At the heart of this book’s ten chapters stands the rich, multifaceted figure of the mother. Are the Jewish mother and the Israeli mother one and the same, or does each have her own distinct identity? What are the enduring and evolving hallmarks of this maternal figure, and how are they reflected in songs in Hebrew and Yiddish? This is a guided journey through the fascinating, dizzying transformations of beloved and half-forgotten songs and melodies. The book's close readings bring these songs to life, offering a window into the worlds of their creators and shedding light on the events and processes that have shaped the Jewish people and Israeli society across the generations. Brimming with information, insights, and delightful curiosities, and accompanied by dozens of illustrations, this book is the fruit of meticulous research, written in clear, fluid, and utterly engaging prose. It is a book every mother will want to read, and that every son and daughter will want to give her as a gift of love.

Prof. Heinrich Mendelssohn was a young student of medicine and zoology in Berlin, where he was born in 1910. When the Nazis came to power, he immigrated to Israel with his family, completed his studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he also wrote his doctoral thesis in zoology. Mendelssohn invested great efforts to expand zoological knowledge in Israel, and later became the director of the Zoological Institute, one of the cornerstones of Tel Aviv University. He served as vice president of the university and dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences. His extensive research earned him the title of "the father of zoology" in Israel and one of the founding fathers of the field of nature conservation. From the beginning of his studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mendelssohn kept a journal in which he recorded his observations of flora and fauna throughout the country and neighboring countries. The Journal was recorded in many notebooks from the year of his immigration, 1933, until 1958. He made many drawings of birds and other animals. In his wonderful drawings, he "captured" the character of the subjects and their behavior in a unique way. Many of them accompany the pages of this book. The journals are a document of enormous importance for the study of nature in our country, a basis and source of information that provides contemporary researchers with the possibility of understanding and researching many processes that have occurred since then and to the present day. Those who peruse the book will learn a lot about Mendelssohn's path and will be able to learn firsthand about the character of our rich animal world in the first half of the twentieth century.

A Guide to Jewish Warsaw 1938 is an extraordinary book, describing a place that no longer exists: Jewish Warsaw was, as is well known, utterly destroyed in World War II. And yet, the book seeks to pretend as if everything is still intact, and it is possible to go on a tour following it or embark on an imaginary journey. Every detail is based on information pertaining to Jewish Warsaw in 1938 from countless sources: newspapers, literature, travel guides, written and oral memoirs, archives, interviews, films, and exhibitions. A Guide to Jewish Warsaw 1938 seeks to reveal the beauty hidden from the eye in the largest Jewish city in Europe before the war. The acquaintance with Jewish Warsaw is made through general and useful introductions, describing its history, its beliefs and opinions, its unique language, and its tastes and smells. At the center of the book are seven walking tours, revealing the city's delights: the antique bookstores on Świętokrzyska Street; the buffet at the Writers and Journalists Association at Tłomacka 13; the "Maccabi" swimming pool and the Bund's sports field; cantorial music at the Great Synagogue and Hasidic melodies in the Modrzyc courtyard in the resort town of Otwock; the summer terrace at the Rubinchik cafe, opening onto Krasiński Garden, "the Jewish Garden"; modern marble sculptures in the cemetery; the "Tel Aviv" cafe on Nowolipie Street; the treasures in the Jewish Museum; courtyards that are a world of their own on Nalewki Street and its surroundings, and much more.

How does the past remain present in the urban landscape—in houses, streets, and public squares—even after the culture that once sustained it has been destroyed? What happens when history is not merely an abstract memory but a material reality that continues to shape and unsettle the present? In Bloody Wednesday , Yechiel Weizman traces the ghostly presence of the Jews of Olkusz, a town in south-central Poland whose large Jewish community flourished for centuries, until the Holocaust. Despite their total physical absence, from the end of the war until today the memory of the Jews is palpable and persistent—and at the same time silenced and repressed—in every street corner: in empty houses, in abandoned cemeteries and synagogues, in plaques and monuments, and through the ongoing public debates about property, heritage, and commemoration. Using the case study of a single Polish town, the book shows how the urban topography of Eastern Europe was continuously reshaped and redefined in relation to the legacy of the Second World War, the question of Jewish property, and the politics of Holocaust memory during the Communist period and after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Adopting a microhistorical lens and examining the smallest details of everyday life and urban history, the book reveals how the persistent debate over the presence of the dead Jews in the concrete and imagined spaces of one small town became a dramatic arena for a painful, intimate, and nostalgic confrontation with the violent fingerprints of the twentieth century and with pressing questions of responsibility, ethics, and guilt.

