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.

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.

According to the conventional understanding, the ultimate goal of Zionism as a national political movement was the establishment of a nation-state. In his new book on the history of the Zionist political imagination from the beginning of the idea of modern Zionism to the establishment of the State of Israel, Dimitri Shomsky challenges a deterministic view by examining unknown writings by the founding fathers of Zionism and by re-examining the known sources, which were interpreted in a tendentious and ahistorical way in the classical literature on Zionism. The author reveals that the leaders of Zionism envisioned the realization of Jewish self-determination in the Land of Israel within a multinational framework. First, they envisioned an autonomous province in the multinational Ottoman Empire, and then - during the British Mandate - a multinational democracy. The book shows that the models of a Jewish state, which were established and developed by the founding fathers of the State of Israel, included recognition of a collective national existence of the Arabs of the Land of Israel. Such political patterns were not the property of marginal figures among Zionists (such as the "Brit Shalom" people), but on the contrary, were presented by the most mainstream Zionists: Yehuda Leib Pinsker, Benjamin Ze'ev Herzl, Ahad Ha'am, Ze'ev Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion. The book focuses on these five figures and presents them and their views in an innovative way, which is known to have an impact on contemporary Israeli discourse.

This collection presents short stories by Yiddish writers who worked in Israel and wrote about it. The stories chosen and translated into Hebrew especially for this book unfold a fascinating mosaic, a synthesis between the literary traditions of Yiddish in Eastern Europe and America and the Israeli language, landscape, characters, and world of images; Between the Jewish home that was destroyed in the Holocaust and the formulating reality in Israel. Yiddish fiction written in Israel confronts the reader with the kibbutz and the urban landscape, Holocaust survivors and Sabars, Arabs, Bedouins, and Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and all over the world. The stories can also be read as an expression of the changes that took place in Israel, from the establishment of the state to the Lebanon War and the first Intifada, from the waves of mass immigration of the Mizrahim and of Holocaust survivors and their settlement in "abandoned villages" to the immigration of Soviet Union Jews in the 1990s.

The collective memory is not an innocent conduit carrying the cargo of the "authentic" past into the present, but a subject of constant struggle between different social forces, which have their own history. The discourse of the Holocaust in Israel has also undergone several incarnations during the last decades that reflected the complex interrelationship between "silence" and speech and the various tensions between private memories and collective memory. In this pioneering book - What Shall We Tell the Little Ones? - Yaakova Sacerdoti examines how Holocaust literature for preschoolers developed in light of the recurring questions on this topic over the years: Is it right to expose children to these horrific events of the past? And if so, how can the indescribable be described? The book examines these questions by describing over thirty children's books about the Holocaust, published since the beginning of the 1990s. Thus, Sacerdoti tries to reveal the literary and poetic techniques - both textual and visual - that children's writers used to try to circumvent the difficulties involved in conveying the experiences of the Holocaust to preschoolers.

Empathy is often conceptualized as the experience of walking in someone else’s shoes. This experience comprises of a cognitive aspect – the ability to identify, understand and adopt the perspective of another, and an affective aspect – sharing the emotions of others, while remaining distinct. Empathy has been widely recognized as central to cognitive and social development, and a key to nurturing interpersonal relationships and encouraging pro-social action. But empathy has drawbacks as well: Its boundaries, limitations and even potential damage have also been recognized and investigated. The articles in this book take multiple perspectives to studying empathy. They discuss how empathy is developed and how it is bounded, and focus on both its positive and negative implications. The articles in the first part of the book take a social sciences perspective to empathy. They define empathy, describe its development from very early age and throughout the life-span, and examine how it affects intra-personal, interpersonal and social processes. The second part of the book discusses the role of empathy in the humanities. The articles in this part address empathy in history, literature and the arts. Together, the articles in this book point to the vast scope of empathy as a phenomenon in both the social sciences and the humanities.

The spread of the Assyrian Empire over the entire Fertile Crescent in the second half of the 8th century BC introduced various forms of cooperation between the neighboring nomadic Arabs and the imperial authorities. The geographical conditions and resultant lifestyle of the Arabs facilitated a mutual dependence and delicate equilibrium between themselves and the Assyrian rulers, eager to capitalize on their unprecedented regional might. Henceforth, the Arabs appear as an organic component of the Fertile Crescent history rather than mere desert raiders.

