During the last decades there have occurred significant upheavals in the political and military position of many religious and ethnic communities in the Middle East and North Africa. Communities which had been rejected and discriminated for decades rose to power or strengthened their political position in their countries by means of military struggles. Meanwhile, in Israel/Palestine, the ethnical-religious Jewish minority has become a ruling majority, while excluding the former Arab-Muslim-Sunni majority, following the wars of 1948 and 1976. This book examines these processes.

Zionists without Borders tells the story of the Halutz movement in Poland and its role in helping the Labor movement rise to the leadership of the Zionist Movement in the interwar period. It describes the founding of a mass national and socialist movement, which changed the face of the Zionist map. The leaders of the Labor movement in Israel established strong ties with pioneers from Poland, thus making the Halutz a cross-border movement, connecting Jews by means of politics, nationalism and socialism.

Commedia dell’arte, originating in Italy and proliferating on European stages from approximately 1650 to 1750, is one of the most significant and long-lasting phenomena in theatre history; its influence on all performing genres is notable throughout Western Drama to this very day. The new study From Carnival to Theatre: Structure and Chaos in the Commedia Dell'arte provides a comprehensive, deeply-researched study of the development of the genre, the establishment of the first professional troupes in Europe, their organization, their patrons and wide variety of popular and elite audiences. The study traces all aspects of the unique improvised performance: the show's space, dramatic patterns, dramatis personae, acting style, costume and stage design are re-interpreted by the attachment of the commedia dell’ arte to its double roots: the heritage of written literature, and manifestations of popular oral tradition in seasonal festivities. The book explores especially the interaction of the commedia dell'arte with the phenomena of carnival, in its very existence as an opposition to the social structure within the liminal time and space related to the celebration. Being an authorized event, containing metaphors of annihilating the existent order, in which subversion could be substituted by amusement, the carnivalesque combined time, place and creative means into a new theatrical form: the commedia dell'arte.

The book The State of Israel and Its Institutions in the Halachic Thought of Rabbi Shlomo Goren reviews the diverse subjects with which Rabbi Goren dealt as a halakhic ruler: the halakhic status of the State of Israel, the concept of sovereignty, military and war laws, immigration absorption, changes in prayer and blessings, and others. The book describes his original, and sometimes unusual, positions within the history of Israel, and his desire to take part in shaping this history.

Question of place: Architecture between the poetic and the ethical calls for a re-understanding of the foundations of the architectural act while exposing it to phenomenological thought. Through a return to the first, and failed, encounter in the late 1970s, between phenomenology depicting phenomena in the light of human experience and architectural discourse, Edna Langenthal offers a new reading of discourse, embracing the thought of philosopher Martin Heidegger and discussing the influence of architectural-architectural scholar Norteberg Which in her opinion missed Heidegger's contribution to her understanding. To emphasize the potential inherent in Heidegger's thought in understanding the question of place and the possibilities of dwelling in it, the author discusses the meaning of the poetic as a constitutive axis in understanding key concepts in contemporary architectural discourse. But the poetic dimension, for her, cannot exist without the ethical dimension. Through a study of the thought of Heidegger's student and critic, the philosopher Emanuel Levins, the structure that connects an affinity between the ethical and the home and the possibilities of settling in it.

The Second Commandment’s injunction against making graven images and likenesses resonates in all facets of Jewish visuality throughout the generations. Although Jews have always created and consumed art, the attitude to figural art –anthropomorphic and zoomorphic representations – has oscillated, like a pendulum, between strict prohibition and full permissibility. Figureless Art traces a lesser-known chapter in the history of Jewish art – a period governed by the swing to extreme stringency that left its mark on Late Antique synagogues in the Land of Israel. This anti-figural trend manifested in the avoidance of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic depictions and in the deliberate obliteration of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures on stone carvings and mosaic carpets that adorned the synagogues. What is the meaning of this strict trend? Did it emerge from within the Jewish world or was it stimulated, conversely, by external influences? Who was responsible for the effacement of the figures in the synagogues and when did these iconoclastic events occur? This book examines these phenomena through a broad historical, religious, and cultural perspective, based on visual and literary sources from Late Antique and early Muslim Palestine.

The book seeks to understand resistance as a meeting point among various political streams that operate in Lebanon and the development of resistance from military action into a project which is beyond culture in the narrow sense, into a hegemony that encompasses all sides of life. The book links the historical development of the Lebanese political system together with the many years of radical Shi'ite political thought in the entire Middle East region, with an emphasis on the influence of leftist and revolutionary secular thought on Shi'ite radical thought in general and that of Hezbollah in particular. The book reviews the various "hegemonic mechanisms" through which Hezbollah rules its hegemony over Lebanon. A hegemony that is not (only) a result of coercion by force, but also (mostly) the result of dominating the discourse of resistance on the Lebanese and regional arena in general.

Therapeutics and Salvation: Freud and Schelling on Freedom proposes a new conceptual perspective on the history of the philosophy of freedom. The book focuses on Sigmund Freud’s theory of freedom, and its fundamental, yet uncharted, connection with the groundbreaking philosophy of the unconscious of F.W.J Schelling. The analysis radically challenges conventional liberal and rationalistic conceptions of freedom in psychoanalysis. The main argument of the book is that Freud formulated his theory of human nature with Schelling’s basic philosophical architecture, in particular Schelling’s concept of freedom, but, at the same time, subverted Schelling’s search for a new theology at the end of the latter's philosophical career. The detailed comparison of Freud’s work with the philosophy of Schelling backtracks a momentous shift from Schelling’s late theo-philosophy, at the endpoint of German Idealism, to the secular system of Freud, in which human reality ousted godly revelation and therapeutics replaced divine salvation. By delineating the move from Schelling’s God-subject relations to Freud’s human-subject relations, the book offers a new perspective on the historical evolution of German Idealism into modern secular thought.

Ateret Zekenim is a work of historical research into the lives of several well-known medieval halakhists from France, Germany, and Spain. The primary focus of the book is biographical, and it attempts to resolve difficult questions that have puzzled the scholarly community for many years. Its author seeks to rely on the writings of his predecessors, but he first substantiates that these foundations were properly laid and that he is not adding to an edifice that is destined to collapse. Thus, for example, the author re-examines the story of Rabbi Asher b. Yeḥiel (Rosh)’s migration from Germany to Spain in the early 14th century, a migration that had a dramatic impact on the culture of Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jewry alike. Is the scholarly consensus – according to which Rosh meticulously planned his flight to distant Toledo, in an entirely different cultural realm, over the course of two decades – correct? After methodical examination of the sources, a very different story emerges. Rosh, and with him the Ashkenazi halakhic tradition, moved from Germany to Spain at the last moment, when there were no other options.

In The Barbed-Wire College Ron Robin tells the extraordinary story of the 380,000 German prisoners who were brought to the USA during WWII and kept in camps throughout the country. Using personal narratives, camp newspapers, and military records, Robin re-creates in arresting detail the attempts of prison officials to mold the minds of their prisoners. From 1943 onward, despite the Geneva Convention, prisoners were subjected to an ambitious re-education program designed to turn them into American-style democrats. Under the direction of the Pentagon, liberal arts professors pushed through a program of arts and humanities that stressed only the positive aspects of American society. The American educators censored popular books and films in order to promote democratic humanism and downplay class and race issues, materialism, and wartime heroics. However, by the war's end, the curriculum was more concerned with combating the appeals of communism than with eradicating the evils of National Socialism. The re-education program, overall, failed to make these POWs shed their Nazi beliefs and become supporters of a liberal- democratic ethos. It succeeded less than the policies of other nations in indoctrinating prisoners of war or internees. In The Barbed-Wire College Ron Robin shows how this intriguing chapter of military history was also tied to two crucial episodes of twentieth- century American history: the battle over the future of American education and the McCarthy-era hysterics that awaited postwar America.

This anthology is a collection of stories, written by women at the turn of the twentieth century and published in the Yiddish press at that time. The have been translated to Hebrew for the first time. From its beginning the Yiddish press enabled all levels of society to sound their voices. Women too were quick to meet this challenge, and until the First World War more than ninety of their works were published: novellas, plays, fiction and a wide variety of short stories. This collection of nineteen stories represents this abundance and its unique qualities. It sounds anew the voices of forgotten women authors, who disappeared even from the eyes of critics and researchers: Maria Lerner, Isabella, Rokhl Brokhes, Yente Serdetsky, Salome Perl, Rokhl Feigenberg and others. Their stories open a window to the world of women at a time of dramatic changes in the lives of Jews in the Russian Empire. They portray conflicts between the generations, especially between the authors and their mothers, the dilemmas of love, and the anguished movement between the small town and the big city, between maintaining traditions and breaking free of frameworks. These stories highly enrich our knowledge of Jewish society at that time and are a fundamental expression of the part women played in that society.

Rabbi Moses ben Nahman (c. 1194-1267), rabbi, commentator, Kabbalist, and public leader, was one of the most prominent and influential Jewish figures in the Middle Ages. His diverse works reflect the history of Jewish communities in Western Europe in the thirteenth century and particularly the story of his own life. This book seeks to illuminate Nahmanides' works and beliefs, on the background of the challenges during his life. How was his thought formed, and what were its sources? In what stage of his life was he acquainted with the Kabbalah? To what extent was his immigration to Eretz Israel the consequence of Barcelona disputation? This book offers a new – historical-biographical – perspective for understanding Nahmanides' religious and intellectual world.

The dictionary is the fruit of a three-decade long research on the vocabulary distinctive of the contemporary Georgian-Jewish language, and especially its Hebrew component. This research is based on ongoing field work performed in various places in Georgia and in Israel. The vocabulary reflects the uniqueness of the language and culture, and to a large extent also the anthropology and history of the community of Georgian Jews.

In the history of halakhah, the treatment of uncertainty became one of the most complex fields of intense study. In his latest book, Moshe Halbertal focuses on examining the point of origin of the study of uncertainty in early rabbinic literature, including the Mishnah, Tosefta, and halakhic midrashim. The book explores instructions concerning how to behave in situations of uncertainty ranging from matters of ritual purity, to lineage and marriage, to monetary law, and to the laws of forbidden foods. This examination of the rules of uncertainty introduced in early rabbinic literature reveals that these rules were not aimed at avoiding but rather at dwelling in the midst of uncertainty, thus rejecting the sectarian isolationism that sought to minimize a community's experience of and friction with uncertainty.

This research project tries, for the first time, to analyze and compare all the key Spanish Jewish apostates, especially Petrus Alfonsi, Abner of Burgos, Geronimo de Santa Fe, Pablo de Santa Maria and Pedro de la Caballeria. The aim of this research is to understand the ideological background of the mass conversion of the Spanish Jewish community from the perspective of the intellectual elite involved in the conversion itself and not – as has usually been the case in modern scholarship – according to the rabbis who decided to stay Jewish. In the first part of the book, the author explains the impact of the conversion of a part of the Jewish intellectual elite on the Spanish Jewish population. In the second part, he examines the opinion of the various ideological converts regarding Christianity (especially the dogmas of the Trinity and Incarnation). In the third part, he analyzes their criticisms of Judaism. The main conclusion of this research is that there is a very important difference between the various converso intellectuals regarding the essence of Christianity. The conversos who were philosophers or kabbalists before their conversion continued with a similar approach even after their conversion, using their former philosophical/kabbalistic knowledge to try to convince their fellow Jews to convert as they had. The common denominator of the different writings of these apostates is not their opinions on Christianity but rather their similar criticisms of Judaism, and especially with regard to keeping Jewish religious obligations.

