement esthétique des sujets abordés. Ecoutons François Niney:“Cette remise en question de nos manières de voir et de nos dilemmes, à la fois politiques et personnels, par le jeu et le poids des mots, différencie radicalement le documentaire selon Marcel, du panel d’opinions tel que l’expose en permanence l’étal médiatique”. L’important est que son public réfléchisse. Il s’agit, selon Valérie Carré, de “mettre en mouvement la réflexion du spectateur”. Qu’attendre de l’avenir? Encore une oeuvre surprenante? Vincent Lowy, à l’écoute, note: “Boulimique de projets virtuels, l’infatigable MO junior annonce déjà les quatre titres d’ […] improbables best-sellers…” [futurs romans policiers }. Il convient enfin de souligner le rôle déterminant qu’a joué Stéphane Kerber dans l’élaboration de ce numéro de Perspectives. Nos vifs remerciements vont à lui. Laissons-lui maintenant la parole.

Periodical for research in the history, culture, and literature of the Jews of Italy. Whoever is dealing with Jewish thought and humanities knows well how important and influential the Italian Jews were and are in these wide ranges of fields. The large creation and thought of the Italian Jews was passed on for multi generations in Hebrew and Italian while keeping a firm methodical tradition which ITALIA periodical is following and keeping the importance of studying and researching the language, literature, culture and history of Italy and Italian Jews. Italian Jews had a strong presence in the European culture from the 13th century on to our current time. Documents, manuscripts and many books show us many remarkable authors and thinkers, Italian Jews and others, that had strong ties with the rather small ethnicity of Italian Jews. Even though there are many respected studies on the contributions of Italian Jews to the cultural making of the Italian nation, there is still a necessary need for a centralized publication of these past and new studies. ITALIA is an important focus point for an academic discussion on the culture, literature, history and language of Italian Jews as well as a place where we can weight the conclusions of these studies and place goals for future doing in these exciting full of aspects fields. Italia – Studi e Ricerche sulla cultura e sulla letteratura degli Ebrei d'Italia Studi e Ricerche Sulla Storia, la Cultura e la Letteratura Degli Ebrei d’Italia Dario Burgaretta Sicilia conservata a Messina Alessandro Guetta universale : forme del pensiero ebraico in Italia tra ‘500 e ‘700 ITALIA è la Rivista di letteratura e cultura, di filologia e linguistica, di storia e d 'arte sull' Ebraismo italiano, pubblicata dalla Casa Editrice Magnes, dell'Università ebraica di Gerusalemme. Agli esperti di studi ebraici post-biblici e di studi umanistici, filosofici e storici in genere accade di imbattarsi in una fitta rete di interessi scientifici in cui gli ebrei italiani compaiono, ora in modo preponderante ora marginalmente e di scorcio. La presenza costante dell' Ebraismo italiano nel panorama culturale europeo ha le sue origine lontano nel tempo. Ed è quasi una norma che manoscritti, editiones principes, libri antichi e moderni abbiano avuto e continuino ad avere attinenza, in maniera diretta o indiretta, col piccolo nucleo ebraico della penisola. La Rivista Italia vuole essere il luogo di incontro per studiosi ed esperti interessati a pubblicare ricerche originali che trattino ed esplorino le ancora molte 'terre incognite' dell'ebraismo italiano, in tutti i momenti della sua storia. Italia si propone di ampliare il suo raggio di influenza e il suo ruolo guida nella ricerca scientifica sull'Ebraismo italiano in Israele e nel mondo. La Rivista esce una volta all'anno con articoli in ebraico, italiano, inglese e francese. È possibile ordinare i numeri arretrati della Rivista Italia (20 volumi pubblicati) presso la Mangnes University Press di Gerusalemme.

This is the first book in Hebrew on the Philosophy of John Rawls, one of the most important English-language political philosophers of the 20th century. John Rawls (February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American philosopher, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard University and author of A Theory of Justice (1971), Political Liberalism, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, and The Law of Peoples.

Rabbi J.B Soloveitchik (1903-1993) was the preeminent leader of Modern Orthodoxy in the United States for nearly 50 years. His prominence in American Orthodox life was based upon his expertise in Torah and Western intellectual culture, his extraordinary pedagogical and rhetorical skills and his halakhic authority. As the head of the World Mizrachi, he also played an influential role on religious Zionism in Israel. Rabbi in the New World , explores the extent of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s leadership in shaping the Orthodox communities in the United States and analyzes the characteristics and multiple domains of his influence. The book examines the question of whether Rabbi Soloveitchik’s leadership is best understood as limited to American Orthodoxy or whether his influence exceeded those boundaries. The essays in the book probe which of his students most closely reflect his religious philosophy, whether his vision was sufficiently flexible to meet the challenges of the present and the future, and whether Rabbi Soloveitchik was open to inter-religious dialogue. The book contains twenty-six articles by scholars in history, sociology, education, theology and philosophy, all of whom evaluate Rabbi Soloveitchik’s works and the era in which he was active. Rabbi in the New World , was co-edited by Dr. Avinoam Rosenak, Chair of Jewish Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Research Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Rabbi Prof. Naftali Rothenberg, Senior Research Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Rabbi of Har Adar.

This book presents a descriptive and historical poetics of the re-written bible, or the exegetical narrative in rabbinic literature of Late Antiquity. The exegetical narrative is composed of a story which simultaneously represents and interprets its biblical counterpart. As a hermeneutical reading of the biblical story presented in narrative form, its defining characteristic lies precisely in this synergy of narrative and exegesis. This genre is but one historical manifestation of the general cultural phenomenon of re-writing canonical texts which begins already in the Bible itself and could be said to reach the modern era in works by Thomas Mann, Joseph Heller, and even “Moses the Prince of Egypt.” Paradoxically, it is precisely the canonical status of the text – that which acts as the foundation for its cultural legitimacy – that invites its constant transformation, violation, and appropriation by succeeding generations of readers. Within this general perspective, this book concentrates on one specific historical moment – rabbinic culture in Late Antiquity. Why, in what circumstances, and through which means does rabbinic culture transfigure itself by re-imagining its past? How does this genre exert its hegemony over the sacred text, its power and meanings? What are the cultural paradigms of coherence that both enable and restrain its reception? These are some of the questions the book addresses in an attempt to provide a new perspective on the cultural imagination of the rabbinic period.

The Halakha is not just a body of literature; it is also a cultural event. It follows then that the philosophy of Halakha must address the happening of the Halakha. Surprisingly, till now philosophers of Halakha have not addressed this dimension of the event or the happening of the Halakha. The articles in this book are an attempt at facing this challenge. But this is not simple because herein lies a paradox. If the event or the happening is something that lies outside the confines of what is captured in the written word, the effort to write about it is one that must take us on a fascinating journey between what is possible and what perhaps is not. What is the nature of the Halakha as an event? What is the knowledge contained in this dimension of the Halakha that defies conceptualization in the written word? How does the insight that the Halakha is principally an event dramatically affect the philosophy of the Halakha? As we have said, philosophers of the Halakha have not addressed this question before and the authors in this collection – scholars and researchers from a wide range of fields – are all facing it for the first time bringing to it a wide range of tools from fields as varied as philosophy, Jewish thought, performance, cinema, group dynamics, cognition, gender studies and more. Together they offer us a new discourse and framework for conceptualizing the philosophy of the Halakha.

The book of Job brings forth the basic questions of the human existence: Is there a reason for suffering? Is there a moral order in the world? What is the place of man in the universe and what is the secret of the relationship between god and man? In this collection of essays, researchers from the biblical, literature, philosophy and art fields, deal with the different facets of the book - the experience which Job was put through compared to the binding of Isaac, Jobs' loneliness compared to that of Jeremiah, the question of Job as a tragic figure, the fear of god and the depictions of Job in medieval art.

Geniza Collection in Geneva Some 350 large vellum sheets, originating from the Cairo Geniza, were uncovered this May by Professor David Rosenthal of the Hebrew University at the Bibliothèque publique et universitaire in Geneva. The Cairo Geniza is an immense depository of Jewish texts, first discovered in the late nineteenth century by Professor Zalman Schechter in the synagogue of Fustat, Cairo. The Geneva collection had apparently been acquired in the same year by a Geneva university papyrologist, Professor Jules Nicole, supplementarily to papyri he had purchased. Following a preliminary examination of the material, it was apparent that the Geniza collection in Geneva included many new fragments of great interest, pertaining to various fields of Jewish studies. Bible : A copy of the Bible carries a dedicatory inscription on the front page of Genesis: “Dedicated to the Synagogue of the Jerusalemites, cursed be he who steals this, cursed be he who sells this, cursed be he who knowingly buys this.” The book was owned by the community of the synagogue of Fustat, which followed the tradition of Eretz Yisrael (i.e. Jerusalem). Indeed, there were also a number of fragments belonging to an assemblage of haftarot. These reflect the practice of a three-and-a-half-year Torah reading cycle in the tradition of Eretz Yisrael. A Masoratic text that was in this collection concludes with a message referring to the renowned masora authorities Ben Naphtali (9th-10th centuries) and adds a name to the geneological roster of this celebrated family. He provides the traditional vocalization and cantillation symbols but deals with counting the verses as well. Talmud : The Geneva collection includes fragments of Mishna, Talmud Bavli and Midrash, as well as two fragments of the Talmud Yerushalmi. The latter, preserved in only one medieval manuscript ) the Leiden Ms.), is therefore of particular interest: the fragment of Yerushalmi Bikkurim amends the traditional text, while the other is an abridged version of Yerushalmi Kiddushin . Halakha : A number of fragments of Geonic texts were found, including a copy of Halakhot Gedolot , Rav Sa’adya Ga’on’s Sefer Mizevot in Arabicand fragments of halakhot of Alfasi and Maimonides. Of special interest are two pages of previously unknown responsa of the geonim Rav Sherira and Rav Hai, addressed to the community of Egypt (10th century). Also found was a fragment of Sefer haGalui , a polemical treatise by Rav Sa’adya Ga’on against the Exilarch and against the head of the Babylonian academy. This text, previously preserved in Hebrew and in Arabic, was found in Geneva on two joined folios. It includes a new passage of the Hebrew version and a previously published (1891) passage of the Arabic version, but here the copiers had excised Rav Sa’adya’s pungent attacks against his adversaries. Liturgy and Prayer : Liturgical verses of HaQalir, previously known in corrupted versions, appear here. Completely new material was also discovered, such as an important liturgical poem from a rare book of piyyutim by Rav Sa'adya Gaon. A laudatory poem by Dunash ben Labrat (10th century) to Hisdai ibn Shaprut, as well as new liturgical poems, have now become available to us. Historical Documents : Found in the new collection are a bill of divorce written in Fustat in 1166, and four letters of correspondence written by and to the leaders of the community. These include a response ruling on financial matters, written in Arabic by R. Elhanan ben R. Hushiel (Qayrawan, first half of 11 th century), of whom only two letters were previously known. This find helps clarify a scholarly debate regarding the identification of this scholar with Rabenu Hananel Berabi Hushiel, the great commentator of the Talmud.