The book sheds light on the aims and achievements of the twelve first female members, who served in the first Israeli Knesset, and in particular on the perception of the status of women in the early years of the state. This study examines the heated debates that arose with the legislation of the following laws: the Marriage Age Law; the Income Tax Ordinance, which serves as a mirror of the status of the married woman; the Security Service Law, which can contribute to the understanding of Israeli society; and the Women’s Equal Rights Law of 1951, whose enactment concluded the work of the first Knesset. The influence of this legislation is felt to this day.

Immediately upon the establishment of the State of Israel, Israel welcomed approximately 720,000 as part of the Great Aliyah. More than one third of these newcomers, immigrants and refugees, were housed in immigrant camps and later in transit camps known as maabarot . Some were later removed from them or left on their own accord; others remained in the maabarot for many years, and the maabarot remained within them. In their early years, the maabarot played an important social role and gave rise to new interethnic relations and new identities. Within a short period of time, and in a space intended to serve as a temporary way station, a shared form of existence emerged in the maabarot. It established principles of organization, fostered cooperation that crossed boundaries of ethnic and communal origin, and created communal cohesion that developed despite the limitations imposed by the absorbing establishment. This book reexamines life in the maabarot through a division into three distinct subperiods that reflect profound changes in social composition, in patterns of power, and in the immigrants’ consciousness of identity. The elimination of the heterogeneity that had characterized the social fabric not only changed the status of the residents in the eyes of the state and society, but also narrowed the social and future possibilities that had opened before them. Through an examination of diverse sources, a detailed depiction of everyday life, and a thematic analysis of language, religion, and education, a formative chapter in the social history of Israel is revealed through the world of the immigrants as they themselves shaped it. From a charged encounter among diasporas, social groups, and a harsh, brutal, and impossible daily routine, a society emerges that has until now remained at the margins of historical research.

In this issue: Diego Rotman | The Sukkah and Its Double: Copies, Variants, and the Stereoscopic Image Shani Tamari Matan | The First Hebrew Dance-Gathering at Kibbutz Dalia (1944): Decoding of an Archival and Choreographic Event Hagar Salamon and Carmela Abdar | Glory of the “Sets”: Praxis and Meaning of Dressing Children in Haredi Families in Israel Ravit Raufman | The October 7 Massacre in Light of the Folktale “The Wolf and Kid”: A Realization of Primal Fantasy Ronni Shaked | Commemoration and Conflict: How the Palestinian Calendar Shapes Identity and Resistance

The Last Trial deals with the trial of Ivan Demjanjuk, who was tried in the State of Israel in 1986 on charges of being "Ivan the Terrible," the operator of the gas chambers at the Treblinka extermination camp, and was acquitted after a seven-year legal process. The book is based on in-depth archival research and reveals for the first time a rich collection of historical documents from the legal authorities in Israel, the United States, and Germany. The book is also based on in-depth interviews with senior members of the legal system who were involved in the trial – judges, attorneys, and witnesses. The Demjanjuk case was considered both a case with a high chance of conviction and a potential for severe punishment, and a case that was expected to bring the memory of the Holocaust back onto the public agenda, some half a century after the Eichmann trial. It was chosen from among the cases of other suspects to be the first test case for the possibility of extraditing Nazi criminals from the United States to Israel. The results of the trial therefore had a decisive impact on the continued activity of the State of Israel in bringing Nazi criminals to justice. When Demjanjuk was acquitted, it became clear that not only had the prosecution failed to achieve the desired result of convicting the defendant, but also that the legal process in his case had failed to fulfill the educational, documentary, and historical goals that were attached to it. In the final analysis, this resounding failure brought the prosecution of the Nazis and their accomplices in the State of Israel to an end. The tension between the legal field and the historical field, and between legal judgment and factual truth, runs throughout the book. The greatest danger of blurring the lines between "law" and "history" lies in the fact that the legal outcome of a criminal proceeding – "guilty" or "not guilty" – may mistakenly be linked to the historical determination of "did happen" or "did not happen." A misunderstanding of legal acquittal as historical acquittal is one of the biggest obstacles to the influence of criminal law, which ends in acquittal, on collective memory. As the book shows, the case of Demjanjuk's extradition and trial in Israel illustrates the difficulties inherent in dealing with the Holocaust within the courtroom, and also sharpens the problematic nature of using criminal law tools to establish historical truths.

