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.

The Babylonian Talmud is the Jewish composition of greatest scope, and its influence on Jewish life is decisive. Jewish sages have devoted more time and energy to its study and halakhic interpretation than to any other book, including the Bible, to the extent that "talmud Torah," Torah study, is mainly perceived as the study of the Babylonian Talmud. Its academic study, in contrast, is still in its initial stages. Critical editions, with the text based on the best manuscripts and an exhaustive and thorough critical commentary, have been published of only a few of the thirty-seven tractates of the Babylonian Talmud. Central questions pertaining to the manner of the formulation of the Talmud, its redaction, and its transmission are still unresolved. This is different from the state of research of other Rabbinic works, the study of which has taken significant strides in recent decades. Critical, balanced, and cautious interpretation of talmudic sugyot (discursive units) will likely illustrate the treasures to be revealed by a scholarly reading of the Babylonian Talmud: illuminating new facets of which traditional study is unaware; the consistent presentation of its meticulous literary fashioning, its contentual depth, and the creative force embodied in this corpus. All these find expression even in sugyot that seem tenuous and bothersome to the traditional student. Tiqqun Olam (Repairing the World) seeks to advance the research of the Babylonian Talmud with an annotated edition of the fourth chapter of Tractate Gittin, which contains various regulations that were enacted "for tiqqun olam." This chapter was chosen for the wide variety of its topics and the redactive methods employed, and for the benefit to be gained from their critical analysis. The widespread study of this chapter in high schools and yeshivot also influences its selection, in the hope it will aid both students and scholars in highlighting his difficulties and in exposing the overt and covert trends of the Amoraim and the redactors of the sugyot. The first chapter of this book examines the meanings of the term "tiqqun olam" in the Mishnah and the Tosefta, along with the structure of the tannaitic units containing regulations "for the repairing of the world" in these two tannaitic works. The main body of the book contains a systematic discussion of these mishnayot and sugyot, using philological-historical methodology, alongside the literary analysis, which has not been sufficiently developed in talmudic research to now. The talmudic text is divided into forty-nine sugyot. For each the book offers a new text based on MS. Firkovich 187, a list of parallels, a selection of textual variants and discussion of their originality, and a commentary. The commentary includes a detailed explanation of the sugyot and an analysis of their strata. A unique attempt is made to glean from within the traces of the difficulties within the sugyot and the dissonance they exhibit the aims of the redactors, who frequently formulated new laws, while devoting sophisticated literary effort in order to mask these innovations, and to impart to the sugyah a harmonious composition. In this book, much effort was invested to reveal the plain meaning of the Talmud, employing the tools of scholarly research - which, for various reasons, are not integrated into the widespread study of the Talmud today. The book undertakes to open a window to the academic world and its methodology, to enable Talmud students to come to know the world of Babylonian Talmud scholarship that is both demanding and profound, but also intriguing, while offering new insights.

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 articles in this volume originated, in large part, as papers presented at a conference convened by the Melton Coalition for Creative Interaction in December 2014 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The Melton Coalition is a consortium of the three Melton Centers established over the years by the visionary philanthropist Samuel Mendel Melton: at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Ohio State University. The conference was devoted to the various forms of interaction that obtain between the oral and the textual modes of discourse in Jewish history and contemporary Jewish life. Some of the essays dwell on oral and textual media in historical context – while others place more emphasis on the contemporary educational implications of the phenomena under discussion. All the essays in this volume articulate patterns of oral and written discourse that can greatly enrich our knowledge of both the history of Jewish culture and the theory and practice of Jewish education.

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.

The Mandel Alumna are seeking to change the world . This book is an attempt to encounter some of them and describe how they're doing it, in Israel and abroad. They are all talking education: how to meet the world and how to cope with the main issues facing humanity. Throughout the book we meet places and their relevant history and the fascinating questions they raise, and some of the great ideas they're connected with. Between the lines we learn of the role played by the Mandel foundation and institutes.

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 .

The words seduction and ethics, which at first sight seem mutually exclusive, are at the heart of the analytic perspective. Vivian Chetrit-Vatine takes as her starting-point an encounter, which is not necessarily consensual, between Emmanuel Levinas's thought and his conception of philosophy as ethics - ethics understood as responsibility for the other - and that of the psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, who posits the first adult other as a seducer of the young psyche from the outset, due to the transmission of enigmatic messages compromised by his or her unconscious. The analyst's ethical position is re-examined and with it the feminine/maternal origins of the human capacity for responsibility for the other.

The charm of Agnon’s work lies in an inebriating combination of the funny and the serious, in his famous irony that knocks down every unquestionable certainty and even its very self. Agnon’s humor eludes rhetoric borderlines, does not tolerate confines of a genre and disobeys simple interpretative solutions. In his new book, Roman Katsman suggests a new literary-anthropological method to break down Agnon’s complicated ‘laughter code’—a method based upon the cultural and semiotic interpretation of symbols. His reading of a wide selection of Agnon’s works, including his four major novels, reveals an entire world of his laughter symbols—a world of violence and sacredness, tragic bewilderment and eruption of new possibilities. In this world, arks fly, princes disappear, serpents eat their own tails, angels and demons dance, illusion turns into reality, and other foolish and cruel miracles occur. The research looks for a solution to the riddle: should Agnon's stories be considered serious or ironic, religious or secular, scornful or emphatic, archaic or modernist; or perhaps the reader is intended to swell with pathos or burst into laughter—and how come Agnon always has the last laugh?

In 1895, Lewis Carroll, the author of the iconic novel Alice in Wonderland and a renowned logician, composed a collection of mathematical problems while he was suffering from sleeplessness. However, Carroll seemed to have overlooked a crucial paradoxical error in his presentation of one of these problems, which is analysed in this book, along with questions such as: Do men have more sisters than women? Why do people find their own coincidences more surprising than those encountered by others? How are life and death expectancies treated probabilistically? Statistics, probability, coincidences, randomness and infinity are explored in this book – a collection of essays written over years of research – through a variety of everyday anecdotes and situations, aimed at students, teachers and readers interested in enriching their knowledge of these subjects.