This book is part of a series of comprehensive commentaries on the Book of Genesis that the late Professor Umberto Cassuto had planned as part of a magnum opus embracing the whole Pentateuch and also the Book of Psalms. The present work is rich in original insights and scholarly illuminations that make it an invaluable guide to the Bible student be he an erudite scholar or just a well-read lay enquirer irrespective of the opinions he holds with regard to the Higher Critical doctrines.

The charm of Agnon’s work lies in an inebriating combination of the funny and the serious, in his famous irony that knocks down every unquestionable certainty and even its very self. Agnon’s humor eludes rhetoric borderlines, does not tolerate confines of a genre and disobeys simple interpretative solutions. In his new book, Roman Katsman suggests a new literary-anthropological method to break down Agnon’s complicated ‘laughter code’—a method based upon the cultural and semiotic interpretation of symbols. His reading of a wide selection of Agnon’s works, including his four major novels, reveals an entire world of his laughter symbols—a world of violence and sacredness, tragic bewilderment and eruption of new possibilities. In this world, arks fly, princes disappear, serpents eat their own tails, angels and demons dance, illusion turns into reality, and other foolish and cruel miracles occur. The research looks for a solution to the riddle: should Agnon's stories be considered serious or ironic, religious or secular, scornful or emphatic, archaic or modernist; or perhaps the reader is intended to swell with pathos or burst into laughter—and how come Agnon always has the last laugh?

Cinema is the most democratic form of art, dependent on the taste of millions of viewers. Within the cinematic historical genre in Arab cinema one finds a rich intellectual discourse, in a constant dialogue with state, censorship and audience . The book "Back to the Past: Filmed History in Arab Cinema" invites the readers to know the Arab cinema industry, mainly the Egyptian one, through the historical genre, and "medieval" films as its core. In films taking place in Middle Ages , the viewers meet warriors and poets, besides the leaders and founders of Islam. These films present also the images of Mongol and Crusaders invaders, slaves and concubines, Mamluks, Christians and Jews. The book surveys also the transition from a situation of Egyptian cinema exported to the Arab world, into the creation of Pan-Arab historical discourse within the satellite channels.

Translated from the Greek with Introduction and Commentary by DWORA GILULA

Gershom Sholem (1897-1982), was one of the most renowned figures in Modern Jewish Culture of the 20th Century. He is one of the leading researchers of Judaism in general, and of Cabbala, Sevtaota, Mysticism and Jewish Torat haSod especially. Even now, a whole generation posthumously, his fountains of diverse creation have not ceased to flow. His personality and scientific contemplation change form and fill dozens of books and studies. Scholem dealt many times in Hasidism and its world, and the THE LATEST PHASE – called thus after the opening article of the collection – assembles all his papers on the subject for the first time. The range of Hasidism studies by Scholem is wide and diverse: from the Baal Shem Tov's spiritual world and historic figure, through the abolition of messianicism in the Hasidism and ending in his famous controversy with Martin Buber. Thought, History, Bibliography, newly and originally interpreted Historical documents, Piercing criticism of Authors and Books, Innovations and Insights – all these forged new ways of understanding Hasidism, accompany its research and have not lost their essence. All the papers have been reprinted and have had many remarks and annotations added to them, placing the original articles in the unique context in which they were written and enriching them bibliographically. The Editors of the book are Prof. David Assaf from the Department of History of the Jewish People in the Tel Aviv University and Dr. Esther Liebes director of the Gershom Scholem Library in the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem.

This book deals with intellectual capacity and the diversity in cinema since the Lumiere brothers in the late nineteenth century and Murray Rosenberg at the beginning of the twentieth century, through international masterpieces (Hitchcock, Welles, Godard, etc.) and the best Israeli films ('Sallah Shabati', 'Metzitzim', 'Bikur Ha-Tizmoret', and 'Waltz with Bashir "). This book was awarded the BAHAT PRIZE, 2007. The BAHAT PRIZE is awarded annually in memory of Professor Yaacov Bahat

Ever since its emergence in the thirteenth-century , Jewish Kabbalah, and most prominently – the Book of Zohar, has captured the hearts of Jewish as well as non-Jewish readers. Significant interest in Kabbalah is evident in the Renaissance, when various Christian Scholars accepted the traditional Jewish narrative, according to which the corpus of medieval Jewish Kabbalah is the Oral Law given to Moses on Mount Sinai. The sixteenth century is rightfully considered the golden age of this kind of Christian interest in Jewish Kabbalah. During this period a group of scholars, high-rank priests, and secular rulers were familiar with Kabbalistic notions, some of these Christians read the Kabbalistic treatises, whether in their original versions or in translation, some even composed commentaries or translated them into Latin, and most important - they incorporated Kabbalistic notions into their own theological and messianic conceptions. Among Kabbalistic writings, most of these thinkers' attention was drawn to the Zohar, and some of them attempted to translate parts of it into Latin. The first comprehensive, though not complete Latin translation of the Zohar was composed by the French orientalist and mystic Guillaume Postel in the middle of the 16 th century. Postel was a prolific and original thinker, who developed an elaborate messianic theological schema, which he based upon Kabbalistic notions. Convinced, as he was, that the Zohar is the perfect and ultimate expression of his own messianic concepts, he embarked on his life project – producing a Latin translation and commentary on the Zohar. This fascinating c ommentary on the Zohar never appeared in print nor was it ever translated into any language. In Judith Weiss's On the Conciliation of Nature and Grace substantial parts of Postel's Commentaries on the Zohar are presented in the original Latin vis a vis her Hebrew translation, accompanied by introductions and notes, elucidating Postel's unique perception of the Zohar and the Kabbalah.

The articles in this volume: Ilan Eldar Language Nationalism, Language Revival, and Language Planning Miri Bar-Ziv Levy The Cinematic Representation of Hebrew Speech in the 1930s Ariel Gabbay פּועֶֹלֶת or פּועָֹלֶת ? Feminine Participle Forms in Pausal Inflection in the 1644 Constantinople Edition of the Mishna Mitka Ratzaby Golub Ethnic Characteristics in Theophoric Personal Names Found in Archaeological Excavations in the Land of Israel during the First Temple Period Einat Gonen Grammatical Variation in Israeli Hebrew in the Light of the Formation of Early Modern Hebrew Ephraim Bezalel Halivni Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar in the Light of the Aleppo and Leningrad Codices Ohad Cohen The Syntactic Status of Verbal Forms Ending with Final Nun in First Temple Prose Chava Farstey “Reverse Calques” and Languages in Contact Rivka Shemesh-Raiskin From Biblical Hebrew to Mishnaic Hebrew: The Use of an Inner Object Forward and contents can be seen in PDF form, just press "SAMPLE PAGES".

Nathan Rotenstreich wrote that understanding the world is a precondition for changing it. Since his years in the youth movement "Gordonia", he was loyal to bringing together thoughts and ideas with the twisted road to their realization. His writings influenced and inspired, and still do so, the existential struggles of the Jewish world and of Israel in the turmoil of times. The present collection of papers aims to be a link to the interaction between thoughts and deeds, and between intellectual heritage and what he called: "The tempo of action and events" . Many of his writings bear very clear interpretations, so much so that it seems they were written in the present. These papers are hidden in periodicals, protocols of conventions and newspapers. Therefore it is appropriate they should be partly exposed in the new volume so that they are available and challenging for future generations. Moreover, his special contributions will illuminate aspects of the renewable sides of his work. The collection marks Nathan Rotenstreich 100 birthday and 20 years since he passed away.

For contents and article abstracts press on Sample pages which is located on the right of the cover photo.