Yehuda Jud Ne'eman's latest book, Auschwitz Capital of the 20th Century , presents the work of one of the most important scholars of Israeli cinema, who was also a groundbreaking director and creator. In this book, Ne'eman shares with his readers his involvement as a creator and intellectual in the establishment of Israeli cinema as a space for central artistic, cultural, and political discourse, whose significant contribution to Israeli culture and society is beyond doubt. The book includes two parts that complement each other. The first part contains an innovative and original discussion that maps the history of Israeli cinema by comparing it to cinema that began during the yishuv period. During this period, cinema was committed to the Zionist narrative, and the work is characterized as a continuous conflict between avant-garde and ideology, similar to Soviet avant-garde cinema. Within the framework of this comparison, Ne'eman emphasizes the preoccupation with modernist cinema of the "New Sensibility," a term coined years ago, and refers to films created by Israeli directors following the French "New Wave," including his own films. In doing so, he claims that between Israeli folk film and the modernism of the "New Sensibility" films, there was in fact cooperation in opposition to the establishment and Zionist ideology. The second part of the book discusses films made in the State of Israel and during the yishuv period that deal with the representation of the Holocaust as a central test case. Among other things, Ne'eman shows that the attempt to heal the horrors of the Holocaust in a simplistic national way expresses feelings of guilt and offers a limited solution to the problems of the survivors.

Anti-Semitism emerged in the late nineteenth century as a political movement that swept the masses. It presented a worldview in which a cohesive tribe called "the Jews" conspired to rule the earth by controlling international capital markets, trade, and money lending, while at the same time working to destroy—through revolutionary plots—the very capitalist system it supposedly controlled. It is easy to draw a straight line from this paranoid thinking at the turn of the century to the murderous delusions of fascism in the twentieth century. But, argues Laura Engelstein, the line was not straight. Anti-Semitism as a political weapon had its opponents, even in Eastern Europe, where its consequences were particularly terrible. Jewish leaders who joined forces in various countries and in cooperation with non-Jewish public figures worked for the rights of Jews and in firm opposition to persecution and acts of violence against Jews. In Tsarist and Soviet Russia, as well as in Poland and Ukraine – regions notorious in the West as centers of hatred for Jews – there were also those who saw anti-Semitism as a harmful burden on society and their movement. In the introduction to the book, Engelstein describes the different ways in which Jews were treated through the ways in which one Jew, Maurice Greenfeld, the author's grandfather, dealt with the upheavals of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the civil war that followed, including the expressions of hostility and sympathy he encountered throughout his life. In the following chapters, she reveals the – sometimes surprising – positions of Russian liberals such as Prince Sergei Urusov, Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura, and Polish émigré in Paris Andrzej Bobkowski. The chapters on the inevitable rise of anti-Semitism thus examine the complex reasons why leaders and intellectuals renounced pogroms and incitement against the Jewish population. Engelstein added a short introduction to the Hebrew edition of the book.

The Military Government was established during the war and operated within the army, but it promoted political and ideological objectives. In July 1948, David Ben Gurion established it as body intended to govern the Palestinians who remained in Israel. Its main objectives were threefold: to facilitate the transfer of Palestinian land into Jewish hands; to exclude Palestinians from the labor market and prevent them from organizing on a national basis. The Military Government promoted these objectives through a bureaucratic mechanism that prevented the Palestinians citizens of Israel from leaving their place of residence without the governor's approval. The supporters of the Military Government were well aware of the fact that its existence makes Israel a non-democratic state. They supported its existence because they believed it was necessary to maintain Israel's Jewish character. The Military Government was controversial in the political system in Israel, but the intensity of the opposition to its existence was sometimes contingent on the partisan and ideological interests of the opponents, both from the left and the right. The book describes the factors that shaped the political system's relationship with the Military Government and traces the changing strength of the debate surrounding it. The book seeks, among other things, to answer the question of whether Prime Minister Levi Eshkol's decision to abolish the Military Government in December 1966 was due to the struggle of the opponents or rather from the recognition that the Military Government had fulfilled its objectives.

The Hebrew University campuses are not just buildings and lawns. They are a huge museum, where walls are paintings, sculptures are stories, and every work of art invites the viewer to a conversation. Art at the Hebrew University is present not only physically, but also in spirit. Art at HUJI presents eighty-three artworks selected from the thousands of pieces on display at the Hebrew University – on the lawns and in enclosed spaces – ranging from well-known works by Henry Moore and Yigal Tumarkin to hidden gems by Marina Abramović and Sigalit Landau. The book is an invitation to embark on a journey through time and discover the stories behind each piece, the artists who created them, and the way in which art has influenced the university. Art at HUJI weaves a dialogue between the works of art displayed at the university and its academic faculty, students, and employees. Inspired by Plato's dialogues, these individuals were invited to choose one work that spoke to them and write about it. Each work featured in this book is accompanied by these reflections, alongside commentary written by the editor of the book and curator of the university, Dr. Michal Mor.