Many books have been written about the Baal Shem Tov; his extensive work and influence have drawn the attention of prominent researchers in the past and present. Tsippi Kauffman has a fresh outlook: she does not attempt to reconstruct the historical Baal Shem Tov, but rather to trace reflections of traditions pertaining to his in essays and writings related to Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, his famous great-grandchild. Rabbi Nahman saw himself not only as a preserver, but also as someone who continued and developed the tradition of the Baal Shem Tov, within struggles in new and different fronts. One of these new fronts was the inner sphere; the dilemmas of self-awareness. The tension between Rabbi Nachman's desire to imitate the Baal Shem Tov, his sense of guilt for not being worthy, and the effort to find a solution for the conflicted psychological state, are ways in which the Baal Shem Tov's figure and traditions shaped his great-grandchild, but also in which the latter shaped the figure of the former in the eyes of generations to come.

Since the establishment of the state and until 1985, Israel’s capital market was mostly nationalized. The government controlled most of the financial activities, and the scarce private activity was shared by only a few institutions that lacked real competition. A long line of reforms that took place since 1985 and to this day revolutionized the banking structure, the capital market and the pension system: • The government reduced its involvement almost completely • The funding means of the business sector and of households expanded tremendously • International capital movements were liberalaized • Conflicts of interests were reduced and the competition amongst financial institutions was improved. The book is divided into 3 parts: The demand for investment in means of production and housing; the funding supply of these investments; and the financial institutions and their supervising system. Every chapter covers a description of a different aspect of the Israeli capital market before exploring the market failures that plagued it and the reforms that alleviated them. A special emphasis is dedicated to the importance of resisting the pressure of interest groups and to the lessons that need to be implemented in the tasks that still lay ahead.

This book focuses on a cycle of some thirty “praise” stories ( Shvachim ) whose heroes are Rabbi Shmuel the Pious and his son, the famous Rabbi Judah the Pious (died 1217; author of Sefer Hasidim ) – the two main figures of the medieval mystical circle known as Hasidut Ashkenaz. The narrative cycle in praise of these luminaries portrays them as extremely virtuous, as mystics with supernatural knowledge, and as masters of magical practices ( ba’alay shem ). Originating orally in Yiddish, these stories were first written down in Hebrew, the sacred language, and then translated “back” into Yiddish – the more widely understood language of the Ashkenazic community. The book presents all versions of these “praise” narratives, extant in manuscripts and print, both in Hebrew and Yiddish, side by side. A thorough introduction traces the growth of this narrative treasure from its embryonic oral beginnings to its fully developed bilingual written manifestations. A detailed analysis of individual stories sheds light on the cultural mentality of medieval Jewry in general and of Ashkenazic Jewry in particular.

The author of Sefer Emeq Ha-Bakha (The Vale of Tears), Yosef ha-Cohen, was a sixteenth-century Jewish doctor of Spanish origin who lived in Italy. This book was not printed in his lifetime. A few copies of the manuscript copied by hand survived. In this volume, Yosef ha-Cohen collected essays written about pogroms against the people of Israel during the Second Temple period and the loss of political independence in Eretz Israel.

Chronicle of French and Ottoman Kings was written by a sixteenth-century Jewish doctor of Spanish origin living in Italy. According to the writer, his intention was to document the hardships and injustices suffered by Jews in the Diaspora - especially the expulsion of Jews from Spain and France - and include them in the history of the conflict between the French kinds and Ottoman Empire over the rule in "the land of Judea and Jerusalem." In effect, this is a story, set in chronological order, of selected events in world history, similar in structure and content to hundreds of writings published at the time. It was written in fine biblical Hebrew, and as such was aimed at an audience who knew the language and could appreciate the conflict between the French kings and the Ottoman Empire as representing world history.

The story recalls the life and work of Josef ha-Cohen, the author of The Chronicles of the French and Ottoman Kings and Sefer Emeq ha-Bakha (The Vale of Tears), published simultaneously. The story reflects a momentous experience of joy and bereavement, love and desire, youth and old age, and most particularly the feeling of human transience.

A bullet misses its target in Sarajevo, a would-be Austrian painter gets into the Viennese academy, Lord Halifax becomes British prime minister in 1940 instead of Churchill: seemingly minor twists of fate on which world-shaking events might have hinged. Alternative history has long been the stuff of parlor games, war-gaming, and science fiction, but over the past few decades it has become a popular stomping ground for serious historians. The historian Richard J. Evans now turns a critical, slightly jaundiced eye on a subject typically the purview of armchair historians. The book’s main concern is examining the intellectual fallout from historical counterfactuals, which the author defines as “alternative versions of the past in which one alteration in the timeline leads to a different outcome from the one we know actually occurred.” What if Britain had stood at the sidelines during the First World War? What if the Wehrmacht had taken Moscow? The author offers an engaging and insightful introduction to the genre, while discussing the reasons for its revival in popularity, the role of historical determinism, and the often hidden agendas of the counterfactual historian. Most important, Evans takes counterfactual history seriously, looking at the insights, pitfalls, and intellectual implications of changing one thread in the weave of history. A wonderful critical introduction to an often-overlooked genre for scholars and casual readers of history alike.

‏‏Deganit Berest is one of the prominent Israeli artists active today. Her many artworks span ‎between painting, photography, and installation. Her intricate works trigger and challenge ‎different interpretive moves. This book present eight of them, written by artists, philosophers, ‎curators and other scholars, unfolding a rich and diverse commentary on Berest’s works. In ‎addition to the papers, the book includes fragments written by the artist herself, unveiling ‎another perspective on the artworks, which usually remains hidden: the artist herself meditating ‎about her own works. ‎

Why is is so hard to improve the Israeli education system? Despite the fact that individual innovative pedagogy projects are successful on a small-scale level, creating islands of excellency, it seems that they are unable to connect to form a comprehensive change. Endless reforms are implemented, and yet the Israeli education system is stuck in terms of the quality of learning and teaching. This book alerts that processes of change in education tend to focus on a technical and superficial dimension, while a more comprehensive change demands detailed strategic planning and systematic work on the core of teaching and learning processes.

Rabbi Judah Leib Alter of Ger, a famed nineteenth-century Hasidic master, wrote an influential collection of Hebrew homilies. But it seems that R. Judah Leib’s sermons were also transcribed by his students, some of whom recorded their teacher’s words in the original Yiddish rather than Hebrew translation. This monograph is based on a newly-discovered Yiddish manuscript of sixty pages. It presents a synoptic edition of the Yiddish text alongside the Hebrew version, thus enabling comparison of the witnesses and demonstrating the development of the various texts. The introduction uses this manuscript to explore broader historical and theoretical issues such as the relationship between written texts and oral culture, the development of written Yiddish, the nature and boundaries of translation, and the complex pathways of transmission from teachers to their students.

Vardi and Weitz bring together wide-ranging scholarship to help us understand the roots, effects, and implications of misbehavior in organizations. The book covers key topics that have emerged in scholarly literature in the past decade, such as insidious workplace behavior, bullying and harassment in the workplace, information hiding, cyberbullying, and organizational spirituality. A thorough and up-to-date resource on this crucial and evolving topic in organizational studies, this book provides insights on misbehavior at the individual, position, group, and organizational levels.

The political upheavals, the leadership crisis, and the ideological frustration which the Israeli Labour party went through in the first two decades of the 21st century led it to an unprecedented electoral decline. What happened to the formerly dominant party which established the state? What kind of intrinsic changes did it undergo in the late modernity and due to new sociological generations? What kind of new or old ideological discourses were formed within it? And how can we characterize its renewed ideological discourse? These questions stood at the background of this ethnographic study. The study focuses on young, idealistic activists who joined the Israeli Labour Party during 2006-2009 and asked to promote a social-democratic agenda. The book is based on multi-arena fieldwork and it enables a rare ethnographic reflection on the way macro level political changes take shape and are embodied in interpersonal interactions on the micro level.

The Book Smugglers is the nearly unbelievable story of ghetto residents who rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts—first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets—by hiding them on their bodies, burying them in bunkers, and smuggling them across borders. It is a tale of heroism and resistance, of friendship and romance, and of unwavering devotion—including the readiness to risk one’s life—to literature and art. And it is entirely true. Based on Jewish, German, and Soviet documents, including diaries, letters, memoirs, and the author’s interviews with several of the story’s participants, The Book Smugglers chronicles the daring activities of a group of poets turned partisans and scholars turned smugglers in Vilna, “The Jerusalem of Lithuania.” The rescuers were pitted against Johannes Pohl, a Nazi “expert” on the Jews, who had been dispatched to Vilna by the Nazi looting agency, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, to organize the seizure of the city’s great collections of Jewish books. Pohl and his Einsatzstab staff planned to ship the most valuable materials to Germany and incinerate the rest. The Germans used forty ghetto inmates as slave-laborers to sort, select, pack, and transport the materials, either to Germany or to nearby paper mills. This group, nicknamed “the Paper Brigade,” and informally led by poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, a garrulous, street-smart adventurer and master of deception, smuggled thousands of books and manuscripts past German guards. If caught, the men would have faced death by firing squad at Ponar, the mass-murder site outside of Vilna. To store the rescued manuscripts, poet Abraham Sutzkever helped build an underground book-bunker sixty feet beneath the Vilna ghetto. Kaczerginski smuggled weapons as well, using the group’s worksite, the former building of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, to purchase arms for the ghetto’s secret partisan organization. All the while, both men wrote poetry that was recited and sung by the fast-dwindling population of ghetto inhabitants. With the Soviet “liberation” of Vilna (now known as Vilnius), the Paper Brigade thought themselves and their precious cultural treasures saved—only to learn that their new masters were no more welcoming toward Jewish culture than the old, and the books must now be smuggled out of the USSR.

The book traces contested visions and representations of al-Andalus/Sepharad in modern Jewish discourse through an in-depth analysis of the work of Sephardi intellectual network in the turn of the twentieth century Palestine/Land of Israel. Against the backdrop of the tumultuous political and social events of that period, and processes of national, ethnic, and religious partitions, the book explores the ways in which these Sephardi intellectuals fundamentally challenged the nationalistic and monolingual ideologies and looks at their efforts to establish a shared Jewish-Arab society based on a symbolic return to the Sephardi/Andalusian medieval legacy of Hebrew-Arabic bilingualism and a Judeo-Muslim joint cultural heritage. By exploring these contested representations of Sephardi identity and culture the book re-examines some fundamental issues that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century and which still accompany us to this day: the national conflict between Jews and Palestinians, the contacts and splits between Hebrew and Arab culture and the formation of ethnic hierarchies between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim. The book aims to contribute to the growing interest in modern Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewish history and to broaden the scope of “Jewish studies” beyond the European Jewish experience.