Meidias (in Greek Mειδίας; lived 4th century BC), an Athenian of considerable wealth and influence, was a violent and bitter enemy of Demosthenes, the orator. His hostility he first displayed in 361 BC when he broke violently into the house of Demosthenes, with his brother Thrasylochus, to take possession of it,–Thrasylochus having offered, in the case of a trierarchy, to make an exchange of property with Demosthenes, under a private understanding with the guardians of the latter that, if the exchange were effected, the suit then pending against them should be dropped. This led Demosthenes to bring against him an accusation of kakegoria (ie verbal insult), and when Meidias after his condemnation did not fulfil his obligations, Demosthenes brought against him a dike exules (ie a trial for obtaining something already lawfully assigned to the plaintif). Meidias found means to prevent any decision being given far a period of eight years, and at length, in 354 BC, he had an opportunity to take revenge upon Demosthenes, who had in that year voluntarily undertaken the choregia. Meidias not only endeavoured in all possible ways to prevent Demosthenes from dis­charging his office in its proper form; also, their mutual relations were sored more still when Demosthenes attempted to oppose the proposal for sending aid against Callias and Taurosthenes of Chalcis to Plutarch, the tyrant of Eretria, and the friend of Meidias. The breaking point arrived when Meidias attacked Demosthenes with open violence during the celebration of the great Dionysia. Such an act gave Demosthenes a good opportunity for moving a public incrimination against his enemy (353 BC), and on this occasion wrote Against Meidias, still extant, which was never pronounced as the two adversaries found an amicable arrangement under which Demosthenes retired his accusation for thirty minae.

The book sheds light on one of the most interesting episodes in the history of Israel's foreign policy. Since the Sinai war (1956), France was a friend and ally to Israel. She provided State-of-the-art weapons to help maintain the balance of power against the Arab States, gave essential political support and economic assistance, and assisted in building a nuclear reactor in Dimona. Charles De Gaulle's return to power in France in 1958, during the war in Algeria, challenged the Israeli leadership. In light of the French President's determination to renew France's influence in the Arab world- would Israel succeed in preserving the Friendship with France? The book deals with the efforts of statesmen, politicians and Israeli officials to achieve this goal. Also De Gaulle's uncompromising policy to obtain the status of a powerful France and its impact on his views on the State of Israel are discussed. The book sheds light on a mystery that plagued many commentators and still remains largely unsolved: why De Gaulle decided to turn a cold shoulder towards Israel in May 1967, when it was facing one of the toughest challenges ever, and why the hesitant policies towards Israel increased after the victory in the six day war.

Bergen-Belsen, a symbol of Nazi satanic evil, was the biggest concentration camp in Germany and the only one to be transformed after the war to become a Displaced Persons' camp and an assembly and rehabilitatation center for many thousands survivors from Eastern Europe, who wished to leave Europe heading for America or Eretz Israel. During its five years' existence as DP camp, Bergen-Belsen became a focal point for the national organization of all the Jews in the British Occupation Zone in North-West Germany, including those who founded the new German-Jewish communities. How did the survivors manage to rehabilitate after the hell they had gone through and against the background of difficult camp conditions after liberation? what was it that motivated them and what shape did their forced yet temporary communal life take? How did they transform from dying people into a dynamic and active entity, with national aspirations? Who were those who founded the new communities side by side with the DO camps|? What was it that motivated them to settle down in Germany, the country of their persecutors and torturers? How did they relate to their DP brothers and what did they aspire to? "New Beginnings" present an unprecedented in-depth inquiry into the development of Jewish lives in postwar Germany. The story of the suevivors, told here from within and based on an extensive variety of primary sources, illuminates a key chapter in post Holocaust Jewish history.

Two Together , by Moshe Meir, embodies a breakthrough in Judaic philosophy in the new era. Its roots are anchored in the sources of the Jewish religion’s twentieth century philosophy, particularly that of Hermann Cohen and Rabbi Soloveichik, and Chassidic philosophy and heritage; its background is the barren dispute between religiosity and secularism in the era defined as post-modern. Moshe Meir’s painful acknowledgment, drawn from personal experience, is that the independent identity of ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ participate in each other’s worlds, and the dispute not only divides them but causes splitting among themselves. In his book, the author develops a new religious-philosophical language which enables stepping out from behind the armor that prevents each party from seeing the other’s humanity, and creating not only humane Jewish rapprochement but also a personal identity that bridges and unifies the secular believer on one hand, and the believing secularist on the other. As a researcher of Judaic philosophy in the new era who has consolidated his own views on these issues, I was deeply impressed by the innovative impetus, clarity and intellectual integrity characteristic of Moshe Meir’s book, from the beauty of its structure, and its elegant style. It is an attractive book which, despite its depth, is eminently readable and enjoyable. This book will enrich and enhance the spiritual world of all readers interested in such topics, and may give rise to serious, in-depth debate among its enthused supporters and equally enthused opponents, whether they are religious or secular. (Prof. Eliezer Schweid, Department of Jewish Thought, Hebrew University, Jerusalem). The search for a refreshing religious philosophy is one of the most vital and fascinating of all. Moshe Meir presents a path which is both model and content for establishing one of the most unique modes of belief in our generation. Precisely because I do not agree with all his views, I consider it of supreme importance that his principles are read by, and echo within, every believing individual – either by their adoption, or critical review – as they convey a tone of orientation that is direct, and deep, in seeking God. (Rabbi Yuval Cherlow). In this beautiful, important, and innovative book, Moshe Meir creates the religious-secular individual from his image, similar only externally to the religious-orthodox individual. This intriguing creation caused me to reconsider my own likeness, and discover that after all is said and done, I am none other than a secular-orthodox person whose similarity to a secular-secularist is only external. (Ari Elon, author of עלמה די and בא אל הקדש (

This issue of "Hamizrach Hachadash" contains 11 articles. The articles deal with Law and Society.

In 1895, Lewis Carroll, the author of the iconic novel Alice in Wonderland and a renowned logician, composed a collection of mathematical problems while he was suffering from sleeplessness. However, Carroll seemed to have overlooked a crucial paradoxical error in his presentation of one of these problems, which is analysed in this book, along with questions such as: Do men have more sisters than women? Why do people find their own coincidences more surprising than those encountered by others? How are life and death expectancies treated probabilistically? Statistics, probability, coincidences, randomness and infinity are explored in this book – a collection of essays written over years of research – through a variety of everyday anecdotes and situations, aimed at students, teachers and readers interested in enriching their knowledge of these subjects.

The relationship between Israel and Africa is a unique case of radical changes that Israel did not experience in its relations with other continents. During the 1960's when most African states received their independence, Israel was one of the first countries to establish diplomatic relations with them and to offerthem assistance. Its representatives operated in 33 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Africa occupied an important place in Israel's foreign policy. The considerations that made Israel establish such a widespread presence in Africa were political, economic, humanitarian and security. Israel had expectations that through friendly relations with many African states, she could break through the circle of Arab enmity,strengthen her security and bolster her legitimacy. Hundreds of Israeli experts were dispatched to africa and tens of thousands of African students came to Israel. There followed, however, tremendous disappointment. In 1973, during the Yom Kippur war and after,almost all african states broke off diplomatic relations with Israel. The author elaborates on the main reasons for this collapse. In the 1980's Israel returns to Africa and at present it has diplomatic relations with 40 African countries. However, several changes have taken place in Israel's present policy towards Africa and they are discussed in the book. The author, who spent nearly 2 decades in Africa, has based his thesis on primary sources and also on his personal experiences

Bearing Witness to the Witness examines the different methods of testimony given by trauma victims and the ways in which these can enrich or undermine the ability of the reader to witness them. Years of listening to both direct and indirect testimonies on trauma have lead Dana Amir to identify four modes of witnessing trauma: The “metaphoric mode”, the “metonymic mode,” the “excessive mode”, and the “Muselmann mode.” The author thus demonstrates the importance of testimony in understanding the nature of trauma, and therefore how to respond to trauma more generally in a clinical psychoanalytic setting. In order to follow these four modes of interaction with the traumatic memory, the various chapters of the book present a close reading of three genres of traumatic witnessing: Literary accounts by Holocaust survivors, memoirs (situated between autobiographic recollection and fiction) and ‘raw’ testimonies given by Holocaust survivors. Since every traumatic testimonial narrative contains a combination of all four modes with various shifts between them, it is of crucial importance to identify the singular combination of modes that characterize each traumatic narrative, focusing on the specific areas within which a shift occurs from one mode to another. Such a focus is extremely important, as illustrated and analysed throughout this book, to the rehabilitation of the psychic metabolic system which conditions the digestion of traumatic materials, allowing a metaphoric working through of traumatic zones that were so far only accessible to repetition and evacuation.

The articles in this volume originated, in large part, as papers presented at a conference convened by the Melton Coalition for Creative Interaction in December 2014 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The Melton Coalition is a consortium of the three Melton Centers established over the years by the visionary philanthropist Samuel Mendel Melton: at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Ohio State University. The conference was devoted to the various forms of interaction that obtain between the oral and the textual modes of discourse in Jewish history and contemporary Jewish life. Some of the essays dwell on oral and textual media in historical context – while others place more emphasis on the contemporary educational implications of the phenomena under discussion. All the essays in this volume articulate patterns of oral and written discourse that can greatly enrich our knowledge of both the history of Jewish culture and the theory and practice of Jewish education.

