Examining the convergence of cafés, their urban milieu, and Jewish creativity, Shachar Pinsker shows how cafés anchored a silk road of modern Jewish culture. He uncovers a network of interconnected cafés that were central to the modern Jewish experience in a time of migration and urbanization, from Odessa, Warsaw, Vienna, and Berlin to New York City, Tel Aviv, as well as cities in the Arab world. A Rich Brew explores the Jewish culture created in these social spaces, drawing on a vivid collection of newspaper articles, memoirs, archival documents, photographs, caricatures, and artwork, as well as stories, novels, and poems in many languages set in cafés. Pinsker shows how Jewish modernity was born in the café, nourished, and sent out into the world by way of print, politics, literature, art, and theater. What was experienced and created in the space of the coffeehouse touched thousands who read, saw, and imbibed a modern culture that redefined what it meant to be a Jew in the world.

In 1980, the Italian publisher Einaudi wanted to publish a series of personal anthologies of its authors. Primo Levi quickly arose to the challenge and submitted La ricerca delle radici ( The Search for Roots ): thirty excerpts from thirty masterpieces of world literature, accompanied by thirty short introductions he wrote. Every such introduction is a brilliant commentary on the work, and a reflection of Primo Levi himself - as a kind of self-portrait, in which the painter produces his collage from materials created by others. These excepts - published for the first time in Hebrew - reveal some of the important ethical and aesthetic influences on Primo Levi and his work. Levi quotes from Job, Lucretius, Rabelais‏, Babel, Shalom Aleichem, de Saint-Exupéry and more, but also from Darwin's On Origin of Species and even from Practical Organic Chemistry. Thus, it is possible to trace his extensive and diverse, humanistic and scientific education, the roots from which his unique literary work grew.

How might a poem acquire divine forgiveness? Ariel Zinder’s book Arise and Sing follows medieval Jewish poets from Iraq and al-Andalus as they seek answers to this pressing question. The book presents close readings of liturgical poems (piyyutim) written in the 10th and 11th centuries, and brings them into contact with contemporary literary theory as well as modern philosophical discussions of the possibility of forgiveness.

This book deals with the cultural and emotional world of Jewish schoolchildren in the “Tarbut” school network in Poland between the two World Wars. It is based on a unique corpus of about 80 letters, written between 1934-1935 by 10-11-year-old fifth graders in the Tarbut school in the town of Nowi Dwόr in Poland to their beloved teacher who had immigrated to Eretz Israel – the place and destination they too dreamed about. In these letters – all composed in Hebrew – the children write about their class, their school, but also about themselves and their families. The pupils’ letters are analyzed in light of the educational practice of pen-pal culture which was developed in and encouraged by “Tarbut” schools, especially between pupils in the Diaspora and their cohorts in Palestine. The letters are also examined as ego-documents that reveal personal stories about the intimate and private world of children, their experiences, fears and hopes, their relationship with their teacher, their families and their friends. Studied as a corpus, they reflect the complexities of the educational experience in a Hebrew Zionist school in Poland. The uniqueness of this book is that it is attentive to children – not teenagers or adults – in their own voice and in real time, telling about their lives, and not from a place of retrospection or later memory. Sources that allow us to hear the authentic voice of a child in real time are very rare indeed. The letters, which were critically edited and published in full next to a clear photograph of the letter, are discussed from various perspectives including Jewish, Hebrew and Zionist education, the history and culture of the child, and the relationship between the Diaspora and Eretz Israel. The book also offers a short history of the influential, now almost forgotten, school network – Tarbut. Finally, the book presents a detailed history of one class in one town in Poland a few years before this world vanished.

When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfill Kafka’s last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted his life to championing Kafka’s work, rescuing his legacy from both obscurity and physical destruction. Nearly a century later, an international legal battle erupted to determine which country could claim ownership: the Jewish state, where Kafka dreamed of living, or Germany, where Kafka’s three sisters perished in the Holocaust? Benjamin Balint offers a gripping account of the controversial trial in Israeli courts—brimming with dilemmas legal, ethical, and political—that determined the fate of Kafka’s manuscripts.