The Western musical tradition has produced not only music, but also countless writings about music that remain in continuous—and enormously influential—dialogue with their subject. With sweeping scope and philosophical depth, A Language of Its Own traces the past millennium of this ongoing exchange. Ruth Katz argues that the indispensable relationship between intellectual production and musical creation gave rise to the Western conception of music. This evolving and sometimes conflicted process, in turn, shaped the art form itself. As ideas entered music from the contexts in which it existed, its internal language developed in tandem with shifts in intellectual and social history. Katz explores how this infrastructure allowed music to explain itself from within, creating a self-referential and rational foundation that has begun to erode in recent years. A magisterial exploration of a frequently overlooked intersection of Western art and philosophy, A Language of Its Own restores music to its rightful place in the history of ideas.

These two collections of Yiddish letters date from the second half of the 17th century and are being published here in full for the first time. The opening five-letter collection was archived together with extensive information about three Jews from Hamburg-Altona, who had been arrested and investigated in Copenhagen in August 1666. The second collection consists of eighteen letters exchanged between Hamburg-Altona and Copenhagen in January 1678. They concern the family and business affairs of a range of people, among them some of Glikl Hamel’s relatives, business associates and acquaintances. Together, the two collections provide a wealth of illuminating new details about the economic, cultural, social, and family life of early modern Ashkenazi Jews in Northern Europe, and also shed light on the practice of Yiddish letter-writing at the time. The English section consists of an introduction followed by a synopsis of each letter, while the Hebrew section comprises a transcription of the original texts as well as their facsimile images.

Prof. Shraga Abramson was the most important scholar of his time in the field of Geonim literature and the teacher of most of the proceeding generation in this field of study. This book is the third collection of his studies pertaining to the Geonim period. The two others are considered mandatory for those interested in this formative and fascinating period. It contains studies published in his lifetime, which were not included in other compilations, as well as some studies found in his estate. The articles deal with various aspects of the Geonim literature.

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.

This book deals with the history of Jewish cemeteries in Poland during the Second World War and later , reflecting Jewish and Polish attempts at rehabilitation , looking after social equilibrium and national identity . It relates to the people, Jews and Poles, whether resident in Poland or living elsewhere, who are involved in different aspects relating to those cemeteries: preservation, maintenance, restoration, including the collection and care of gravestones that were removed from the cemeteries. These individuals are also active in setting up monuments and in documenting the cemeteries, in addition to carrying out research into the art, philology, genealogy and history of the cemeteries and the gravestones.

A look at three communal educational cycles. Kibbutz Education, education in working class schools and general secular education in the settlement and the state education in the State of Israel.

Against the background of Kristallnacht and Britain's retreat from the Jewish Mandate for Palestine, David Ben-Gurion shaped a new Zionist foreign policy based on the assumed rise of the United States as a world power that would determine the future of the Middle East. This book traces the evolution of the demand for a Jewish state into a central and specific aim of Zionist policy and the interrelated process by which Ben-Gurion became increasingly oriented toward the United States and American Jewry at the expense of Zionism's historical connection with Great Britain. Based on new documentary evidence, Allon Gal's study charts Ben-Gurion's ascent from the leadership of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) to prominence in the world Zionist and international diplomacy. The book also portrays the emergence of American Jewry as a political factor that strove to secure Jewish interests in an open and self-assured fashion. Distributed in North America by Indiana University Press.

Literature for children written in pre-state Israel played a major role in shaping the young generation's values, experiences and conception of the world. Up until the 1940s, the hegemonic current of this literature's related the tale of the Zionist-Socialist accomplishments and presented the Hebrew generation growing up in the country as the opposite of the Diasporic Jew. During World War II, with the arrival of the news of the Holocaust transpiring in Europe, as well as at the period of conflict with the British, the story for children had changed dramatically. This shift has left a considerable mark on Hebrew culture as a whole. In her book From the School Desk We Were Taken Yael Darr describes how writers for the young committed themselves toa new story, focusing on the battle and sacrifice of youths. In this new narrative the Hebrew children were portrayed as skillful fighters serving role models even for the parents' generation. Yet, Darr also suggests that the literature for children did not ignore the news about the destruction of the European Jewry. While it might be expected of literature aimed at young readers to spare them exposure to such a catastrophe, it was in fact precisely that literature which was quick to tell the story of the disaster. Furthermore, in its varied and numerous references to the Holocaust the children's literature even preceded the Holocaust literature for adults. Darr's book recounts the military-national story as well as the tale of the devastation of the European Jewry in all its complexity. The writer also shows how some of the literary forms dealing with the Holocaust during the British Mandate were abandoned, when towards the founding of the state the children's literature fused the heroism of the country's youth and the story of the Holocaust weaving them into a pronounced national lesson. The book uncovers a wide range of literary works for children and youngsters written in the nineteen forties both by mainstream, center-stage, authors and by those in its margins. It closely analyzes several establishing works of fiction thus shedding light on the society and culture of those years while undermining conventions concerning the position of the Israeli based Jewish community concerning the Holocaust and its survivors.

In the last twenty years, the disappearance of the orchards, which were part of the coastal plane's scenery of Israel on one hand, exposes old buildings, iron gates and Cyprus trees leading no-where on other hand. The purpose of the book is to discover the story of these remnants: to describe the biography of entrepreneurs who came to Palestine in the years 1920s 1930s and invested in Citrus Plantations, to deal with their Zionist ideology and their economic perceptions. Dr. Irit Amit-Cohen is a researcher and a writer. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography and Environment and Department of Land of Israel and Archeology at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. Her research focuses on preservation and conservation cultural built heritage and cultural landscapes, Israel State studies and on the history of Palestine in the years of the British Mandate.

Baruch Kimmerling (1939-2007) was one of Israel's outstanding critical sociologists. In this volume, Israeli and Palestinian scholars of several disciplines and generations offer a series of studies on Israel and Palestine, past and present, in dialogue with the research agenda Kimmerling has advanced. Essays discuss Zionism and militarism, frontier and colonization, social protest and the limits of democracy, the sociology of fear and the politics of home -- and Kimmerling's own trajectory.

How did British Jewry respond to the Holocaust, how prominent was it on the communal agenda, and what does this response tell us about the values, politics, and fears of the Anglo-Jewish community? This book studies the priorities of that community, and thereby seeks to analyse the attitudes and philosophies which informed actions. It paints a picture of Anglo-Jewish life and its reactions to a wide range of matters in the non-Jewish world. Richard Bolchover charts the transmission of the news of the European catastrophe and discusses the various theories regarding reactions to these exceptional circumstances. He investigates the structures and political philosophies of Anglo-Jewry during the war years and covers the reactions of Jewish political and religious leaders as well as prominent Jews acting outside the community's institutional framework. Various co-ordinated responses, political and philanthropic, are studied, as are the issues which dominated the community at that time, namely internal conflict and the fear of increased domestic anti-semitism: these preoccupations inevitably affected responses to events in Europe. The latter half of the book looks at the ramifications of the community's socio-political philosophies including, most radically, Zionism, and their influence on communal reactions. This acclaimed study raises major questions about the structures and priorities of the British Jewish community. For this paperback, the author has added a new Introduction summarizing research in the field since the book's first appearance.

During the last decades there have occurred significant upheavals in the political and military position of many religious and ethnic communities in the Middle East and North Africa. Communities which had been rejected and discriminated for decades rose to power or strengthened their political position in their countries by means of military struggles. Meanwhile, in Israel/Palestine, the ethnical-religious Jewish minority has become a ruling majority, while excluding the former Arab-Muslim-Sunni majority, following the wars of 1948 and 1976. This book examines these processes.

The prominent historian Karl Bosl, who during World War II had been a high school teacher in Ansbach, Franconia, intimated that he had been critical of the Nazis and asserted that he had belonged to a small group that engaged in active resistance; one of its members, Robert Limpert, was apprehended by the Nazis and brutally put to death just hours before the Americans arrived. The present study, based on a large number of unpublished official and private documents, records Bosl’s manifold links to the Nazi regime and reveals that as late as December 1944 he delivered a stirring lecture before Ansbach’s Nazi leadership in which he extolled the struggle for the preservation of Hitler’s Greater German Reich; yet as early as September 1945 he vigorously condemned Nazism at a ceremony at Limpert’s grave. The documents attest also to how Bosl succeeded in persuading Ansbach’s Denazification Tribunal that he had risked his life opposing the Nazis. An unpublished account allows for a detailed reconstruction of the daring, little-known activities of young Limpert and his three classmates.

The Holocaust is an unsolved problem for humanity. We are still trying to explain the causes and the origins of the hell of Nazi Europe and its impact on our understanding humanity and concept of Western civilization. For Jewish thinkers, the problem is even more urgent as it brings forward difficult questions about Jewish identity. The book " In the Beginning There was the Holocaust " brings a panoramic picture of the responses of Jewish Philosophy to the Holocaust, Theodicy, the meaning of Jewish existence after the Holocaust, struggle with nihilism and despair, and questions concerning Holocaust education and the culture of remembrance. The major claim in the book is the Holocaust is a major crossroad in our world; if we want to understand ourselves we have to explore the roads that go out of it.

The Land of the Bible, cradle of Judaism and Christianity, is a world of wonders. Here Abraham was asked by God to sacrifice his first born son Isaac, returning from decades of exile in Egypt the Israelites established a nation, and Jesus with the Twelve Apostles founded what would be known as Christianity. Due to its strategic position and spiritual significance, this small piece of land attracted kings, emperors, and sultans who throughout thousands of years claimed it in their quest to dominate the world. It is also a land of unique topographical phenomena: most notably the world's lowest spot, the Dead Sea, the largest Makhtesh, the Great Rift Valley, the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Michael Medina’s three dimensional photos accompanied by Professor James H. Charlesworth’s descriptions walk you in Jesus’ footsteps as well as through some of the Holy Land’s most significant and spectacular historical, archeological, and topographical wonders.

Ateret Zekenim is a work of historical research into the lives of several well-known medieval halakhists from France, Germany, and Spain. The primary focus of the book is biographical, and it attempts to resolve difficult questions that have puzzled the scholarly community for many years. Its author seeks to rely on the writings of his predecessors, but he first substantiates that these foundations were properly laid and that he is not adding to an edifice that is destined to collapse. Thus, for example, the author re-examines the story of Rabbi Asher b. Yeḥiel (Rosh)’s migration from Germany to Spain in the early 14th century, a migration that had a dramatic impact on the culture of Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jewry alike. Is the scholarly consensus – according to which Rosh meticulously planned his flight to distant Toledo, in an entirely different cultural realm, over the course of two decades – correct? After methodical examination of the sources, a very different story emerges. Rosh, and with him the Ashkenazi halakhic tradition, moved from Germany to Spain at the last moment, when there were no other options.

In this provocative work, Alvin H. Rosenfeld contends that the proliferation of books, films, television programs, museums, and public commemorations related to the Holocaust has, perversely, brought about a diminution of its meaning and a denigration of its memory. Investigating a wide range of events and cultural phenomena, such as Ronald Reagan's 1985 visit to the German cemetery at Bitburg, the distortions of Anne Frank's story, and the ways in which the Holocaust has been depicted by such artists and filmmakers as Judy Chicago and Steven Spielberg, Rosenfeld charts the cultural forces that have minimized the Holocaust in popular perceptions. He contrasts these with sobering representations by Holocaust witnesses such as Jean Améry, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Imre Kertész. The book concludes with a powerful warning about the possible consequences of "the end of the Holocaust" in public consciousness.