The articles in this volume: Jonatan Feintuch – The History of R. Ada b. Abba – Multiple Contexts and Multiple Messages in a Babylonian Talmudic Sugya. Shulamit Elizur – Exile on Native Soil. Avital Davidovich-Eshed – Sanetified God, Desecrated Woman: The Female Body as a Site of Cultural Conflict. Rereading the Story of the Murder of Sarit from a Hebrew Chronicle of 1096. Tsippi Kauffman – Birth in Hasidic Literature: Gendered Readings. Yakir Englander – Tension Regarding the Status of the Zaddik's Body: The Stories about the Ba'al 'Ahavat Israel' from Viznitz. Yaniv Goldberg – 'You Are Not My Groom' – A Feminist Reading in S. An-sky's Between Two Worlds (The Dybbuk). Omri Ben-Yehuda – Between Bialik and Himslef: Acting Hyperbole Out. David Heyd – 'The House which Householders Attend': Agnon on the Theater. Zahava Caspi – Apocalypse, Territory and Identity in Joseph Mundi's The Ruler of Jericho and The Messiah. Shimrit Peled – Construction of Female Sexual Subjectivity in Victoria by Sami Michael in Comparison to other Hebrew and Israeli Writers. List of Contributors. English Abstracts.

Please press on Sample pages for Contents in English.

Jewish Festivals in the Time of the Mishnah and Talmud includes four parts. Part One: The Jewish Calendar; Part Two: The Cycle of the Pilgrimage Festivals; Part Three: The Days of Awe; Part Four: The Holidays of the Second Temple. It also includes diagrams and illustrations.

This volume presents twelve scholarly chapters by Prof. Ilan Eldar, discussing ancient Hebrew vocalization methods and reading traditions (pronunciation and configuration) among Jewish communities, especially among ancient Ashkenazi communities. These chapters have been published over the years as separate essays, and are compiled here for the first time. This volume contains the following chapters: Chapter 1: The Palestino-Tiberian Vocalization Chapter 2: The Vocalization of the Passover Haggada in Mahzor Vitry Chapter 3: The Sources of the Hebrew Reading Traditions in the Middle Ages Chapter 4: The Research of Oral Reading Traditions of Hebrew Chapter 5: The Hebrew Reading Traditions of the Baghdadi Community Chapter 6: Doublets in the Language Traditions of Hebrew Chapter 7: The Pre-Ashkenazi Reading Tradition Chapter 8: The Sources of Ashkenazi Reading Tradition Chapter 9: Vocalization Systems and Pronunciation Traditions of Hebrew Chapter 10: The Contribution of Prof. Shlomo Morag to the Study of the Hebrew Language Heritage of the Yemenite Jews Chapter 11: Neologisms in the Piyyutim of the Ashkenazi Mahzorim Chapter 12: Post-Biblical Forms in the Ashkenazi Tradition as Reflected by the Vocalization of the Worms Mahzor

This book explores the life and work of Issac Orobio de Castro, a converso who returned to Judaism openly and became one of the Sephardic Jewish leaders in Western Europe in the seventeenth century. His personal fate and work embody the fate of the whole community with its problems, internal conflicts, aspirations and dreams. The study of his image brings to the surface the problematics of the Marranos who re-embraced the doctrine of their forefathers and established a model community in Amsterdam, one of the important cultural centers of the time. Orobio's way of blending in with the normative Judaism in the time of Spinoza's excommunication, his ideological and spiritual doubts, his constant arguments with those who break through the fence from within and with his Christian surroundings from outside - all represent the vitality of a particular community, which was called to the test and stood many trials at the turning point of the history of Jewish people in the modern era.

MA‘ARAG : The Israel Annual of Psychoanalysis is a democratic forum for psychoanalytic research, practice, and criticism published through the initiative and cooperation of the Sigmund Freud Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis of the Hebrew University and the Israeli Association for Self Psychology and the Study of Subjectivity, the Israel Society for Analytical Psychology, the Israel Psychoanalytic Society, the Israel Institute for Group Analysis, the Israel Institute of Jungian Psychology, and the Tel-Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. The articles in this volume: Aviel Oren and Gaby Shefler - AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION OF KLEINIAN THEORY: THE PARANOID-SCHIZOID AND DEPRESSIVE POSITIONS AND THE RELATION BETWEEN SPLITTING AND PSYCHIC DISTRESS Dana Amir - PERVERSION: FROM EMPTY EVENT TO EVENT WITHOUT A WITNESS Gideon Lev - DENIGRATION, INDIFFERENCE, FASCINATION: PSYCHOANALYTIC APPROACHES TO FAITH Ofir Levi - THE ROLE OF HOPE IN PSYCHODYNAMIC PSYCHOTHERAPY WITH CHRONIC AND COMPLICATED POST-TRAUMATIC REACTIONS Moshe Halevi Spero - A BRIEF NOTE REGARDING THE HEBREW TRANSLATION OF FREUD’S CONCEPT OF NACHTRÄGLICHKEIT Emanuel Amrami - THE ANALYTIC TRI-COLLAGE: COMBINING ALIEN THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES DURING CLINICAL WORK Beatriz Priel - PSYCHOANALYSIS AND TRANSLATION: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY ESSAY Guy Perel - FROM THE ‘WALL’ TO THE ‘MOJO’ WITH WINGED SANDALS: A JUNGIAN PERSPECTIVE ON LONG-DISTANCE RUNNING Michael Shoshani and Batya Shoshani - BORGES ALONGSIDE THE ANALYTIC COUCH: THE ANALYSIS OF A MAN WHO DWELLED OUTSIDE TIME Meir Chelouche - GRANDPARENTS AND THEIR GRANDCHILDREN: PSYCHOANALYTIC PERSPECTIVES Ofrit Shapira-Berman and Michal Waldman - A SONATA FOR TWO: PROFESSIONAL PERSPECTIVES AMONG PSYCHOTHERAPISTS WHO GREW UP IN CHILDREN’S HOSTELS ON THE KIBBUTZ

MA‘ARAG: The Israel Annual of Psychoanalysis is a democratic forum for psychoanalytic research, practice, and criticism published through the initiative and cooperation of the Sigmund Freud Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis of the Hebrew University and the Israeli Association for Self Psychology and the Study of Subjectivity, the Israel Society for Analytical Psychology, the Israel Psychoanalytic Society, the Israel Institute for Group Analysis, the Israel Institute of Jungian Psychology, and the Tel-Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. The articles in this volume: A viel Oren - PLAY OF DREAMS, DREAMS ABOUT PLAY: ON DREAM SPACE IN PSYCHOANALYTIC PLAY THERAPY WITH CHILDREN Omri Bichovski - IS METAPHYSICS HYSTERIA? Gal Ventura - THE DEAD MOTHER, THE UNCANNY AND THE ANXIETY OF MODERNITY Ditza Hananel - REMARKS ON THE RELATION BETWEEN MOTHER AND SON IN THE EARLY STAGE OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX Shlomit Yadlin-Gadot - TRUTH AXES AND THE MULTILINGUAL MIND: THEORY AND TECHNIQUE IN THE MIRROR OF TRUTH Moshe Landau - THOUGHT, MEANING AND ANTI-MEANING: DEVELOPMENT OF THE AESTHETIC DIMENSION OF MIND Gabi (Gabriela) Mann - FLEXIBLE WALLS: THE ANALYTIC FRAME (‘SETTING’) AS THE CURATIVE CONTEXT Ruth Netzer - BEYOND ACTIVE GOODNESS: ON PSYCHOANALYTIC PSYCHOTHERAPY AND JUDAISM Yorai Sella - THE SENSE OF SENSE: A REVISED PERSPECTIVE ON THE SCHIZOID DILEMMA IN LIGHT OF WINNICOTT’S CONCEPT OF THE TRUE SELF AND MERLEAU-PONTY’S PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE BODY Yochai Ataria - TRAUMA AS A BLACK HOLE IN THE HEART OF CULTURE: THE PASSAGE FROM INDIVIDUAL TO SOCIETY Roey Shopen - FROM THE PAGES OF A DIARY TO THE GAZE OF THE OTHER: AN ANALYSIS OF LEAH GOLDBERG’S DIARY AND DIARY WRITING AS AN ESSENTIAL PHENOMENON FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF SELF AUTONOMY

The Golan Heights is the only place in Israel where many big and small volcanoes exist. It features various volcanic phenomenons, some of which were created in a long process and some in just a few hours. Since the Golan is "young" (geologically speaking), these phenomena are well preserved, almost without erosion or later cover. Furthermore, volcano eruptions are often shown on TV, so we have a chance to understand them better than other geological activities that are slower or take place in the sea or far deserts. In order to understand and be impressed by the wonderful manifestations of nature that used to be stormy and wild but today is accessible and still, we need a whole book that will tell us about everything that unites all these phenomena together and also explain each of them separately. But it is impossible to understand the Golan Volcanic phenomena without first understanding the whole volcanic procedures on planet Earth, in the depth of the ground at the bottom of oceans and in faraway galaxies. Unfortunately many people who hike in the Golan pass by many beautiful and rare sites without a clue about what they are missing. Therefore this book's purpose is to inform them about the immense variety of these wonderful phenomena with minimum effort. This is the reason why the book includes two parts: a general chapter called "An introduction to Volcanology "' and another chapter called "Volcanism in the Golan Heights". In order to enable the readers to understand the geological terms in the book, it also includes a dictionary of geological volcanological terms called " A word in the stone ", a bibliography and a list of the prominent volcanological sites in the Golan: almost all of them are near the road so they can be visited and enjoyed without risking entrance to difficult trails or old mine fields.

