The story recalls the life and work of Josef ha-Cohen, the author of The Chronicles of the French and Ottoman Kings and Sefer Emeq ha-Bakha (The Vale of Tears), published simultaneously. The story reflects a momentous experience of joy and bereavement, love and desire, youth and old age, and most particularly the feeling of human transience.

‏‏Deganit Berest is one of the prominent Israeli artists active today. Her many artworks span ‎between painting, photography, and installation. Her intricate works trigger and challenge ‎different interpretive moves. This book present eight of them, written by artists, philosophers, ‎curators and other scholars, unfolding a rich and diverse commentary on Berest’s works. In ‎addition to the papers, the book includes fragments written by the artist herself, unveiling ‎another perspective on the artworks, which usually remains hidden: the artist herself meditating ‎about her own works. ‎

The Book of Psalms contains a selection of religious hymns, which reached us in various versions and through different historical sources. In his book, Michael Chyutin contemplates the processes through which this book consolidated, by tracing the early collections and discussing their editing principles.

Thinking about Jewish Holidays is a compilation of chapters originally published in Ha'aretz newspaper's "Culture and Literature" section. The articles deal mainly with how biblical material concerning Jewish holidays is manifest. It shows that the biblical sources are not conclusive, thus challenging the study of biblical approaches to the cultural memory of Jewish holidays.

Rabbi Judah Leib Alter of Ger, a famed nineteenth-century Hasidic master, wrote an influential collection of Hebrew homilies. But it seems that R. Judah Leib’s sermons were also transcribed by his students, some of whom recorded their teacher’s words in the original Yiddish rather than Hebrew translation. This monograph is based on a newly-discovered Yiddish manuscript of sixty pages. It presents a synoptic edition of the Yiddish text alongside the Hebrew version, thus enabling comparison of the witnesses and demonstrating the development of the various texts. The introduction uses this manuscript to explore broader historical and theoretical issues such as the relationship between written texts and oral culture, the development of written Yiddish, the nature and boundaries of translation, and the complex pathways of transmission from teachers to their students.

Prof. Eliezer Schweid is one of the most prominent Jewish thinkers in Israel, scholar of Jewish thought throughout the generations, an Israel Prize laureate and a teacher and educator for many. His thought laid the groundwork for Jewish existence, as well as for contemporary existence at large, and for dealing with many post-modern dangers. This book provides an overall and critical view of Schweid's intellectual work. His students and colleagues ask questions of existence and seek to pave, with and following Schweid, paths of spirit and life.

Articles in this issue: Noam Mizrahi | The Eleventh Song of the Sabbath Sacrifice: Literary Form and Exegetical Content Tanja Werthmann | 'You Know the DIfference between a Lover (Oheb) and a Passionate Lover (Hosheq)': Degrees of Love in Maimonides and His Source in al-Ghazali Judith Weiss | Kababalah in Gerona in the Thirteenth Century: Azriel and Nahmanides. A Re-Evaluation Tsippi Kauffman | R. Boruch of Medzhybizh and the 'Medzhybizh Dynasty' English Abstracts

Few articles in this issue: Gilad Shapira | Hermenautics as Poetics: The Case of Midrash HaGadol Moshe Shoshan | The Road to Lydda: A Survivor's Story: Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai's Flight from Jerusalem According to Eicha Rabba 1:5 Richard Hidary | Why Are There Lawyers in Heaven?: Rabbinic Aggadot on the Divine Courtroom Kedem Golden | Solving a Riddle of Judah Halevi Idit Einat-Nov | 'Everybody wants to live': A Literary Reading of the Maqama by Yehuda Al-Harizi, 'The Rooster'

The book traces contested visions and representations of al-Andalus/Sepharad in modern Jewish discourse through an in-depth analysis of the work of Sephardi intellectual network in the turn of the twentieth century Palestine/Land of Israel. Against the backdrop of the tumultuous political and social events of that period, and processes of national, ethnic, and religious partitions, the book explores the ways in which these Sephardi intellectuals fundamentally challenged the nationalistic and monolingual ideologies and looks at their efforts to establish a shared Jewish-Arab society based on a symbolic return to the Sephardi/Andalusian medieval legacy of Hebrew-Arabic bilingualism and a Judeo-Muslim joint cultural heritage. By exploring these contested representations of Sephardi identity and culture the book re-examines some fundamental issues that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century and which still accompany us to this day: the national conflict between Jews and Palestinians, the contacts and splits between Hebrew and Arab culture and the formation of ethnic hierarchies between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim. The book aims to contribute to the growing interest in modern Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewish history and to broaden the scope of “Jewish studies” beyond the European Jewish experience.

Religious Zionism: Religion, Nationalism and Politics offers a new and groundbreaking understanding of the various forms of religious-Zionist political thought. It presents an analysis that undermines the common dichotomy between religion and secularism, and discusses in length the identity of religious Zionism as it consolidated during the past fifty years, based on this modern dichotomy, shedding new light on the movement.