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.

Since 1901 the Jewish National Fund was the organ of the World Zionist Organization for the purchase of lands in Palestine and settling it with Jewish people. While working towards this goal, the JNF was faced with a multitude of issues to address: designing the land and settlement policy, deciding where to purchase lands, which types of farming and economy to enhance, which types of settlements to develop, which socio-economic sectors of the Jewish people to assist, how to develop national geographic and economic systems, how to secure as wide as possible borders for the anticipated Jewish autonomy, and how to create a Jewish demographic majority in Palestine. This book presents the first deep and detailed research conducted on the subject. In a lively and exciting way it relates the process of decision-making, planning, and carrying out of the policies and enterprises of the JNF in the years prior to World War I, all this against the background of the considerations in Palestine and developments in the Zionist world.

This unique volume, which is sure to engage the attention of both scholars and the general public, is an unparalleled cross-generational and international dialogue among eminent historians about three central aspects of the unfathomable enigma of the Holocaust. In the first section, beyond a seminal overview of sixty years of research, the writers reflect on historiography and historical thought ranging from contemporaries of the Third Reich to the ongoing discussion about the controversial role post-war West German historians played in Holocaust research. This is followed by a section focusing on social antisemitism until the 1950s and the German public’s awareness of the Holocaust, including the posture of the German Resistance Movement. The third major theme is the Jewish society, from its initial attempts to develop new forms of societal life under the Nazi regime until the brink of annihilation during the mass deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka. The concluding chapter sheds light on the unresolved tension between reflective personal memory and impersonal historical research of this dark period in human history.

Zionists without Borders tells the story of the Halutz movement in Poland and its role in helping the Labor movement rise to the leadership of the Zionist Movement in the interwar period. It describes the founding of a mass national and socialist movement, which changed the face of the Zionist map. The leaders of the Labor movement in Israel established strong ties with pioneers from Poland, thus making the Halutz a cross-border movement, connecting Jews by means of politics, nationalism and socialism.

The kibbutz and the moshav are two collective democratic forms of settlement inspired by the socialist ideology prevalent within the Jewish national movement in Palestine at the end of the 19 th beginning of the 20 th century. As was the case in a number of other voluntary forms of association such as communes, social movements, political parties and some trades union which, from the beginning of the modern age, were influenced by the socialist utopia, the promise of gender equality in the kibbutz and the moshav became one of the fundamental principles of these communities. This promise was part of an attempt to establish a new egalitarian society, in which inequality in the distribution of rights and obligations between men and women will be abolished through transforming the boundaries between the private and the public spheres. As this division forms a central institutional mechanism which, for centuries, has produced and re-produced an unequal gender order, it was by attacking this mechanism that equality was meant to be achieved. This book presents the historical development of gender boundaries in the kibbutz and the moshav. It underscores their dynamic nature and sheds light on the changing private and public spheres that evolved during decades. This is accomplished through giving space to the multi-faceted and multi-cultural voices of the women members of the kibbutz and the moshav, secular and religious women, old-timers and new comers, situated at the center or at the periphery of their communities. It brings into sharper focus many issues related to gender boundaries and to the private and public spheres that have rarely or even never been raised. By doing so, this book contributes to our understanding of the social mechanisms that (re)produce gender inequality in modernity, be it in its socialist, capitalist or post-industrial version. It also provides additional evidence to the limits of any attempt to achieve gender equality by focusing only on the transformation of women without challenging hegemonic masculinities.

This book is the first attempt to review the history and the fall of the Jewish community that existed in Beit She' an from the late 19th century until the outbreak of the Arab Revolt in 1936. The story of the community, which has been almost completely forgotten by the public and academic consciousness, is based on an initial study of several public and local archives, as well as a thorough study of dozens of primary and secondary sources of various types: press clippings, academic and autobiographical sources, oral interviews and others. Beside presenting the history of the community itself, which includes the unique challenges it experienced during its fifty years of existence and the organizational and ideological processes which characterized it, the study is also a base for a better assessment and understanding of the several small Jewish communities that existed during this period in a number of Arab cities and towns: Be'er Sheva, Ramle, Nazareth, Samakh, Jericho and others. This is accomplished by comparing the events in Beit She' an to those which took place in other communities, while trying to identify the factors that led to the collapse of these communities during the Mandate period, and to the withdrawal of the Zionist movement from its substantial support to their continued existence. The book also deals with different questions of ethnic and national Jewish identity, the relations between marginal communities and the leading national institutions, and issues relating to Zionist historiography over the past century.

FORMTEXT This study examines the Pentateuchal account of Israel’s preparations for entering Canaan, appearing within the concluding section of the Book of Numbers. Literary-critical analysis reveals that each of the passages that comprise this account is the product of several stages of composition, with each literary stratum reflecting the ideological tendencies of the authors responsible for its creation. It emerges that ideological disputes that raged in Judea of the Persian period, when these texts were composed, manifested themselves in historiographical accounts describing a much earlier time – that just prior to the entry into Canaan. The wilderness period, seen as decisive for Israel’s past, and the notion of the Mosaic Torah believed to have been given during this formative era, along with the obvious parallel to these Judean authors’ own days, those of the return from exile, led them to depict the events at the end of Moses’ time in ways that addressed the burning questions of Yehud of the Persian period. The textual and historical analysis reveals that a previously unrecognized substratum, running throughout the account, has been augmented by several editorial additions. This recognition in turn sheds new light on the Pentateuch’s formation and on the historical circumstances reflected in its composition . FFFFFFFF000100000000060054006500780074003200300000000000000000000000000000004E00D605D4052000D405D805DB05E105D8052000E905D905D505E405D905E2052000D105EA05D905D005D505E8052000D405E105E405E8052000D105D005EA05E8052000D405D005D905E005D805E805E005D8052E002000D105E805D905E805EA052000D405DE05D705D305DC052000D405D905D0052000D405DB05D905EA05D505D1052000E205DC052000D205D1052000D405E205D805D905E405D40500000000000000000000

Dr. Yosef Govrin joined Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1953 and during his 42 years of diplomatic service he served in many functions in Israel and abroad, inter alia: Ambassador to Romania, Deputy Director General of the Foreign Ministry, and Ambassador to Austria, Slovenia, Slovakia and to the UNO in Vienna. These Reflections are based on the author's activities in developing relations with these three states in substance and in quantity, his discussions with the heads of these states and their discussions with their Israeli counterparts, surveying their internal and external policies, describing the local Jewish communities and the activities to foster relations with them and to strengthen their national s tatus. These reflections have a documentary nature and constitute a unique and important source for research regarding the history of Israel's relations with Austria, Slovenia and Slovakia from the beginning of the 1990s, characterized by the end of the Cold War, following such historic events as the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the end of the presidency of Austria's Kurt Waldheim, when he was "persona non grata" in many parts of the world, including Israel, as well as the signing of the Oslo Agreements, known as the Declaration of Principles between Israel and the PLO.

The present study begins as an attempt to analyze an apparently paradoxical situation created by two events, which occurred simultaneously in 1948: the establishment of Israel as an independent state and the emergence of the ‘Ofakim Hadashim’ (New Horizons) group of artists, acknowledged as the most renowned local artists at the time. The creation of the State of Israel may be considered the high point of Jewish nationalism, when the nation celebrated its distinctiveness. On the other hand, Ofakim Hadashim was a group of intellectuals who aspired to disengage their artistic work from the dominant political processes of the time. The basic claim of its members was l’art pour l’art, which ostensibly contradicted the significance of the general political process. This situation is highly interesting since it challenges the general sociological assumptions about the role of intellectuals in nation-building processes, and also contradicts the usual explanation regarding the Israeli state-building process. It concludes that an explanation of the social complexity existing in 1948 can be found in an understanding of modernity as a multifaceted phenomenon embracing a diversity of inherently contradictory practices.

Commedia dell’arte, originating in Italy and proliferating on European stages from approximately 1650 to 1750, is one of the most significant and long-lasting phenomena in theatre history; its influence on all performing genres is notable throughout Western Drama to this very day. The new study From Carnival to Theatre: Structure and Chaos in the Commedia Dell'arte provides a comprehensive, deeply-researched study of the development of the genre, the establishment of the first professional troupes in Europe, their organization, their patrons and wide variety of popular and elite audiences. The study traces all aspects of the unique improvised performance: the show's space, dramatic patterns, dramatis personae, acting style, costume and stage design are re-interpreted by the attachment of the commedia dell’ arte to its double roots: the heritage of written literature, and manifestations of popular oral tradition in seasonal festivities. The book explores especially the interaction of the commedia dell'arte with the phenomena of carnival, in its very existence as an opposition to the social structure within the liminal time and space related to the celebration. Being an authorized event, containing metaphors of annihilating the existent order, in which subversion could be substituted by amusement, the carnivalesque combined time, place and creative means into a new theatrical form: the commedia dell'arte.

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.

What do we do when we are suddenly subjected to traffic and senseless suffering – suffering we did not bring upon ourselves, that we feel we do not deserve? This book is about the suffering of Jewish men, women and children who were singled out as targets of senseless hatred and ruthless persecution by the Nazi’s during the Second World War. The struggle of Holocaust survivors to come to terms with what happened to them in the Nazi concentration and death camps gives us a poignant picture of the human struggle to understand what life is all about in the face of its tragedies and hardships, and of the evil of man’s inhumanity to man.

Folk-culture is typically associated with continuity; how can one engage folk-culture in situations of destruction and extermination - the reality Zionist folklorists confronted facing the Shoah? With the first bits of information regarding the destruction in Europe, many of them assembled in Tel Aviv to form the Yeda Am folklore society; in tandem, the Institute for Jewish Folklore was formed in Jerusalem. The two competing organizations dealt with fragmentary lives in the Diaspora in different ways, in their quest to find new meanings from them. This book examines Zionist folkloristics at this dire hour from a perspective that views fractured reality as a fundamental principle in studying cultures in general, by combining approaches from folklore studies and science and technology studies. This book undermines the distinction between individualist scholarly knowledge and collective folklore by examining everyday scholarly habits: Archival practices, the use of letterheads, jubilee celebrations of scholars as well as practices of editing and laying out scholarly publications. The tension between national culture and ethnic cultures is revealed in new ways, as is the relationship between avant-garde and folklore studies.

A sociological-historical study of the German Jews in Israel.

The political upheavals, the leadership crisis, and the ideological frustration which the Israeli Labour party went through in the first two decades of the 21st century led it to an unprecedented electoral decline. What happened to the formerly dominant party which established the state? What kind of intrinsic changes did it undergo in the late modernity and due to new sociological generations? What kind of new or old ideological discourses were formed within it? And how can we characterize its renewed ideological discourse? These questions stood at the background of this ethnographic study. The study focuses on young, idealistic activists who joined the Israeli Labour Party during 2006-2009 and asked to promote a social-democratic agenda. The book is based on multi-arena fieldwork and it enables a rare ethnographic reflection on the way macro level political changes take shape and are embodied in interpersonal interactions on the micro level.