Contents: Nili Wazana – Preface In Memoriam Gershon Galil Prof. Zecharia Kallai 24.6.1923-17.1.2016 ) Amihai Mazar Prof Trude Dothan 12.10.1922-28.1.2016 ) Biblical Studies David Frankel - The Final Form of the Story of the Rape of Dinah in Light of Textual and Redaction Criticism Noam Mizrahi - From Wisdom to Hymn: The Literary, Textual and Linguistic Development of Jer 10:12-13 Miriam Sklarz - The Poet Before God, Against his Enemies and Facing his Congregation Naphtali S. Meshel - Dramatic Irony and double entendre in the Book of Job Amitai Baruchi - Unna Plural Forms Referring to ‘Elohim’ and the Israelite Cultic Proclamation Recurring in the Cult of the Calf The Bible in Relation to the Ancient Near East Shira J. Golani - ‘ That (No) Plague May Come Upon Them for Being Registered’ (Exod 30:12): Census and Plague in the Bible in Light of the Ancient Near East Mordechai Cogan - Restoring the Empire: Sargon II’s Campaign to the West in 720/19 BCE History of Exegesis David Kopeliovich - Hated by his Brothers: The Typological Function of Jeremiah the Prophet in Josephus’ Jewish War Jonathan Jacobs - Use of the ʻNarrative Parableʼ by Northern-France Disciples (11th-12th Centuries) Isaac Gottlieb and Stewart Vanning - Rupert of Deutz (c.1075-1129) and Jewish Commentaries on the Joseph Story Itamar Kislev - The Contribution of Minhat Yehuda for Improving the Text of Rashbam’s Torah Commentary Yohanan Kapah - Joseph Hayyun’s Maggid Mishne

The book The Israeli Sovereign: The Novel and the Discourse 1967 – 1973 explores Israeli sovereignty, nationality and space as represented and constructed in a range of Israeli novels published between 1967 and 1973, in their historical and geographical context and in light of the public discourse between the 1967 and 1973 wars. The research aims to characterize the Israeli sovereign subject and Israeli space represented and constructed in literature, in the context of the public discourse of the period. Some of the questions the study deals with are: What kind of Israeli subject emerges from the novels of the period? What kind of Israeli space is created in these texts? What is the relation between that space and the various points of view that were prominent in Israeli discourse at the time? These issues and others are discussed in light of the historical spatial situation of occupation and massive territorial expansion.

The widespread view of the world is atomistic: each person has an individual consciousness and each person exist to himself. Each person has his own experiences, sensations and emotions; Others do not — and cannot — take part in them. A difficult moral dilemma arises: it is clear why I should take care for myself and satisfy my wants, but why worry about others? Why should I care what happens to other people, if I don't feel their suffering? Zemach proves in this book that the atomistic world view is wrong.

This title discusses the middle section of the Book of Number, including a number of incidents such as the Spies and the Red Hefer, a central aspect in the Purity process in the Bible.

The dictionary mainly covers the Hebrew component in languages that have not been documented or that have been documented less than that of the prestigious Judeo-languages, Yiddish and Latino. Thus, it encompasses the different dialects of Judeo-Arabic from North Africa, Yemen and Iraq, and to some extent from Syria, Judeo-Georgian and Judeo-Persian. Other languages are included sporadically. It also includes Haketiya (Moroccan Judeo-Spanish), Judeo-Italian and others.

A collection of war stratagems selected from ancient historians, arranged according to their content in four books, with an introduction and a commentary, and an appendix of selected passages from the books of Julius Caesar and Livius. Frontinus, an outstandingly talented man, made his name and career under five Roman emperors (1st and 2nd century AD), he fought with distinction in Britania, was a senator, managed provision of water for Rome, was a writer and intellectual. He wrote several books, but only two of them survived entirely, The Aqueducts of Rome and The Stratagems , a sequel to his technical book on warfare that was lost. In the preface to Stratagems he writes: 'I feel obliged, in order to complete the task, to summarize excelent operations of generals, examples of wisdom and foresight, to serve and foster the generals' power to conceive and execute stratagems of their own, and not to fear their result , if they could be compared with achievements already successful. Introduced, translated from Latin and annonated by Prof. Dwora Gilula.

The Book of Micah is composed of prophecies by Micah, a contemporary of Isaiah. Micah flourished ca. 733-712 BCE, or even a little later, but before the invasion of the mighty Assyrian army of Sennacherib to Judah. Not all the prophecies of Micah have been preserved, and not all the prophecies included in the Book of Micah had been penned, or delivered by Micah. In his detailed introduction and the commentary to the Book of Micah, the author deals with the complicated problems pertaining to the book, its literary units, and their oral and written history. The author of the commentary is Professor (emeritus) Yair Hoffman, from the department of Bible in Tel Aviv University, who authored also the commentary on the Book of Jeremiah (2001; 2 volumes), in the Mikra Leyisra’el series. He is the author and editor of numerous volumes and papers in Hebrew and English. He served as the head of the School of Jewish Studies of Tel Aviv University. Professor Hoffman’s commentary on the Book of Micah is a must for any Bible student. This commentary on the Book of Micah is part of Mikra Leyisra’el, an ongoing series of scientific Hebrew commentaries to the Bible composed by renowned scholars from universities in Israel and abroad. The commentaries are written according to the most recent achievements of biblical scholarship, and relevant studies in Semitic linguistics, Ancient Near Eastern studies, and archaeology, with special attention to the contribution of the medieval Jewish commentators and grammarians. The Mikra Leyisra’el series boasts the commentaries on the books of Deuteronomy (2 volumes); Joshua; Judges; Samuel (2 volumes); Isaiah 40-66 (2 volumes); Jeremiah (2 volumes); Ezekiel (2 volumes); Joel and Amos; Obadiah and Jonah; Nahum, Habakkuk and Zephaniah; Proverbs (2 volumes); Song of Songs; Ruth; and Esther. The commentary on Lamentations is now in its final production stage and the books of Kings (2 volumes); Ezra-Nehemiah; Haggai; Malachi; and Daniel are now in advanced stages of editing. More volumes are in various stages of preparation.

This study of the Parable of the Three Rings is the first full account in Hebrew of the history and the literary and allegorical origins of the parable, as well as of its reception from the early Middle Ages to the Early Modern period. The study provides evidence for the non-Western origins of the parable, which are known mostly through its Western European renderings in Lessing's Nathan the Wise and Boccaccio's Decameron. In some of its versions, the parable contains the idea of religious relativism. This idea was often accommodated in its particular cultural and religious surroundings, but at other times negated and altered to suit the preferences of the other narrators and audiences. Whether the original, relativist, possibly tolerant, message were upheld or not – makes the history of the parable more intriguing to modern readers. The study of the parable tracks the religious idea -- presented in various allegorical forms -- back to its Muslim origins. It also reveals the Eastern origins of the parable's literary framework. The discussion follows the evolution of the parable and its entrance into Catholic Europe, analyzing it contextually and with reference to prevalent contemporary religious ideas among Muslims, Jews, and Christians between the eighth and the sixteenth centuries . A Hebrew translation of Avishai Margalit's “The Ring: On Religious Pluralism” provides a logical-philosophical perspective on the idea of religious pluralism .

This is another volume in the series "Mikra Leyisrael" Commentary on the bible. This volume includes the books of Nahum, Habakkuk and Zephaniah, three of the prophets from the book of Trei Asar. The volume is comprised of three seperate books made up into one book.

The biographies in this volume comprise the concluding part of the Scriptores Historiae Augustae. Their main subjects are the events of the Roman Empire during the years 235-284. These were the days of the so called Illyrian Caesars on the throne of Rome. The Empire was compelled in those days to face too often and too dangerous incursions of barbarians, as well as tireless efforts of various provincials trying to free themselves from Roman mastery. Rome was forced to recruit more and more barbarians to fill up the ranks of her soldiery and officers. Rome even experienced a strong shortage of silver and gold metals to coin her Denarii and Aurei. These deficiencies revealed Rome's weakness abroad and caused disquiet and instability within the borders of the Empire. However in spite of inflation, overtaxing and blackmailing bureaucracy the people of Israel in their country managed to continue their recovery due to the failed uprising in the century passed. The author-editor of these biographies remains anonymous. Although one may presume he had been a fifth century Roman of the senatorial circles. The author-editor did not pretend to be a professional biography writer. Nevertheless, it is clear that he had been a man of letters who made great efforts to provide a vivid and reliable account of those stormy days, the last generations of pagan Rome.

The relationship between Jewish agriculture in the USSR, Jewish sponsors in the USA, and the Bolsheviks constitutes a fascinating segment in the history of interwar Jewish cooperation. This book explores the ideological motives of communal farming and everyday life in Jewish communities, mostly in Soviet Russia. It addresses this ideological tradition and its practice from the 19 th century and until the establishment of the State of Israel, demonstrating the ways in which Jews accustomed to the Eastern European Shtetlekh soon became efficient farmers. The second part of the book gives and account of communal farming in the Jewish world in the modern era, providing a fresh outlook on the negative approach toward Jewish agriculture, traditionally expressed in history books.

How should we explore the spiritual and ideological world of the Sages? Rabbinic thought is conveyed in the various works of Rabbinic literature, and this book offers something like a golden key to deciphering their meaning through literary study of the art of redaction. This is achieved by a systematic exploration of examples from the various genres of Rabbinic works: Mishnah, Tosefta, Midrash and Talmud.