This is the story of an adventurous journey into a magical, unknown and incomprehensible world where nature is alive and has a psyche, including trees. Do trees have a spirit? Does a tree have a soul? Scientists may question the notion that trees have a mind, soul or spirit, but there are cultures where trees have a soul and a mind of their own. The book describes the mind-blowing experience of entry into a world of spirits and trees, a world of animism – the field of anthropology that ascribes a psyche to all natural elements. Written in the form of travel log accompanied by illustrations, the book reveals the wisdom and sensitivities of villagers in northern Burma, who opened their home, their trees and their hearts to the author, allowing him to touch and understand their beliefs, and through them understand his own self.

The book contains the first-ever Hebrew translation of a collection of medieval Arabic stories, entitled The Hundred and One Nights . The chapters of the book deal with a variety of issues, for instance, the work’s origins and history, extant versions and manuscripts, language, material culture, poetics, the ideas and themes reflected in the stories, and Jewish background elements that can occasionally be discerned in some of the stories.

The Rebellion of the Daughters reveals for the first time the phenomenon of young Jewish women from Orthodox families escaping their homes in Krakow and its surroundings at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. In extreme cases, hundreds of these young women sought refuge in a convent in Krakow and converted to Catholicism there, and in other cases they sought to exercise their right to higher education, including at a university that recently opened its doors to women. The book relies on an abundance of archival documents, including police and court investigations, correspondence and memos of government ministries as well as personal letters, press reports and literary works, including the well-known story "Tehila" by S.Y. Agnon. Through all of these, the stories of three of the young women who run away are reconstructed and the background to their escape is revealed, the struggle of their families in trying to bring them back to their home, and the stormy discussions that the phenomenon of the Rebellious girls provoked in Jewish society in its various guises. The last part of the book describes how the crisis of rebellious girls later motivated Sarah Schnirer, a young woman from Krakow, to establish an afternoon school for girls, an institution that provided girls with religious education in a formal framework and later developed into the Beit Ya'akov educational chain.

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

This book presents a comprehensive selection, translated for the first time into Hebrew, of the Latin works of Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374), the "father of humanism" and a pivotal precursor to the Italian Renaissance. The compilation includes some of Petrarch's renowned personal letters, such as the pair he addressed to the Roman orator and philosopher Cicero. It features a therapeutic-autobiographical dialogue in which he engages with his spiritual father, Saint Augustine, challenging the latter's strict worldviews. The selection also encompasses an Invective against the dominant Aristotelian philosophy of his era, asserting the preeminence of classical rhetoric over philosophy; a novella presenting his interpretation of the closing story of the Decameron ; and a portion of his Latin poetry, through which he sought to revive the works of the great Roman poet Virgil. Through these writings, Petrarch fostered the emergence of a new secular culture on the cusp of the modern era—one that emphasizes humanity and life in this world—and set the stage for the remarkable creative surge of the Italian Renaissance.

A jubilee volume in honor of Prof. Menahem Ben-Sasson. The book, which contains 22 articles written by Prof. Ben-Sasson's colleagues, students, friends, and family members is dedicated to phenomena of leadership in the Jewish world . The various articles examine conceptions, practices and ways of Jewish leadership from diverse perspectives and in varied times and places. They are based on variegated sources: historical and judicial documents, biblical exegeses, poetry, letters, Responsa, polemical and philosophical writings. The volume is a tribute to Prof. Ben Sasson's extensive academic and public activity.

To the Water , a monograph on the writer Yosef Haim Brenner, seeks to reimagine the conventional perspective on Brenner, shifting the focus from his role as a national prophet to that of a modernist writer. The chapters of the book collectively form a life story, not only of the writer himself but also of his artistic era, the era of early Hebrew modernism. This innovative literary language, forged through the wanderings of Brenner and his cohort of young, provincial writers in early 20th-century Europe, transcended mere "style". It constituted a profound way of thinking and experiencing the world, swiftly captivating its creators, bursting forth in their works with great originality, and, paradoxically, vanishing with the same swiftness with which it had arrived. The book strives to recontextualize Brenner's creative output, asserting that his style does not merely continue the tradition of European realism from the 19th century. Instead, it stands as a bold and uniquely Hebrew creation, distinct from anything that preceded it.