Ran Aaronsohn and Shaul Stampfer Preface: Between the Old World and the New World Nachum Gross Introduction: On Jewish Entrepreneurship Judith Kalik 'Kastaw' (Deposit) and 'Wiederkauf' in the Economic Activity of the Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth Adam Teller General Arenda and the General Arendarz in Eighteenth Century Lithuania Mordechai Zalkin 'And These Shall Escape, the Smith and the Metalworker': Idea and Reality in the Economic World of the Russian Maskilim in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century Ruth Kark and Michal Ben Ya'akov Entrepreneurship and Initiatives of Sephardic and Oriental Jews Building Urban Residential Neighborhoods in Palestine at the End of the Ottoman Period: The Case of Jerusalem Jacob Cohen-Hatav Entrepreneurship, Planning and Spatial Development: The Establishment of the Mahane Yehuda Market in Jerusalem and its Development during the Period of the British Mandate (1917-1948) Nahum Karlinsky The Californian Model and its Implementation in the Jewish Citrus Industry, 1905-1939 There are abstracts in English at the end of the book.

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 most comprehensive Hebrew Dictionary. The revised and updated Even Shoshan Dictionary is the ultimate Dictionary for both Contemporary and Biblical Hebrew. The Dictionary aslo includes a number of idioms and sayings.

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.

From Empathy to Denial is the first comprehensive study of the broad range of Arab responses to the Holocaust based on years of painstaking historical research. The book explores how Holocaust representations developed after the Second World War by analyzing themes, and case studies, spanning a period of almost seventy years. It shows how these perceptions evolved in the shadow of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

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.

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.

The Second Commandment’s injunction against making graven images and likenesses resonates in all facets of Jewish visuality throughout the generations. Although Jews have always created and consumed art, the attitude to figural art –anthropomorphic and zoomorphic representations – has oscillated, like a pendulum, between strict prohibition and full permissibility. Figureless Art traces a lesser-known chapter in the history of Jewish art – a period governed by the swing to extreme stringency that left its mark on Late Antique synagogues in the Land of Israel. This anti-figural trend manifested in the avoidance of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic depictions and in the deliberate obliteration of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures on stone carvings and mosaic carpets that adorned the synagogues. What is the meaning of this strict trend? Did it emerge from within the Jewish world or was it stimulated, conversely, by external influences? Who was responsible for the effacement of the figures in the synagogues and when did these iconoclastic events occur? This book examines these phenomena through a broad historical, religious, and cultural perspective, based on visual and literary sources from Late Antique and early Muslim Palestine.

Studies in Talmudic Literature contains the scientific writings of Eliezer Shimshon Rosenthal published during and after his lifetime. They were written from 1957 until his death in 1979. Volume I contains articles on the various periods of the Talmudic literature. Volume II is composed of studies on the various languages used in Talmudic literature and the elements and principles of the Halakha. This compilation will benefit those who wish to learn from his theory and understand his unique contribution to Talmudic research.

This introductory book deals with the bonds created between German physicians and the Nazi biomedical vision based upon racial and eugenic conceptions. These ideological connections and the attitudes of many Nazi doctors, culminating in the actions of Mengele and other SS physicians in Auschwitz , may be described as a Medicalization of the Holocaust. In July 1933, the sterilization law was enacted. Under the pretext of war, the Nazi modus operandi was changed to medical murder. It strove to stop the spread of hereditary diseases by gassing to death sick people judged “unfit” to be included among “Aryan Germans”. Although officially abandoned in summer 1941, Hitler used the expertise gained by the medical murderers to design the “Final Solution”. Nazi physicians operated the first annihilation camps like Treblinka, while others initiated the process of Ghettoization, arguing that the Jews were spreading epidemics. The second part of this book depicts the courageous efforts of many Jewish doctors to resist annihilation. In many ghettos, Jewish doctors worked on behalf of the “Judenrat” to try keep people alive. A clandestine medical faculty functioning in the Warsaw ghetto was the pinnacle of Jewish intellectual resistance. Even in concentration camps, physicians attempted to sustain the basic creeds of medical ethics by protecting and saving patients. The last chapters of the book deal with the efforts to cope with the lessons of the Nazi misuse of medicine.

This book describes the changes that took place among the various different sectors of society in the FSU regarding their attitudes towards the Jews and Israel.

This book deals with the arrival of modernity in the Holy Land in the form of the 86 km Jaffa-Jerusalem Railway. Befitting the completion of such a substantial undertaking, the inauguration, in September 1892, was a grand affair, attended by representatives of the Ottoman Empire, consuls, religious leaders, and foreign delegations. The tracks approached Jerusalem from the southwest through the Judean Mountains, taking advantage of the deep, winding river bed of the Soreq Valley. This afforded the least steep route, though even then the grades were a challenge for the locomotives. Since the tracks were of narrow meter-gauge they could easily follow the natural contours of the land on the ascent to Jerusalem, the highest point, at about 700 meters above sea level. . The railroad was the largest civil engineering project ever undertaken in the modern Holy Land. It was built to exploit the tremendous growth of pilgrim traffic and tourism during the second half of the nineteenth century. Though several proposals had been put forward since the 1850s, it was only in the 1880s that two young Jewish entrepreneurs, Joseph Navon of Jerusalem and Joseph Amzalak of Jaffa, backed by the Protestant banker Johannes Frutiger, were enabled to take the first steps leading to the acquisition of a license from the Ottoman government for laying down the iron rails. Unable to raise sufficient capital in Europe, Navon sold the license to a group of Catholic businessmen in Paris, who established the Société du Chemin de Fer Ottoman de Jaffa à Jérusalem et Prolongements. When the first locomotive was tested on a short length of track at Jaffa half the population turned up to witness the event, such was the novelty of the sight and sounds of the horse of fire and iron. Despite difficulties due to the low cost of construction and poor traffic during the early years, the railroad opened up Jerusalem to modern tourism, brought greater numbers of pilgrims, and contributed to the growth of the city. It also delivered fresh water in times of drought. This is the most thoroughly researched publication ever to appear on the first railroad in the Holy Land. Moreover, it relies extensively on the one resource that best captures the spirit of the Jaffa-Jerusalem Railway: magnificent photographs, mainly taken between 1891 and 1914. These early photographs, gathered from archives in Israel, the United States, England and Germany, are supplemented with those taken by British forces from December 1917 on, from Israel, Australia and England, and a number of color images dating from the mid-1980s. Details of locomotives and rolling stock, maps, tables of statistics, track plans, extensive notes, a bibliography, and index are included. The intended audiences, apart from general readers and railway enthusiasts, are historical geographers, historians of the Holy Land in modern times, and transport and tourism historians.

Two opposite arguments are heard in political and academic discourse in Israel about the status of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF): One argument is that the IDF possesses too much power and that military thought governs political thought. Others contend that the military is over-supervised by civilian groups such as parents, civil rights groups, and other organizations, thereby limiting its space of operation. Can both these arguments be right at the same time? How can the contradiction between them be reconciled? This is the problematic at the heart of this book. In Who Governs the Military , Yagil Levy proposes a distinction between two modes of civilian control over military affairs: control of the armed forces – focused on military doctrine, weapons systems, operational performance, recruitment policies and the resources allocated to the military – and control of militarism, which focuses on political culture and the level of legitimation it awards to the use of force. Levy argues that inverse relations have developed since the early years of the state; namely, increase in control of the IDF dovetailed with a decrease in control of militarism. This distinction is useful in analyzing key issues that have attracted scholarly attention in recent years, among them: - The political implications of changes in the social composition of the IDF. - The sources and implications of casualty-averse policies. - The impact of extra-institutional control; namely, the actions taken by social movements and interest groups, in the public and judicial arenas, in an attempt to restrain the military. - The significance of the military's permeability to the market society. - The complex role played by the press in controlling the military.

Michael Evenari's biography unfolds his exciting, manifold life: his life of botany, the confrontation with political events as a youngster and his thrilling experience of helping in the development of Israel. Evenari takes us on his exciting expeditions in the company of his beloved wife. He tells us of his meetings with many personalities and about his farm in the Negev. The discovery of long forgotten floodwater irrigated farm systems from the times of King Solomon and their reconstruction became a successful experiment which led him to teach this approach of runoff agriculture in many parts of the world, initializing progress in the development of various arid areas.

It is commonly accepted that the initial Jewish resettlement of the Holy Land in the late nineteenth century laid the foundations of the State of Israel. But what were the key elements of that process, and who implemented it? What did the new enterprise look like, and what was its significance? These important yet often poorly understood issues are reconstructed and analyzed in this unique study. Ran Aaronsohn provides fresh insight into the role played by Baron Edmond de Rothschild through his many and diverse agents ("the administration") in the Jewish settlement movement and places the endeavor in global perspective by comparing it to the phenomenon of colonization throughout the world. The author draws upon a wide array of sources – including primary archival material from Israel and France – and illustrates his narrative with maps and historical photos to create a richly detailed picture of a crucial period in Jewish history.

The Book Smugglers is the nearly unbelievable story of ghetto residents who rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts—first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets—by hiding them on their bodies, burying them in bunkers, and smuggling them across borders. It is a tale of heroism and resistance, of friendship and romance, and of unwavering devotion—including the readiness to risk one’s life—to literature and art. And it is entirely true. Based on Jewish, German, and Soviet documents, including diaries, letters, memoirs, and the author’s interviews with several of the story’s participants, The Book Smugglers chronicles the daring activities of a group of poets turned partisans and scholars turned smugglers in Vilna, “The Jerusalem of Lithuania.” The rescuers were pitted against Johannes Pohl, a Nazi “expert” on the Jews, who had been dispatched to Vilna by the Nazi looting agency, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, to organize the seizure of the city’s great collections of Jewish books. Pohl and his Einsatzstab staff planned to ship the most valuable materials to Germany and incinerate the rest. The Germans used forty ghetto inmates as slave-laborers to sort, select, pack, and transport the materials, either to Germany or to nearby paper mills. This group, nicknamed “the Paper Brigade,” and informally led by poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, a garrulous, street-smart adventurer and master of deception, smuggled thousands of books and manuscripts past German guards. If caught, the men would have faced death by firing squad at Ponar, the mass-murder site outside of Vilna. To store the rescued manuscripts, poet Abraham Sutzkever helped build an underground book-bunker sixty feet beneath the Vilna ghetto. Kaczerginski smuggled weapons as well, using the group’s worksite, the former building of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, to purchase arms for the ghetto’s secret partisan organization. All the while, both men wrote poetry that was recited and sung by the fast-dwindling population of ghetto inhabitants. With the Soviet “liberation” of Vilna (now known as Vilnius), the Paper Brigade thought themselves and their precious cultural treasures saved—only to learn that their new masters were no more welcoming toward Jewish culture than the old, and the books must now be smuggled out of the USSR.