Identity and Its Discontents is an intellectual, gothic journey, which explores and interprets for the readers the personal story and thought of fourteen "marginal Jews", Jewish intellectuals from a variety of disciplines who lived in Europe from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Jacob Golomb does a good job of describing the twisted Jewish-European identity of these spiritual giants in the face of the fractured European humanist ideal. The book is structured as a fabric created from the intersecting stories of key thinkers who left a singular intellectual mark on the twentieth century and the shaping of Jewish consciousness in it - from Kafka to Freud, from Bruno Schulz to Gensin, from Ahad Ha'am to Berdichevsky, from Herzl and Nordau to Martin Buber and Zeev Jabotinsky, and from Stefan Zweig to Primo Levi. The original key that Golomb offers to understanding the mechanisms of the identity construction of the "fringe Jews" is the attitude of these thinkers to the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, and the ways in which this illuminates the question of identity politics and the internal struggle in modern Judaism between nationalism and universal humanism. Identity in Discomfort is the fruit of the author's many years of important research work on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and their acception in Hebrew literature and thought. Prof. Hagi Kenaan

In his autobiography, Abraham Halevi Fraenkel describes growing up as an Orthodox Jew in Germany and his development as a mathematician at the beginning of the twentieth century. In his memoir, originally published in German in 1967, Fraenkel painted a unique picture of the complexity of Jewish life in Germany with special emphasis on the developments in the Orthodox community. He described the world of mathematics in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, in the context of the great mathematicians he met, many of whom were Jews or had Jewish roots. In his personal life, Fraenkel merged the worlds of orthodox Judaism, liberal Zionism and mathematics, in a period of global and national upheavals, which included the two World Wars and the establishment of the State of Israel. The last chapter of the book, which describes his extensive public activity in Israel from the 1930s until his death in 1965, was written by Prof. Jiska Cohen-Mansfield. Introductions were added by Prof. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel and Prof. Menachem Magidor, the former president of the Hebrew University.

This is the ninth volume of the series Judaica Latinoamericana , edited by AMILAT – Israeli Association of Researchers of Latin American Jewry. It is based on studies presented at the Latin American Section of the Seventeenth World Congress of Jewish Studies (2017). Former volumes of the series may be accessed at http://amilat.online. The book is a multi-disciplinary collection of 23 articles – 19 in Spanish, two in Portuguese and two in English –in five thematic sections: Jewish communities – internal processes presents studies on identities, migrations and religion in Argentina and Mexico, as well as informal education and the history of a peripheral community in Chile. Migrations analyzes processes of migration, acculturation and integration in different periods in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and Mexico. Antisemitism, Shoah, Memory deals with Peruvian attempts to rescue Jews, silence and memory of the Holocaust in Mexico and Uruguay, as well as visual components of racism and memory in Cuba and Argentina. Zionism and the State of Israel analyzes Socialist Zionism in Uruguay and recent Brazilian policy toward the Middle East conflict. Literature presents a variety of topics, such as history of migration and post-migration literature, Shoah and exile, and contemporary Jewish literature in Argentina, Brazil and the US.

The kibbutz is a social experiment in collective living that challenges traditional economic theory. By sharing all income and resources equally among its members, the kibbutz system created strong incentives to free ride or—as in the case of the most educated and skilled—to depart for the city. Yet for much of the twentieth century kibbutzim thrived, and kibbutz life was perceived as idyllic both by members and the outside world. In The Mystery of the Kibbutz , Ran Abramitzky blends economic perspectives with personal insights to examine how kibbutzim successfully maintained equal sharing for so long despite their inherent incentive problems. Weaving the story of his own family’s experiences as kibbutz members with extensive economic and historical data, Abramitzky sheds light on the idealism and historical circumstances that helped kibbutzim overcome their economic contradictions. He illuminates how the design of kibbutzim met the challenges of thriving as enclaves in a capitalist world and evaluates kibbutzim’s success at sustaining economic equality. By drawing on the stories of his pioneering grandmother who founded a kibbutz, his uncle who remained in a kibbutz his entire adult life, and his mother who was raised in and left the kibbutz, Abramitzky brings to life the rise and fall of the kibbutz movement. The lessons that The Mystery of the Kibbutz draws from this unique social experiment extend far beyond the kibbutz gates, serving as a guide to societies that strive to foster economic and social equality.

Two focal points are at the center of this book: the history of German Jews during the Holocaust and the involvement of the Foreign Ministry of Nazi Germany. The process of "solving the problem of the German Jews" consisted of stages of escalation that are exemplified in 175 translated documents written by or addressed to German diplomats. The narrative that is placed in the historical context, demonstrates the course that began with the deprivation and dispossession of German Jews of their civil and economic rights, continues with their forced immigration and finally with their deportation and extermination. Included are the reactions of the German Jews, the responses that came from outside Germany, and the role of the Foreign Ministry, who was eager to participate in “solving the Jewish Question”. The book opens with a preface by Prof. Moshe Zimmermann.