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 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 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.

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.

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.

Galit Hasan-Rokem | Dov Noy – A Centennial Anniversary Amos Noy | Three Variants of a Riddle and a Solution: In Memory of Dov Noy Few articles in this issue : Avishar Har-Shefi | On the Beginnings of the Hasidic Story Itamar Dagan | Written New Year’s Greetings According to Texts from the Cairo Geniza and Rabbinic Literature Haya Bar-Itzhak z”l | The Dead and the Survivors: Historical Legends about Women during the1648/49 Pogroms as a Female Site of Memory Hanna Cohen-Perez and Esther Schely-Newman | Sainte Laktar (el Guettar) in Tunisia and Israel: Passages through Time and Space Michael Lukin | The Traditional Yiddish Lullaby as an East-Ashkenazi Phenomenon