The caves Atlas portrays some of the most famous caves in the world, including the hiding sites of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It also includes most of the largest caves in Israel, and some of the most exiting arid zone caves in the world. The maps and the text are based on tens of years of studies by the Israel Cave Research Center of the Hebrew University, and other scholars. Research results on the geology, archaeology and biology of the caves are discussed with references to additional information. The atlas text is written in Hebrew, but its detailed maps, color illustrations and English references appeal to everybody, including scientists, hikers and speleologists alike.

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 .

In crucial decision-making moments during the struggle of the Zionist Movement for obtaining sovereignty, the Jewish members of the Communist Movement in Israel presented an opposition. They made an attempt to undermine the Zionist narrative and Zionism itself as a value. In the public eye, its activists were tied to treason and turning their back to the national struggle. The conduct of the Jewish communists in Eretz Yisrael is a case study for the ability of ideological commitment to keep its seniority when facing opposite its members' national loyalty. The book A Red Star in the Israeli Flag presents a complex relationship between the Zionist Movement and the approach to it by members of the Communist Movement. The latter brought together various ideological streams and perceptions regarding Zionism, and its leadership did not always express the ideological variety that was common amongst its members. The Labor Movement was initially a home to members of the Communist Movement and they took part in acts of settlement and protection, but following their split and the establishment of a separate movement, its members' positions became more radical and this climaxed with their renouncement of the Zionist ethos. The attempts to recreate a dialogue with the Zionist Movement were led by the Jewish section of the Communist Movement. Its Jewish members recruiting to serve in the Second World War alongside Yishuv people, despite the objection of its Arab leaders, accelerated the splitting. The War highlighted the connection with the Yishuv and a Zionist stream was forming in the Movement. The events of the Second World War and the establishment of the State of Israel faced the leaders of the Communist Movement with the need to define their relations with the newly-formed state, its socialist-like actions and the value of Zionism. Jewish communist leadership continued denying Zionism as a value and attempted to replace it with values such as patriotism and nationalism. The Communist Movement tested the willingness of Israeli society and political system to accept an ideological group that takes part in Zionist causes and yet refrains from siding the value of Zionism.

This volume deals with an eventful period in the modern history of Palestine. It provides new insights into the role of the US consuls in the Ottoman Middle East in the special context of the Holy Land. The motivations and functioning of the American consuls in Jerusalem, and of the consular agents in Jaffa and Haifa, are analyzed as part of the US diplomatic and consular activity throughout the world, and of Western involvement in the Ottoman Empire and in Palestine during the century preceding WWI. The processes of cultural, demographic, economic, environmental and settlement change – sometimes at the expense of the local population – and the contribution of the US consuls and American settlers, both Christian and Jewish, to development and modernization of Palestine are discussed.

While the history of Zionism in the US has been the subject of numerous works, American ideological attitudes toward the State of Israel have been less frequently treated in the scholarly literature. This book fills that gap. An international conference convened in the Negev brought together academic authorities for three full days of candid interaction and bold analyses of American Zionist ideology. This volume distills the results of that conference, illuminating the images and expectations of American Jews toward Israel, especially their liberal hopes. Readers interested in the status and fate of the Jewish state will find this collection of essays thought-provoking and instructive.

This is a major, unprecedented study of the Soviet partisan movements' intelligence activity in 1941-1945, and its impact on the outcome of the war between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. It contributes significantly to the understanding of the Soviet intelligence culture and practice during WWII, as well as to the study of the Holocaust, which is provided with clear well-documented evidence of the Soviet leadership's knowledge about the extermination of the local Jews by the Nazis and their supporters.

The book "Sabras don’t age" explores the inner world and identities of 23 senior officers from the founding Israeli 1948's generation, at their seventies. As human representations of the "Sabra" – the mythological "new Jew" – these officers embody the extreme opposition between youthfulness and old age; between hegemony and marginality. Those persons who once constituted the ultimate symbols of the Hebrew youngster, the agile commander, the powerful masculine body, and the Western ideal of eternal youth – are presently facing the deterioration of their bodies, their approaching death, and most painfully – the current cultural meanings of being old. Their personal aging process is accompanied by major changes that took place in the Israeli society, primarily the move from collectivistic toward individualistic ideologies, with the consequent undermining of their status. How do these Israeli heroes settle the wide contradiction between the values which they have symbolized throughout their lives and their present situation? Are they able to preserve their status as national pantheon heroes, while coping at the same time with the various demands posed by their advanced age? Already at their eight life decade, the Israeli officers identify themselves – in their "narrative identity cards" – as Sabras, men and heroic commanders who have dedicated their lives to their homeland, and above all –as non-old. Yet, as opposed to the ceased time in the narratives, time incessantly flows in their private lives. Indeed, the officers do not deny their aging. Rather, they are completely aware of the changes that took place in their lives and bodies and directly cope with the new needs. Through the mechanism of compartmentalization, they are able to preserve a public heroic young self, while coping - in private - with old age. In this way, they succeed to maintain a valued identity in a world that worships youth. These officers' identity management sheds light not only on the first Israelis at their advanced years, but also on the founding ethos of the Israeli collective identity. However, as the youth ideal is by no means bounded to the Israeli case, but encompasses the Western world as a whole, the identity strategies employed by the Sabra Generals possess major implications for all elders, and especially for older men, in the post-modern era. Thus, this book is aimed not only at readers interested in the Israeli society and culture, and not only at those concerned with the aging of army officers, but to anyone that wonders how is it possible to age keeping a respected and continuous self in a world that relates to old people as the ultimate "other".

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.

The book presents an innovative research on the Holocaust in 'Second Generation' Israeli artists' artworks. The Israeli uniqueness is clearly reflected in their artworks influenced by the cultural-educational connection of the subject of the Holocaust in Israel as well as by the link to significant events in Israeli history. The book explores a wide variety of topics and questions that occupied the artists and presents various ways they chose to express the workings of their inner world, effected by their parents' experiences during the Holocaust.

The work presents an account of modern Jerusalem’s demographic evolution and a description of the city’s socio-demographic profile at present. The demographic evolution will be traced back succinctly for about 150 years. The last two decades, since the reunification is treated more intensively. The enormous contrast between the conditions that existed in the mid-19th century at the threshold of modernization, and those prevailing in contemporary Jerusalem, as residents and visitors can experience and study them, should convey an inkling of the progress made. This progress was not achieved by constructing a completely new city – as in the case of Tel-Aviv and many other places in Israel and elsewhere – but by the more intricate processes of reforming a historic and in this instance even a holy city, and developing it through additions of large areas and the innovations of modern life.

Question of place: Architecture between the poetic and the ethical calls for a re-understanding of the foundations of the architectural act while exposing it to phenomenological thought. Through a return to the first, and failed, encounter in the late 1970s, between phenomenology depicting phenomena in the light of human experience and architectural discourse, Edna Langenthal offers a new reading of discourse, embracing the thought of philosopher Martin Heidegger and discussing the influence of architectural-architectural scholar Norteberg Which in her opinion missed Heidegger's contribution to her understanding. To emphasize the potential inherent in Heidegger's thought in understanding the question of place and the possibilities of dwelling in it, the author discusses the meaning of the poetic as a constitutive axis in understanding key concepts in contemporary architectural discourse. But the poetic dimension, for her, cannot exist without the ethical dimension. Through a study of the thought of Heidegger's student and critic, the philosopher Emanuel Levins, the structure that connects an affinity between the ethical and the home and the possibilities of settling in it.

For many years Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) has been the object of intense debate. After her bitter critiques of Zionism, which seemed to nullify her early involvement with that movement, and her extremely controversial "Eichmann in Jerusalem" (1963), Arendt became virtually a taboo figure in Israeli and Jewish circles. Challenging the "curse" of her own title, "Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem" carries the scholorly investigation of this musch-discussed writer to the very place where her ideas have been most conspicuosly ignored. Sometimes sympathetically, sometimes critically, these distinguished contributors reexamine the crucial aspects of Arendt's lfe and thought: her complex identity as a German Jew; her commitment to and critique of Zionism and the State of Israel; her works on totalitarianism, Nazism and the Eichmann trial; her relationship to key twentieth-century intellectuals, from Gershom Scholem to Martin Heidegger; her intimate and tense connections to German culture; and her reworkings of political thought and philosophy in the light of the experience of the twentieth century.

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This book is dealing with the uses of the memory of the Resistance and of the Holocaust, born in the wake of the war between the years 1945–1985. Italy is used as a case study for the understanding, shaping and the formation of the new European national identities post World War II. This title focuses on the Italian agenda and is shedding a new light on the process of reconstruction and revitalization (including the rebuilding of national self-identity). The book traces the changes in the character and functions of historical memory during this period when national consciousness was u ndergoing a critical development in its search for unity. It leads to a broader venue of the tensions between the memory of anti-fascist resistance on the one hand and the shameful and disturbing awareness of the fascist past on the other. This is the first attempt of a synthesis of this kind of Italian history that combines all interdisciplinary sources: memoir literature and literary sources in general, historiographic debates as well as political discussions.

Reinventing a Nation: Palestinian Intellectuals in Israel, focuses on a comparison of three generations of Palestinian intellectuals and idea producers and disseminators in Israel. The book displays the ways that these intellectuals struggled to make meaning and contextualizing of their national catastrophes (Nakba) and to cope with it by building some alternative social and political identities, while also attempting to preserve their relative elite and preferential positions. The research is based on qualitative content analysis of the works of major writers, poets, journalists and essay writers - from 1948 and onward - who were active in Israel, at least for a part of their lives.

The four volume series of the History of the Hebrew University Project is devoted to the development of the idea and of its implementation during the pre-state period. The previous three volumes expanded in a great number of scholarly articles on the complex stories which made up this history from a great variety of aspects – scientific and academic, political and organizational, economic and social. The present volume, the last part of the project, seeks to focus on the individuals, the personalities of the people who made the university become a reality; those who struggled for its foundation, and the pioneering scholars and scientists who laid the basis and shaped the Hebrew University. It opens a window for the wider public to become familiar with the story of the Hebrew University without the need to penetrate into the complexity of scientific and other issues dealt with in previous volumes. The story of the university is the story of the enormous efforts involved in bringing prominent scholars and scientists to Eretz Israel, then a remote and marginal corner in the Middle East. These efforts were accompanied with debates of principle and personal controversies within and outside of the university about academic and national considerations. Despite all difficulties, criticisms and doubts, the founders of the university succeeded in building an institution of intellectual excellence that would become a pillar in the project of Jewish national renaissance and prepared the basis for the Hebrew University academic leadership in Israel and in the Jewish world for many years to come.

The book The State of Israel and Its Institutions in the Halachic Thought of Rabbi Shlomo Goren reviews the diverse subjects with which Rabbi Goren dealt as a halakhic ruler: the halakhic status of the State of Israel, the concept of sovereignty, military and war laws, immigration absorption, changes in prayer and blessings, and others. The book describes his original, and sometimes unusual, positions within the history of Israel, and his desire to take part in shaping this history.

