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.

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

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

Articles: Svetlana Natkovich | Maskil and the City: Representations of the Maskilic Subjectivity and Urban Habitus in the Literature of Russian Maskilim, 1862-1888 Natasha Gordinsky | ‘Sideways from Moscow: Uri Nissan Gnessin’s Provincial Writing’ Dina Berduchewsky | Brenner’s London as a Crossroads in the Story of Early Hebrew Modernism Lilach Nethanel | Literary Modernism: The Retreat. Shklov by Zalman Shneour Allison Schachter | Elisheva Bikhovksy’s Novel Side-Streets Representing a Non-national, Minority Hebrew Culture Rafi Tsirkin-Sadan | The Curse of the Forbidden City: Haim Lensky’s St. Petersburg Sonatas and the Images of St. Petersburg in Russian and Hebrew Literature Maya Barzilai | The Lost German City: Berlin of Leah Goldberg

Articles: Yona Sabar | Grandpa Ephraim and Grandpa Menashe: Two Opposite Characters, Based on Personal and Communal Childhood Memories Dov Cohen | ‘The Holy Island of Chios’: New Findings Concerning the Purported Burial Place of R. YaꜤakov ben Asher (BaꜤal Ha-Turim) on the Island of Chios and Pilgrimages to His Gravesite Itamar Drori | Rabbi Israele Costa’s ‘Miḳweh Yisrael’ (1851): The Beginning of the Adapted Jewish Story for Youth Carmela Abdar | Reflections on Magical Texts on Jewelry and Amulets of Jewish Women and Children from Yemen and Habban Tom Fogel | JaꜤle – Yemenite Nostalgia in a Jerusalem Café Jacqueline Laznow | ‘I Recognized the Holidays According to the Food’: Tradition and Memory in the Jewish Community of Argentina Reviews: Eli Yassif | The First Book of Jewish Jokes: The Collection of L. M. Büschenthal, ed. Elliott Oring, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018 Dudu Rotman | Vered Tohar, The Book of Tales, Sermons and Legends. Anthology of Hebrew Stories from the Print Era: An Annotated Edition, Tel Aviv: Hakibbuz Hameuchad 2017, 201 pp.

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

In this book, based on lectures delivered at the Historical Society of Israel, the famed historian G. W. Bowersock presents an examination of political developments in the Arabian Peninsula on the eve of the rise of Islam. Recounting the growth of Christian Ethiopia and the conflict with Jewish Arabia, he describes the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of the late Sassanian (Persian) Empire. He concludes that the Byzantine Empire's defeat of the Sassanian forces, which destabilized the region, provided the opportunity for the rise and military success of Islam in the seventh century. Using close readings of surviving texts, Bowersock sheds new light on the complex causal relationships among the Byzantine, Ethiopian, Persian, and emerging Islamic forces.

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

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 philosophy of Levinas has developed over nearly sixty years. Its evolution can be subdivided into three main stages: Following the pre-war writings, the period 1945-1961 lead to the book Totalité et Infini, in which the ethical thought of Levinas takes a first accomplished form. During the last stage, whose central opus is Autrement qu’être (Otherwise than Being), his thought both radicalized and opened up to multiple horizons. Indeed, Levinas is not merely an academic philosopher ignorant of other movements of thought that mark his century. This book aims to show how the stages of Levinas’s strictly philosophical thought is expressed with regard to politics, Judaism, and Christianity.

This book surveys the development of Jewish religious law and practice in relation to healthcare, with an emphasis on their influence on Israeli medical law. It contains discussions on the nature of Jewish law and and ethics, especially in comparison to Catholic moral theology and the Western political traditions . The book is divided into key themes: approaches to health, illness and the body; medical nursing and social services; doctor-patient relationships; the uses of the dead and living body; fertility, genomics and infertility; Jewish sexual ethics and the medicalization of religion; abortion; care for neonates; the timing of death and organ transplantation from the brain-dead, and end-of-life care . The book should be of interest to students and scholars of bioethics, Jewish religious law, history of Israeli law, and the interactions between social history of medicine and biomedical law . This is a much expanded and revised Hebrew version of the 2014 book Jewish Medical Ethics published by Cambridge University Press.

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