If everyone who took a course in introductory statistics understood that there is a better chance of doing well and enjoying the subject than winning the jackpot, this book would not have been published and lotteries would be making less. Maybe you have a phobia regarding Statistics and maybe your conception of it is boredom, tedium and incomprehensibility. The book Thinking Differently invites you to reconsider. Statistics helps us understand phenomena in a wide variety of fields. This book presents in a friendly and humorous manner the logic, the intuition and the beauty of Statistics, without delving into mathematical depth. This goal of the book is not a mere transmission of technical details; it aims to impart comprehension and a way of thinking. The book places a strong emphasis on the connection between Statistics and the world, expressed by timely examples from many fields - via detailed applications, through exercises whose solutions appear at the end of the book and by means of pictures and illustrations. Basic statistical concepts, such as "average", are in everyday use. Why, then, is the attitude towards Statistics ambivalent? Why do we have faith in the weather forecast, but regard surveys suspiciously? What is a "statistical fraud"? How do babies come into the world? This book makes an effort to answer the first three questions and to underscore the intricacy of the subject, both its capability and incapability, the misunderstanding of which incurs errors and invites unrealistic expectations.

This selection of studies spans a period of about 50 years while including new studies which are published here for the first time. The studies in the first section all deal with religious rituals in Israel in Biblical times, and are characterized by a constant aspiration to infiltrate this exotic and mysterious world, described in utopist and anachronistic lines, and to see it for what it is, without disregarding its legislative uncompromising character on the one hand or its internal power and riveting wholeness on the other. The second section brings together studies dealing with the written work and the author's labor in Biblical times and from which arises the fact that it is impossible to properly understand the biblical literary design without paying attention to the conditions in which the biblical author lived and the material he worked with, mainly the scrolls. Various studies dealing with various aspects of biblical literature and Israel's biblical faith and religion, were collected in the third section. The fourth section holds programmatic contents on critical studying of the bible and exploring it in the new era.

Two Together , by Moshe Meir, embodies a breakthrough in Judaic philosophy in the new era. Its roots are anchored in the sources of the Jewish religion’s twentieth century philosophy, particularly that of Hermann Cohen and Rabbi Soloveichik, and Chassidic philosophy and heritage; its background is the barren dispute between religiosity and secularism in the era defined as post-modern. Moshe Meir’s painful acknowledgment, drawn from personal experience, is that the independent identity of ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ participate in each other’s worlds, and the dispute not only divides them but causes splitting among themselves. In his book, the author develops a new religious-philosophical language which enables stepping out from behind the armor that prevents each party from seeing the other’s humanity, and creating not only humane Jewish rapprochement but also a personal identity that bridges and unifies the secular believer on one hand, and the believing secularist on the other. As a researcher of Judaic philosophy in the new era who has consolidated his own views on these issues, I was deeply impressed by the innovative impetus, clarity and intellectual integrity characteristic of Moshe Meir’s book, from the beauty of its structure, and its elegant style. It is an attractive book which, despite its depth, is eminently readable and enjoyable. This book will enrich and enhance the spiritual world of all readers interested in such topics, and may give rise to serious, in-depth debate among its enthused supporters and equally enthused opponents, whether they are religious or secular. (Prof. Eliezer Schweid, Department of Jewish Thought, Hebrew University, Jerusalem). The search for a refreshing religious philosophy is one of the most vital and fascinating of all. Moshe Meir presents a path which is both model and content for establishing one of the most unique modes of belief in our generation. Precisely because I do not agree with all his views, I consider it of supreme importance that his principles are read by, and echo within, every believing individual – either by their adoption, or critical review – as they convey a tone of orientation that is direct, and deep, in seeking God. (Rabbi Yuval Cherlow). In this beautiful, important, and innovative book, Moshe Meir creates the religious-secular individual from his image, similar only externally to the religious-orthodox individual. This intriguing creation caused me to reconsider my own likeness, and discover that after all is said and done, I am none other than a secular-orthodox person whose similarity to a secular-secularist is only external. (Ari Elon, author of עלמה די and בא אל הקדש (

In this myth-shattering study Isaiah Friedman provides a new perspective on events in the Middle East during World War I and its aftermath. He shows that British officials in Cairo mistakenly assumed that the Arabs would rebel against Turkey and welcome the British as deliverers. Sharif (later king) Hussein did rebel, but not for nationalistic motives as is generally presented in historiography. Early in the war he simultaneously negotiated with the British and the Turks but, after discovering that the Turks intended to assassinate him, finally sided with the British. There was no Arab Revolt in the Fertile Crescent. It was mainly the soldiers of Britain, the Commonwealth, and India that overthrew the Ottoman rule, not the Arabs. Both T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") and Sir Mark Sykes hoped to revive the Arab nation and build a new Middle East. They courted disappointment: the Arabs resented the encroachment of European Powers and longed for the return of the Turks. Emir Feisal too became an exponent of Pan-Arabism and a proponent of the "United Syria" scheme. It was supported by the British Military Administration who wished thereby to eliminate the French from Syria. British officers were antagonistic to Zionism as well and were responsible for the anti-Jewish riots in Jerusalem in April 1920. During the twenties, unlike the Hussein family and their allies, the peasants (fellaheen), who constituted the majority of the Arab population in Palestine, were not inimical towards the Zionists. They maintained that "progress and prosperity lie in the path of brotherhood" between Arabs and Jews and regarded Jewish immigration and settlement to be beneficial to the country. Friedman argues that, if properly handled, the Arab-Zionist conflict was not inevitable. The responsibility lay in the hands of the British administration of Palestine. Isaiah Friedman is professor emeritus of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He was elected Senior Fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford and was a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Palestine 1914-1918: British- Jewish-Arab Relations; Germany, Turkey and Zionism, 1897-1918; Palestine: a Twice Promised Land? Vol. 1: The British, the Arabs, and Zionism, 1915-1920, the editor of twelve volumes in the series Documents on the Rise of Israel; and co-editor of the new edition of Encyclopaedia Judaica, 22 vols. (2007).

This book explores the early days of Jewish education in the Russian Empire, especially from the socio-economic perspective. Various chapters describe the world of the lonely scholar, emergence of the enlightenment groups, the employment sphere of the educated, education systems founded, the cultural space they shaped and their relationship with the traditional society circles.

Peter Singer’s remarkably clear and comprehensive Practical Ethics has become a classic introduction to applied ethics since its publication in 1979 and has been translated into many languages. For this second edition the author has revised all the existing chapters, added two new ones, and updated the bibliography. He has also added an appendix describing some of the deep misunderstanding of and consequent violent reaction to the book in Germany, Austria and Switzerland where the book has tested the limits of freedom of speech. The focus of the book is the application of ethics to difficult and controversial social questions. • Revised and updated second edition • Written in a clear and accessible style tackles topical and controversial personal and social problems

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is described by many as a paradoxical philosopher. He often seems to be asserting both sides of a contradiction. His teaching has been a source of inspiration for various opposing and even antagonistic political movements and doctrines: He is considered to be one of the first thinkers of modern democracy, and an apostle of totalitarianism. He is the father of "Natural Education", but his thoughts might sound as a program for "Social Engineering" of human beings. He is a romantic, longing to simple life within nature, but again, he is a loyal son of the bourgeois civilization of his era. Rousseau's Paradoxical character is also reveled in his account of "Progress". It seems that he is saying to contradictionary things about this notion. On the one hand, it appears that, according to Rousseau, mankind can realize freedom only through a process of historical progress. On the other: that progress has enslaved men and brought disaster upon them. These paradoxes have deceived many of Rousseau's readers and interpreters, who chose to emphasize one side of Rousseau at the expanse of the opposite. The book "Rousseau: Progress as a trap" strive to avoid this mistake. It shows that the greatness of Rousseau's philosophy lies precisely in its dialectical character. Rousseau is indeed a Severe critic of progress, but his critique is not merely an "external" and purely-negative one: He is a philosopher of the enlightenment, and accepts the principles of enlightenment (in fact, he is one of the formulators of such principles). On behalf of these principles he criticizes enlightenment itself. Rousseau's decree, that progress has enslaved mankind, gets its critical substance only if one presumes, as did Rousseau, that progress should emancipate mankind. The philosophers of the enlightenment celebrated progress. In his optimistic epoch, and without denying the credo of enlightenment, Rousseau pointed out a dark and dangerous character of human progress. This book shows the Rousseau's dialectical, or ambivalent approach to progress anticipates important currents in 20th century philosophy and critical theory. Due to this approach, Rousseau's philosophy is perhaps more relevant today than it was during his lifetime.

Rabbi J.B Soloveitchik (1903-1993) was the preeminent leader of Modern Orthodoxy in the United States for nearly 50 years. His prominence in American Orthodox life was based upon his expertise in Torah and Western intellectual culture, his extraordinary pedagogical and rhetorical skills and his halakhic authority. As the head of the World Mizrachi, he also played an influential role on religious Zionism in Israel. Rabbi in the New World , explores the extent of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s leadership in shaping the Orthodox communities in the United States and analyzes the characteristics and multiple domains of his influence. The book examines the question of whether Rabbi Soloveitchik’s leadership is best understood as limited to American Orthodoxy or whether his influence exceeded those boundaries. The essays in the book probe which of his students most closely reflect his religious philosophy, whether his vision was sufficiently flexible to meet the challenges of the present and the future, and whether Rabbi Soloveitchik was open to inter-religious dialogue. The book contains twenty-six articles by scholars in history, sociology, education, theology and philosophy, all of whom evaluate Rabbi Soloveitchik’s works and the era in which he was active. Rabbi in the New World , was co-edited by Dr. Avinoam Rosenak, Chair of Jewish Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Research Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Rabbi Prof. Naftali Rothenberg, Senior Research Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Rabbi of Har Adar.