The Jewish National and University Library came into being in the years of the British mandate. Its mission was to collect preserve and centralize the spiritual treasures of the Jewish people. Eventually, it would contribute to the fulfillment of the Zionist objective of nation building. The Tel Aviv municipality brought the literary remains of national poets and writers like Bialik and Ahad Ha-Am into its library system. Their collections were developed into public municipal libraries. The Histadrut established a central library and supplied the settlement movement with library services. In that way it contributed to the realization of political, social and ideological aspirations of establishing a socialist society. Simultaneously, with these efforts to collect centralize and preserve the Jewish spiritual heritage in Palestine, the evil Nazi regime became active in destroying Jewish culture by book burning, cleansing German libraries of Jewish books and scattering Jewish libraries and collections in ghettos and concentration camps. Nevertheless and paradoxically, the Nazis have secured and preserved some of the more valuable Jewish library collections for future research in order to be able, post factum to legitimize the destruction of the Jewish people and its spiritual heritage. The two sections of the book document and describe conflicting processes: building and destruction, collecting and dispersion, securing and destroying, plunder and restitution of private and public Jewish book collections and libraries. In the first part, "Libraries and book collections during the British mandate in Palestine" the creation and shaping of a national library and public libraries are described. In the second part "Burning scrolls and flying letters" the negative processes of confiscation and plundering of Jewish libraries throughout Europe are delineated. The salvaging activities of libraries and books by Hebrew University emissaries after the Holocaust and the transfer of the remnants to Jerusalem are discussed. In the last section of the book, the reader may find some historical documents that lend support to the two sections of the book and have never been published so far.

Israelis on the Move” tells the story of young adults from the Former Soviet Union as they beat a path to Israeliness Based on analyses of their immigration stories, the book offers a new perspective in immigration studies that sees belonging as achieved not through the adoption of foundational national ethos of the new place, but rather through participation in local debates about this ethos . More particularly, the book examines the way in which the young immigrants shape their belonging to Israel through a reading of the homecoming ethos that awards them automatic citizenship. Based on an interpretation of instantiations of the homecoming ethos in everyday life, they form an affinity to their new home, construct their identity, and locate themselves within Israeli society. In doing so they are concerned with decoding, interpreting and critiquing the building blocks of the ethos: the memory of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, military service, the new Jew, and allegiance to their new place. The book shows how the immigrants hold onto an ethos that promises them recognition and inclusion within the ethno-religious nation. At the same time, they resist the total demands Imposed by the ethos, and criticize Zionist premises that are considered as taken for granted . We term this double, interrelated movement critical belonging, a concept that suggests that the immigrants’ belonging to the new place does not entail the unconditional acceptance of local ethos, while at the same time implying that their critique does not entail their rejection of the new place or a retreat into socio-cultural enclaves.

Therapeutics and Salvation: Freud and Schelling on Freedom proposes a new conceptual perspective on the history of the philosophy of freedom. The book focuses on Sigmund Freud’s theory of freedom, and its fundamental, yet uncharted, connection with the groundbreaking philosophy of the unconscious of F.W.J Schelling. The analysis radically challenges conventional liberal and rationalistic conceptions of freedom in psychoanalysis. The main argument of the book is that Freud formulated his theory of human nature with Schelling’s basic philosophical architecture, in particular Schelling’s concept of freedom, but, at the same time, subverted Schelling’s search for a new theology at the end of the latter's philosophical career. The detailed comparison of Freud’s work with the philosophy of Schelling backtracks a momentous shift from Schelling’s late theo-philosophy, at the endpoint of German Idealism, to the secular system of Freud, in which human reality ousted godly revelation and therapeutics replaced divine salvation. By delineating the move from Schelling’s God-subject relations to Freud’s human-subject relations, the book offers a new perspective on the historical evolution of German Idealism into modern secular thought.

The essays in the book Between Ze'ev Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin deal with the main issues of the History of the Revisionist Movement and Herut Movement. It deals with the movements' historical leaders – Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the founder of the Revisionist Movement, and Menachem Begin, the founder of Herut Movement and the first Israeli Prime Minister from the Right-wing faction. The essays deal with the following issues: The Revisionist Criticism of the Yishuv Leadership during the Holocaust ; Ben-Gurion's Attitude towards the Revisionist Movement , The History of the Herut Movement , 1948-1965 ; The Disappearance of Menachem Begin in 1951 and Its Significance; The Herut Movement and Israel's Relations with Germany; The Attitude of Herut Movement towards Kastner Trial; "The Princes" - The Second Generation of Herut Movement. Winner of the Jabotinsky Literature and Research Prize for 2015

This study examines the concept of United Nations peacekeeping operations and their execution in Cambodia, Former Yugoslavia and Somalia from 1988 to 1995. The research is anchored primarily in United Nations documents, which were produced following the diplomatic discussions that took place in the organization on the subject of peacekeeping in general and in the cases of Cambodia, Former Yugoslavia and Somalia in particular This research demonstrates, using the records of diplomatic discourse at the United Nations, that although there was an attempt to change the concept of peacekeeping operations, it eventually failed. The best explanation for this outcome is that international politics at the United Nations – at least as it concerns peacekeeping operations – is still conducted according to the principles of each state’s realpolitik. The states formed their stance on a case by case basis, while calculating power relations in order to advance their own national interests. Therefore their position on each topic did not necessarily match the declared position of any particular political alliance. Furthermore, many multi-functional operations were still executed in accordance with the traditional concept. The main objective of these operations was international mediation between belligerent sides in order to form sovereign governments and to deploy a 'peacekeeping force' in accordance with the traditional principles of international and local consent, impartiality and the non-use of force. Traditional objectives were preferred over new objectives such as democratization, human rights, and economic development.

China and Israel: From Discord to Concord provides the Hebrew reader, for the first time, with eyewitness testimony and historical and economic analysis of the step-by-step evolution of Sino-Israeli ties, from the frozen relationship of the early 1950s to the extensive economic, diplomatic and cultural ties of the twenty-first century. Included in the anthology are the recollections of diplomats who were central to the creation of Sino-Israeli ties ( Isai Magid, Zev Suffott, Moshe Yegar, and Reuven Merhav) and the perspectives of prominent American, Chinese, Indian, and Israeli scholars. The footnotes attached to these chapters cite up-to-date bibliographical sources, in Hebrew and other languages, for further research on Sino-Israeli relations .

A 100 years after the Zionist congress decided to establish the university in Jerusalem (Vienna, 1913), this volume, the 4 th in the series, is being published. The first three volumes were dedicated to the roots of the idea to establish a cultural and spiritual infrastructure of a national entity in the state of Israel and the founding of the university and it's progress during the steps towards an Israeli state. The first chapter in the history of this establishment ended when it was brought down from Mt. Scopus in 1948. The first volume of this series revealed to the reader the complexity of establishing this university through detailed and in-depth studies that dealt with the scientific, organizational and political aspects of the process. Only a small part of these studies were dedicated to the people behind the process. This volume lays before us the biographies of the first founders and professors of this university to make their mark on the establishment and development of the university during the mandate years. There are three parts to the book. The first part tells about the founders and designers of this institution and includes the people of action who accompanied it's setting up and enabled it's functioning. The second part is dedicated to the theoretical sciences: Humanities, Jewish Studies and the first researchers in the law and society fields. The third part brings us the biographies of the teachers and researches in the Mathematics and Experimental sciences fields. This book is dedicated to the people who arrived in Jerusalem under different circumstances from around the world. Thanks to their cooperation on Mt. Scopus, they enabled the fulfillment of an idea, first conceived in the second half of the 19 th century, and turned into a successful reality during the settlement period.

Many studies have been written about the kibbutz, but only a few serious studies have been published to date on the religious kibbutz, whose members maintain an orthodox religious lifestyle in addition to living and working collectively. This book examines the ideology and pioneering efforts of the Religious Kibbutz Movement in the pre-state years, and especially its emphasis on clustered settlements, leading to the birth of ten religious kibbutzim, nine of them in three distinct clusters, between 1936 and 1948. Religious pioneers settled in the Beit She’an Valley, in the hills south of Jerusalem (Gush Etzion) and the northern Negev – all of them frontier regions that posed a formidable geographical and political challenge. The Religious Kibbutz Movement in the Land of Israel looks at how these kibbutzim fitted into their surroundings and interacted with their non-religious neighbors, and explores the religious settlement enterprise in the context of all Zionist settlement in Palestine at the time. Translated from the Hebrew Torah Ve-Avoda Be-Binyan Ha-Aretz (The Religious Kibbutz during the Mandate Period).

Walter (1887-1966) and his son Moshe (1922-2017) Wolf, both born in Hamburg, had very unusual life stories. Their autobiographies coalesce and intertwine in this powerful book - the father recounts his Jewish-bourgeoisie childhood in Germany, his military service with the German forces during World War I, his work as a banker and the building of his family; he tells of his escape from Nazi Germany and his new life in the United States. Meanwhile, his son pursues his point of view, continuing the family story from the moment he arrived in Israel, describing his own choices - working the land and joining the British Army in the war against Germany. This outstanding tale enriches even further the fascinating, multi-faceted image of German Jewry, offering a path, now more relevant than ever, into contemporary Israeli society.

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".

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.

This book deals with the social history of workers in Ofakim, since the time of its founding (1955) and up to the partial closing of its biggest factory in 1981. The book traces the development of a new town in the middle of the desert, from the decision to establish and populate the town, to the harsh social and economic vacuum faced by the new inhabitants, and on to the shaping of the local labor market. With industrialization, Ofakim became permanently characterized as a place where labor was a matter of national priority, often lacking a solid economic rationale. The state 'guaranteed' the residents full employment, and therefore came to be perceived as responsible for their social and economic degradation. The book describes the dynamics of the relationships of the town's residents with each other and with the outside: encounters with bureaucrats, capitalists and factory managers; the relationship between local workers and workers from the Gaza strip; and the relationship between groups within the town, such as men and women. Through their emergence and reshaping, these relationships gave rise to social boundaries that influenced the status of workers in the labor market and beyond. The book also sets forth a collective biography of residents and local leadership coming together to create a community for themselves. This project was at times limited and shaped by decisions and actions of national leaders and external institutions, but ultimately this local community came to provide the people of Ofakim with a sense of pride and belonging. This discussion highlights the tight interrelationships between community, labor and the economy. The last part of the book tells the story of labor struggles waged by local workers against the closing of factories, which may be termed 'closure strikes'. It describes the unfolding of a closure strike, and the factors that influence it by way of a comparative analysis. This form of workers' protest illustrates the power of communities, with their internal coherence, to provide solidarity for the workers. This leads to a discussion of economically-motivated popular protests and the struggle of Israeli citizens against economic liberalization.

Great Britain was the first European power to establish a consulate in Jerusalem, soon to be followed by other nations. When the consulate was forced to close late in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I, the consular records were burnt to avoid their falling into the hands of the Turkish authorities. Mordechai Eliav has selected 135 documents dating from the appointment of the first consul in 1838 until the final report in the closing down of the consulate in November 1914. The documents are not only indicative of the activities of the consulate and its officials; they reflect political, social and economic developments in Palestine as a whole, and in Jerusalem in particular, for almost 75 years, and the British interest aid involvement in these developments. This volume is an important contribution to British diplomatic history as well as to the history of nineteenth-century Palestine.

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.

In 1901, the Zionist Organization founded the Jewish National Fund to purchase lands in the Land of Israel and transfer them to the ownership of the Jewish people. The book before us examines and summarizes the JNF's land purchasing policies and endeavors, from the establishment of the Fund to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. A major part of this essay centers on the period from 1936 to 1948, which were the most important years of the JNF's activities and during which it became almost the sole Jewish entity promoting this aspect of the building of the land of Israel. During these years, the JNF purchased about 600,000 dunams, which constitute more than 60% of its acquisitions from its establishment to the establishment of the State. The pivotal nature of the JNF during those years stems first and foremost from the recognition of its settlement endeavors by the top institutions of the Zionist Organization, in promoting the political interests of the Zionist movement in the land of Israel. The creation of actual real property owned by the Jewish people which also served as a foundation for settlement was a prerequisite for achieving a Jewish state. Under it's articles of association, the lands purchased by the JNF cannot be sold. They were leased for the purpose of establishing agricultural and urban settlements and subsequently, the State of Israel applied this principle to all its lands (about 20.5 million dunams), of which JNF lands now constitute about 13%.

Many tend to think of post-Zionism Jerusalem as a forsaken provincial Ottoman town, entangled in a net of hatred originating in its various religions. This image coincided with the Zionist redemption vision, which sought to revive the deserted land. Lemire, studying Jerusalem of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century from within its own context – the writings of its inhabitants, documents of its governing bodies, maps, and economic reports – depicts a completely different picture. For over seventy years, members of the different religions - Jews, Christians, and Muslims - lived a life of incredible coexistence. Mutual respect and reciprocation dominated the city and its enlightened Ottoman rulers were aware of the needs of its various communities. Only the rise of nationalism and the city’s partition into quarters destabilized its unique social fabric. Vincent Lemire did not write a nostalgic document about a long-lost past, but rather illustrated an important political outlook, demonstrating that the national and religious animosity in Jerusalem is not necessarily inherent to the city.

What was the balance of power in the battles of Judas Maccabaeus and in Israel's War of Independence? Were they, as is commonly assumed, wars of the few against the many? These questions were discussed in a conference organized by the School of History of the Hebrew University in December 1999. The participants were in general agreement that the discussion of the balance of power must not be confined to the number of troops and that other variables must be taken into account. Nevertheless the numbers of troops is important. Conflicting views were presented on the battles of Judas Maccabaues whereas on the number of troops in Israel's War of Independence there was general agreement. Published in this collection, for the first time, are a General Staff document from 1952 and a research paper by Yehosuha Ben Arie for the IDF History Branch from 1955. Both conclude that in the matter of the number of troops the War of Independence on the whole was not an instance of the few against the many. Other articles, based on lectures delivered at the conference include Bezalel Bar Kochva and Israel Shatzman on the battles of Judas Maccabaeus; Beni Morris and Amitzur Ilan on the balance of forces in the War of Independence, Eyal Nave and Mordechai Bar-On on the evolution of Israeli collective memory of the balance of power and on possible ways of representing the facts of the case in school books; Shmaryahu Ben-Pazi, Moshe Erenwald and Nimrod Hagiladi on three case studies: Safad, The Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem, and Rechovot; and Joseph Heller's essay on the centrality of the 'few against many' theme in David Ben Gurion's thought which widens the scope of the discussion in the conference.

For the first time the reader of the Hebrew language is presented with a book uncovering the unique activity of the German-Catholics in 19th century Eretz Israel. Those are the builders, for example, of the Dormition in Jerusalem and the Hospice in Tabgha.

Anybody interested in the changing character of the Israeli society will find fascinating material here, illuminating the interaction between changing politics and changing cultural norms. The documents that are part of this book can serve as illustrations to scholars, teachers and the intelligent reader.

Homer's Odyssey is a grand epic poem of voyage and adventure. It recounts Odysseus' return to his native island of Ithaca after twenty years of war and wandering. We also encounter his son Telemachus, who has just come of age, as well as his wife, Penelope, sorrowful for her absent husband yet cunningly avoiding her boisterous and arrogant suitors. Having overcome the man-eating Cyclops Polyphemos, the bewitching Circe and the harrowing phantoms of the Underworld, as well as other perils, Odysseus finally arrives in Ithaca to reclaim his kingdom. Yet the Odyssey is not merely a tale of high adventure and a hero's triumphant return, it is also a story of man's inner confrontations and his encounter with the vicissitudes of fate. As with Arouetty's previous translation of the Iliad, the new prose translation of the Odyssey aims at precision and clarity. It strictly adheres to the Greek original, attempting to retain its nobility of language and style.

Distinguished philosopher Hilary Putnam, who is also a practicing Jew, questions the thought of three major Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century – Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas – to help him reconcile the philosophical and religious sides of his life. An additional presence in the book is Wittgenstein, who, although not a practicing Jew, thought about religion in ways that Putnam juxtaposes to the views of Rosenzweig, Buber and Levinas. Putnam explains the leading ideas of each of these great thinkers, bringing out what, in his opinion, constitutes the decisive intellectual and spiritual contributions of each of them. Although the religion discussed is Judaism, the depth and originality of these philosophers, as incisively interpreted by Putnam, make their thought nothing less than a guide to life. Origonally published by Indiana University Press.

The Iliad of Homer is a powerful poem of force and heroism. It is the earliest of epics in Western Civilization and, since its appearance in the 8 th century BCE, has inspired subsequent literary works. It tells of the final year of the Trojan War, one of the central stories in Greek mythology, and of the wrath of Achilles and its horrendous consequences. This is the first Hebrew prose translation of this great work. It has been done with meticulous care both to accuracy and style, aiming to preserve as far as possible the literary richness and charm of the original. As the Iliad belongs originally to the oral tradition, it is meant rather to be listened to than read; hence the translation aims at a greater musicality of Hebrew and simplicity of expression – both important characteristics of the Greek original. The translator has added a concise introduction and comprehensive notes to enhance readers’ understanding of this timeless poem. An index was added in the second edition.

The book Biblisch- talmudische Medizin , first published in Berlin, in 1911, is a unique life's work bringing together a comprehensive knowledge in medicine, Jewish and general sources. The various chapters include a broad review of the world of medicine in the Bible and the Talmud in light of Jewish law, a detailed description of the biological organs, diseases of body and mind, deformities, gynecological and sexual. There are chapters on legal medicine, preventative medicine, health cures and dietetics. The material is also based on in-depth study of Bible, Mishnah, Talmudic and Rabbinic literature, Midrash, the External Books, the works of Joseph Ben Matityahu, the New Testament, as well as ancient and modern legal literature, Likewise illuminating sources from Greek and Latin literature, western medical literature, referencing hundreds of publications from the eighteen and nineteen hundreds were used. The writer Dr. Julius Preuss (1861-1913) was born in a small town in Prussia, in which his parents' house was the only Jewish family. He studied medicine in Berlin and was close to the orthodox Jewish community, where he acquired much of his extensive knowledge in Judaism. Over the years Preuss published over thirty articles on medicine and Judaism in various scientific journals, all the while maintaining a medical practice in the town of his birth and afterward in Berlin. He passed away two years after publishing his book in German, based on his articles. Preuss' book was translated into English by Dr. Fred Rosner (Biblical and Talmudic Medicine ) and was published in the United State in 1978. At a conference on Jewish and medical law, which took place in Jerusalem in 1998, the book was quoted and it was indicated that a translation into Hebrew was sorely needed. The translator into Hebrew, Uri Wurzburger , remained loyal to the original German, at the same time expanding the quoted references appearing in the book and adding modern interpretations.

L a Divina Commedia (Devine Comedy) is an epic poem written by Dante Alighieri between c. 1308 and his death in 1321. It is widely considered the preeminent work of Italian literature, and is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature. The poem's imaginative and allegorical vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval world-view as it had developed in the Western Church by the 14th century. It helped establish the Tuscan dialect, in which it is written, as the standardized Italian language. It is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso . On the surface, the poem describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven; but at a deeper level, it represents, allegorically, the soul's journey towards God. At this deeper level, Dante draws on medieval Christian theology and philosophy, especially Thomistic philosophy and the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. Consequently, the Divine Comedy has been called "the Summa in verse ". (Wikipedia) This new Hebrew translation presents the three parts of the Devine Comedy where opposite to every Hebrew line its original Italian equivalent. Each page contains annotations relevant to the verses printed in that page. Translated and annotated by Reuven Cohen.

In 1915 Albert Einstein started writing this booklet in an attempt to provide readers who do not necessarily possess knowledge of theoretical physics with an accurate understanding of one of the highest intellectual achievements of the human mind, the theory of the relativity. This friendly brain-challenge is written in the form of a dynamic dialogue, yet it also requires a substantial intellectual effort from the reader. In this important scientific document, the reader is taken on a journey through Einstein’s special and general relativity theories.

One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things , by Lucretius—a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions. The copying and translation of this ancient book-the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age-fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.

Smocza is the biography of a street in Warsaw that was completely destroyed in World War II. The book reveals the story of a Jewish microcosm between two world wars. It is based on historical and literary sources that piece together a multicultural mixture of a society in transition, where orthodox Jews, Bundists, Zionists, shoemakers, tailors, poets, actors, prostitutes, and others lived side by side.

The book presents a broad and varied picture of Islam. It covers a wide range of topics, including faith and jurisprudence, theology and philosophy, mysticism, culture and society, from the dawn of Islam in the seventh century to contemporary times. Geographically, the book encompasses such regions as the Middle East, North Africa, the Indian subcontinent, East Asia and Europe/West . The book traces lines of continuity and change in Islam throughout the ages on such complex and sensitive issues as religion and state, the concept of jihad, Islamic attitudes to religious minorities or to Western Christian culture. These issues became hotly debated in the modern era, especially from the late 18th century, when Muslim societies were forced to contend with European colonialism, political upheavals, social and economic schisms, and identity crises . There is a clear need for a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction book in Hebrew for students and readers alike so that the appearance of the book is timely. Apart from containing new materials, the book also contains many insights, and in some cases reexamines and revisits prevailing scholarly approaches.

The book breaks with Nietzsche's previous essay style (as in The Birth of Tragedy). It is a collection of aphorisms, largely concerned with human psychology. He criticizes social Darwinism in it: Wherever progress is to ensue, deviating natures are of greatest importance. Every progress of the whole must be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures retain the type, the weaker ones help to advance it. Something similar also happens in the individual. There is rarely a degeneration, a truncation, or even a vice or any physical or moral loss without an advantage somewhere else. In a warlike and restless clan, for example, the sicklier man may have occasion to be alone, and may therefore become quieter and wiser; the one-eyed man will have one eye the stronger; the blind man will see deeper inwardly, and certainly hear better. To this extent, the famous theory of the survival of the fittest does not seem to me to be the only viewpoint from which to explain the progress of strengthening of a man or of a race.§224 Nietzsche also distinguishes in this work the obscurantism of the metaphysicians and theologians from the more subtle obscurantism of Kant's critical philosophy and modern philosophical skepticism, claiming that obscurantism is that which obscures existence rather than obscures ideas alone: "The essential element in the black art of obscurantism is not that it wants to darken individual understanding but that it wants to blacken our picture of the world, and darken our idea of existence" (Vol. II, Part 1, 27).