This book deals with rheumatic diseases that are mainly diseases of the skeletal system and muscles. It contains comprehensive and up-to-date information on more than 120 acquired and congenital joint diseases, such as various arthritis, skeletal and spinal diseases, tendon issues, vascular infections, peripheral nerve injury syndromes, and more. The book is written in a simple, clear and comprehensible language. It lists the various symptoms of diseases, diagnostic methods, including laboratory tests and various imaging methods, various therapeutic approaches, including conventional drug therapies and alternative therapies. A special chapter in the book is devoted to common questions frequently asked by the patients and the answers to them. It also presents explanations of common terms and concepts in rheumatic diseases.

“ Halakhic marriage perpetuates a person’s status as property… This form of control over a woman’s sexuality is a type of terrorism that does not apply to men .” This statement expresses a modicum of the discomfort felt by modern religious women with respect to the traditional wedding ceremony. This book follows the efforts by these women to alter the traditional ceremony, challenging it and opposing it even while remaining a part of it. These women choose to express their agreement with and opposition to various elements of the tradition in a manner that reflects a worldview that values both equality and Orthodoxy. The social power relations between these women and their environment describe the revolution taking place in religious society, in the shadow of the intersections of tradition with modernity, and of Orthodoxy with feminism. Non-religious women who nevertheless struggle to accept various aspects of the Jewish wedding ritual will likewise find in this book an echo of the whispers in their hearts.

The relationship between Israel and Africa is a unique case of radical changes that Israel did not experience in its relations with other continents. During the 1960's when most African states received their independence, Israel was one of the first countries to establish diplomatic relations with them and to offerthem assistance. Its representatives operated in 33 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Africa occupied an important place in Israel's foreign policy. The considerations that made Israel establish such a widespread presence in Africa were political, economic, humanitarian and security. Israel had expectations that through friendly relations with many African states, she could break through the circle of Arab enmity,strengthen her security and bolster her legitimacy. Hundreds of Israeli experts were dispatched to africa and tens of thousands of African students came to Israel. There followed, however, tremendous disappointment. In 1973, during the Yom Kippur war and after,almost all african states broke off diplomatic relations with Israel. The author elaborates on the main reasons for this collapse. In the 1980's Israel returns to Africa and at present it has diplomatic relations with 40 African countries. However, several changes have taken place in Israel's present policy towards Africa and they are discussed in the book. The author, who spent nearly 2 decades in Africa, has based his thesis on primary sources and also on his personal experiences

In what way is the German nation like all the other nations? Is there a unique path which German History took? And furthermore- To which people can we liken the German nation? To nations in the Western World or nations from all over the world? This book attempts to answer some of these and other questions about Germany.

This title discusses the middle section of the Book of Number, including a number of incidents such as the Spies and the Red Hefer, a central aspect in the Purity process in the Bible.

The Kethib and Qeri forms, scattered here and there throughout the Biblical Text, combine here, like a mosaic, to form a complete picture and give one a comprehensive system of language. The book analyzes this linguistic system according to the manuscript Kether Aram Tsova, presenting the method of the most authoritative Masorite scholar Rabbi Aharon Ben-Asher. This systematic study examines the Biblical phenomenon of Kethib and Qeri interchanges by linguistic criteria. The book consists of an introduction summarizing the research on this topic, followed by four chapters. Chapter One: Orthography dealing with different orthographic realizations of words as הנער (K ) / הַנַּעֲרָה Q))Deut.22:15) ). Chapter Two: Morphology engages in morphological interchanges, as ואתי (K ) / וְאַתְּ (Q ) (Jud.17:2). Chapter Three: Syntax including various categories related to the syntax in particular the morpho-syntax like syntactic concord, as מגדיל (ישועות) (K ) / מִגְדּוֹל (ישועות) (Q)( Sam.22:512). Chapter Four: Lexicon and style dealing with interchanges of K/Q in the domain of lexicon and style as העיר(התיכונה)(K ) / חָצֵר(התיכונה)(Q)(Kings. 20:42 ). Finally, a general summary of discussions and conclusions. Additionally, statistical data that indicate the validity of the findings with respect to occurrences of Kethib and Qeri in the Biblic Text in general. The Kethib and Qeri System in the Biblical Text is an innovative linguistic analysis, which will be of great interest to scholars of Biblical language, Bible Exegesis and Masoretic Text.

This collection presents the readers with essays and articles that raise the issue of the religious and cultural sources – together with philosophical, ethical and legal aspects – of the concept of "human dignity". The analyses and presentations only emphasise the necessity for the intellectual grappling with "human dignity" in Israel at the beginning of the 21st Century

This title discusses the reciprocal relationship between the army and Israeli society in shaping the collective historical memory their part in forming the national identity.

This book is the most comprehensive and complex study of reading that has taken place in Israel.

Ethical dilemmas faced by teachers and the need to evaluate them with critical tools were the starting point of this study, which is based on stories collected in hundreds of interviews with educators from different sectors of Israeli society. Teachers and school principals recount how complicated it is to express in their work a variety of values and commitments, with pressure coming from different directions. Many educators are unhappy with the results of their work, but nevertheless keep ethical dilemmas to themselves, without consulting anyone.

This book is about the central figure of our contemporary, 'liquid modern' times – the man or woman with no bonds, and particularly with none of the fixed or durable bonds that would allow the effort of self-definition and self-assertion to come to a rest. Having no permanent bonds, the denizen of our liquid modern society must tie whatever bonds they can to engage with others, using their own wits, skill and dedication. But none of these bonds are guaranteed to last. Moreover, they must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change – as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again. The uncanny frailty of human bonds, the feeling of insecurity that frailty inspires, and the conflicting desires to tighten the bonds yet keep them loose, are the principal themes of this important new book by Zygmunt Bauman, one of the most original and influential social thinkers of our time. It will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology and in the social sciences and humanities generally, and it will appeal to anyone interested in the changing nature of human relationships.

Thousands of Quotes from around the world and from the Jewish Culture together with an educated explanation of their origin and wording. More than 12,000 quotes, in 400 comprehensive sections on more than a 1,000 subjects.

The book The Last of the Lord's Poets deals with the beginning of Modern Religious Poetry in the land of Israel as it was reflected in the early work of Yosef Zvi Rimon (1889-1958), with the many turbulent upheavals the old and new Jewish settlement went through, as a background. Unlike other poetries, religious and semi-religious, which dealt many times in religious issues in-order to deal with personal or public issues, Rimon's Poetry focused on God, the search for him and the rebellion against him. Rimon's God was not a universal God, Deistic or the God of the supreme. Rimon dedicated his life and his literature, according to his own observation, to the God of Israel, the unique Historic Jewish people's God, with all of his cultural national symbols, according to his standing in the religious tradition. Rimon's poetry is based, similarly to all major religious poetry, on varied texts, many times from distant historical linguistic facets. Rimon used biblical texts, Talmud, Midrash, Medieval Jewish philosophy and poetry, Kabala, Hasidism and modern language and literature. The use of these texts is not external or random, but an educated use by a person who knew these literatures inside and out and dealt with them as if they were holly script. Therefore one should be patient while reading, and the rewards will follow. This kind of poetry requires time in-order to reveal, facet upon facet, the entirety of the meanings hidden within it. Reading Rimon's poems can be compared to time travel, in which the reader discovers hidden worlds, delt by lovingly and fearfully by whole generations until they were intertwined together by the poet in his poems.

The Hope of Enlightenment presents for the first time in Hebrew a comprehensive analysis of the thought of Jürgen Habermas. A philosopher, social critic, and public intellectual, Habermas is an ardent but hardly a dogmatic defender on the Enlightenment. He has thus has contributed a distinctive perspective in the ongoing discourse on modernity. To illuminate the far-reaching significance of this contribution – and its challenges to both Israeli and modern society in general -- Matan Oram examines Habermas's critical thought through the prism of political philosophy in the broad context of the crisis of modernity. By focusing on the dialectical relationship between 'rationalism' and 'liberalism' in Habermas’s thought, the book traces his theoretical project as it has evolved throughout his vast corpus of writings, and explores its philosophical and intellectual origins.

In the ongoing flood of studies of memory in its manifold forms and meanings, the no less powerful subject of forgetting tends to be forgotten. We often think of forgetting as a passive process, something that simply “happens” to us and to other living beings; but many of the studies in this inter-disciplinary volume reveal the active and even creative nature of forgetting, its positive features, and its varied roles in a wide series of cultural and intercultural templates. Neuroscientists joined with historians, philologists, a linguist, philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists, an archaeologist and an artist in the two joint workshops that generated this volume, under the auspices of the Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz and the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The lively exchanges in the workshops are reflected in the comments and discussion that follow many of these experimental, meditative essays.

Mount Carmel of Graf von Mülinen is a translated, edited and annotated edition of the monumental Beiträge zur Kenntnis des Karmels, written by Graf Eberhardt von Műinen, a well-known Swiss researcher and diplomat. His book was first published in Leipzig by Baedeker Publishing in 1908. The work constitutes a meticulous and professional exploration of Mount Carmel in the beginning of the twentieth-century, and an important stepping stone in the chronology of the field. This Interdisciplinary study of the mountain covers a range of fields such as Arabic dialectology, botany, zoology, general geography, geology, climate, anthropology, religion, archaeology and folklore. This book is dedicated to the 44 casualties of the devastating fire on Mount Carmel in December 2010.

A collection of war stratagems selected from ancient historians, arranged according to their content in four books, with an introduction and a commentary, and an appendix of selected passages from the books of Julius Caesar and Livius. Frontinus, an outstandingly talented man, made his name and career under five Roman emperors (1st and 2nd century AD), he fought with distinction in Britania, was a senator, managed provision of water for Rome, was a writer and intellectual. He wrote several books, but only two of them survived entirely, The Aqueducts of Rome and The Stratagems , a sequel to his technical book on warfare that was lost. In the preface to Stratagems he writes: 'I feel obliged, in order to complete the task, to summarize excelent operations of generals, examples of wisdom and foresight, to serve and foster the generals' power to conceive and execute stratagems of their own, and not to fear their result , if they could be compared with achievements already successful. Introduced, translated from Latin and annonated by Prof. Dwora Gilula.

The historian Willy Cohn kept a diary from his youth till his death in 1941. The book contains the entries written from 1933 till 1941, which had been hidden in Berlin by family members. This is a comprehensive document containing deep, serious descriptions. The diary was written from a subjective point of view, but also from the point of view of a professional historian. Cohn described the initial shock felt when the Nazis came into power, and the deep disappointment with the disappearance of the humanistic and democratic values he believed in which collapsed right in front of his eyes, as well as the move of many acquaintances to ‘the other side’. This reality created an ongoing conflict with the German patriotism which was part of his personality and became empowered even more during his military service in World War I . The diary includes much documentation of the Jewish community’s life: the efforts made and actions taken in dealing with the economic collapse which resulted from Nazi policy; the serious debate between the Orthodox and the Liberals, between Zionists and non-Zionists, regarding the objectives of the community youth's education; the cultural renaissance which took place within German-Jewish society in the first years of the Nazi regime, which Cohn was a part of by lecturing in his town and in many other communities on topics of Jewish history and Zionism. The stronghold which tightened around the Jewish community after the November 1938 pogrom (Kristallnacht), the isolation which was even more hurtful than the life-threatening economic hardship, the relationships between Jews and non-Jews during these times of crisis, the hope that the German people still has positive forces which will overcome evil, and the desperate efforts to leave Germany and immigrate to Israel – all these are expressed in a unique manner in the diary .

Replacing Myself with Myself is the fifth selection of Michael Handelzalts's weekly columns, written and published in the Haaretz newspaper between June 2005 and November 2008. Anchoring his amused musings in the headlines, he ponders, among other things, on the kind of fruit with which the Snake and Eve had tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden, on the virtues of good spirit, and on other matters, most of them highly immaterial. A selection of his columns, Histoires d’en lire, was published in French in 2001 by Gallimard.

The Mandel Alumna are seeking to change the world . This book is an attempt to encounter some of them and describe how they're doing it, in Israel and abroad. They are all talking education: how to meet the world and how to cope with the main issues facing humanity. Throughout the book we meet places and their relevant history and the fascinating questions they raise, and some of the great ideas they're connected with. Between the lines we learn of the role played by the Mandel foundation and institutes.

Many Voices in the Prose of Shulamith Hareven by Yael Balaban is the first book-size monograph dedicated to Hareven’s oeuvre. It offers for the first time a deep understanding of Hareven’s fiction, including her early short stories, City of Many Days , and Thirst – the Desert Trilogy . Hareven’s unique voice has been missed by contemporary critics, as both her ideas and her poetics were ahead of her time: She wrote about sexual abuse long before the subject ever entered public discourse; wrote about the “second generation” of Holocaust survivors before the term was established; and created Mizrahi and Arab characters very different from the stereotypic characters in contemporary Hebrew literature. It is time to re-read Shulamith Hareven’s work and discover beautiful stories suffused with moral and social sensitivity and a profound commitment to language and literature .

In both these essays, "On the Indians" and "On The Laws of War", published here for the first time in Hebrew, Francisco de Vitoria lays down the foundations of international law as it is known today. De Vitoria develops for the first time concepts which will become the core of contemporary international law and international conventions, and in particular, participation in an unjust war, the ruler's personal responsibility for the decision about going to war, and the direct and indirect responsibility of subjects taking part in the hostilities. Both essays are firmly embedded in the debates of early modern Europe about the Law of Nature and the Law of Nations, and their impact on claims of European rulers to imperium and dominium (Imperial slugs and control) on overseas territories. In his wide-ranging Introduction to this book, Prof. Amos M egged places the two essays within the context and spectrum of the scholarly debates that were conducted at the major European universities during the early modern period, and provides the readers with a unique interpretation of the most distinctive themes in the essays, namely, the issue of human rights and international law, and presents personal insights on these aspects.

Ever since its emergence in the thirteenth-century , Jewish Kabbalah, and most prominently – the Book of Zohar, has captured the hearts of Jewish as well as non-Jewish readers. Significant interest in Kabbalah is evident in the Renaissance, when various Christian Scholars accepted the traditional Jewish narrative, according to which the corpus of medieval Jewish Kabbalah is the Oral Law given to Moses on Mount Sinai. The sixteenth century is rightfully considered the golden age of this kind of Christian interest in Jewish Kabbalah. During this period a group of scholars, high-rank priests, and secular rulers were familiar with Kabbalistic notions, some of these Christians read the Kabbalistic treatises, whether in their original versions or in translation, some even composed commentaries or translated them into Latin, and most important - they incorporated Kabbalistic notions into their own theological and messianic conceptions. Among Kabbalistic writings, most of these thinkers' attention was drawn to the Zohar, and some of them attempted to translate parts of it into Latin. The first comprehensive, though not complete Latin translation of the Zohar was composed by the French orientalist and mystic Guillaume Postel in the middle of the 16 th century. Postel was a prolific and original thinker, who developed an elaborate messianic theological schema, which he based upon Kabbalistic notions. Convinced, as he was, that the Zohar is the perfect and ultimate expression of his own messianic concepts, he embarked on his life project – producing a Latin translation and commentary on the Zohar. This fascinating c ommentary on the Zohar never appeared in print nor was it ever translated into any language. In Judith Weiss's On the Conciliation of Nature and Grace substantial parts of Postel's Commentaries on the Zohar are presented in the original Latin vis a vis her Hebrew translation, accompanied by introductions and notes, elucidating Postel's unique perception of the Zohar and the Kabbalah.

This study of the Parable of the Three Rings is the first full account in Hebrew of the history and the literary and allegorical origins of the parable, as well as of its reception from the early Middle Ages to the Early Modern period. The study provides evidence for the non-Western origins of the parable, which are known mostly through its Western European renderings in Lessing's Nathan the Wise and Boccaccio's Decameron. In some of its versions, the parable contains the idea of religious relativism. This idea was often accommodated in its particular cultural and religious surroundings, but at other times negated and altered to suit the preferences of the other narrators and audiences. Whether the original, relativist, possibly tolerant, message were upheld or not – makes the history of the parable more intriguing to modern readers. The study of the parable tracks the religious idea -- presented in various allegorical forms -- back to its Muslim origins. It also reveals the Eastern origins of the parable's literary framework. The discussion follows the evolution of the parable and its entrance into Catholic Europe, analyzing it contextually and with reference to prevalent contemporary religious ideas among Muslims, Jews, and Christians between the eighth and the sixteenth centuries . A Hebrew translation of Avishai Margalit's “The Ring: On Religious Pluralism” provides a logical-philosophical perspective on the idea of religious pluralism .

The standard study of Talmud is to accept the given as ultimate, that the sayings and the interpretations recorded therein are faithful to what was actually said. After having checked for the genuine version, for the right GIRSAH, eliminating the scribal errors, the text assumes reliability and serves as a starting point for further discussions and additional deductions. For over forty years, Prof. David Halivni has questioned the given as the authoritative text and argued for the necessity to go back in time and reexamine the veracity of the interpretations. Many of the given interpretations are forced, do not neatly fit the text they interpret and often attribute to the authors of the statements intentions that they did not necessarily share. As a consequence, substitute interpretations were necessary to which the multi volumes of "Sources and Traditions" were dedicated. While the books dealt mainly with the actual Talmudic interpretations, the introductions dealt with the causes responsible for the deviations from the original. It took the writings of a few volumes to become clear that the interpretations, unlike the apodictic statements were not officially transmitted by the Transmitters, the professional reciters and reached the later compilers which are referred to in the volumes as STAMMAIM, anonymous scholars, only through random survival which was not always complete. Sometimes it survived in a truncated form which the later compilers filled in, conjecturing what was missing. The present volume contains all of the introductions which provide the reader not only with the final conclusion but also with the developmental stages which led to that conclusion further strengthening its plausibility.

The book Praise of Fools , which was printed twice - in 1880 and 1910 - is an unusual satire/parody in Hebrew satiric literature. It is intended not only for certain circles or people in the Jewish context, but also has a universal character: it makes fun of and derides a long list of philosophers, writers, intellectuals and scholars a nd others , presenting them as useless, plagiarists and fools. All this i s done in order to supposedly praise ignorance and stupidity and to propose finding within them security and peace. The book accorded to Rubin the title "the Jewish Erasmus," however, the introduction places the book within the extensive European "fool literature".

This text has been translated for the first time, into Modern Hebrew, expresses aspects of the inter-religious dialogues during a time when Europe was experiencing a number of cruel religious wars.

How did Mass Communication become an important area of research and such a popular subject at universities and colleges within such a short time scale? Here is an exhaustive and comprehensive analysis of the development of Mass Communication departments.