Selected articles from current issue: Amir Banbaji | More Figurative than all Other Songs. A Study of the Pre-Maskilic History of the Hebrew Melitsah Nurit Barnea-Bernheim | ‘Total Love’: The Story of Miriam in ‘The Tale of the Scribe’ by S.Y. Agnon Neta Stahl | ‘How Come I Love the Ugav?’: The Ugav in Uri Zvi Grinberg’s Poetry Roy Greenwald | Kin of Dust: On Al Hakhmot Derakhim by Avot Yeshurun

Within the Babylonian Talmud are dozens of stories depicting sharp confrontations between the Amoraim, the Talmudic sages. These narratives portray the charged relationships among the sages, the emergence of conflict, and the profound emotional harm that results from it. Why do conflicts among the creators of Talmudic literature occupy such a central literary place? This book examines these stories as a distinct literary corpus. The analysis shows that the conflicts consistently center on one domain: injury to personal honor. They are also marked by a characteristic plot structure, in which conflict develops unintentionally and escalates uncontrollably, leading to a rupture between the characters. Using tools from narrative theory and comparative poetics, the book explores how these stories operate. They draw the reader into a web of misunderstandings and communicative failures, making simple moral judgment difficult. Instead, they direct attention to the inner and interpersonal worlds of the characters, and to the literary construction of the Talmudic study house as a space of mutual dependence and identity formation.

This commentary lay hidden for centuries in a single manuscript that eventually made its way to the British Library in London. This edition consists of three parts: 1. A lengthy introduction , which, in addition to bibliographic and historiographic details about the author of the commentary and an account of the manuscript’s journey to the library where it is now housed, also contains a detailed analysis of his exegetical method and a discussion of his sources. 2. The body of the commentary by Rabbi Isaac ben Samuel, which includes an exegetical translation of the verses of II Samuel and their interpretation, both in Judeo-Arabic. Alongside these appear the Hebrew translation of the verses and their commentary, prepared by the editor. The layer of annotations , comprising notes that address the explanation of the commentary, its textual variants (including those found in a partial manuscript preserved in the St. Petersburg Library), its language, the sources on which it draws, and the scholarship related to it.

In this volume: Avi Shveka | The Prohibition to Capture a Mother Bird along with Her Young: A Reassessment Itamar Kislev | The Story of Nadav and Avihu: A Renewed Examination Yisca Zimran | Motion and Change in Micah 1:2–9 Noam Mizrahi | On the Importance of Text-critical Secondary Versions for Reconstructing the Literary Formation of Isaiah 61:1–7 Uri Gabbay | The Mesopotamian ‘Mouth Washing’ Ritual: A Hebrew Translation And more...

Simon Bernfeld (1860–1940) was one of the most popular Jewish European writers of the early twentieth century. A prolific bestselling author in a broad range of fields of history and Jewish studies, and a pivotal figure in the renaissance of Jewish national culture. His oeuvre encompassed dozens of books, hundreds of essays, and thousands of daily columns published in Hebrew and German. Yet despite his vast influence, Bernfeld remained outside the mainstream. His prominent presence until the late 1920s stands in stark contrast to his subsequent obscurity. This gap prompts for an examination of whether his “forgetting” was deliberate and connected to the historical narrative he sought to promote. His political views, expressed in his sermons as a modern rabbi in Belgrade, in his polemic essays criticizing both the rabbinate and the Zionist Congress, were similarly marginalized. On The Margins: A Biography of Simon Bernfeld unfolds a biography woven into the history of the Jewish intelligentsia circles in Galicia, his birthplace, and Berlin, where he lived for many years until his death. His correspondence with a wide array of figures reviles the emergence of Hebrew mass media and a national canon. Through spatial and cultural analysis, exploring themes of Jewish imperial relations and intra-European migration, the book maps the Jewish intellectual networks of Galicia and the Pale of Settlement, examining their impact on the formation of Jewish cultural and intellectual power centers at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Two Mekhiltot on the Jethro Portion (Exodus 18) is, in a sense, a complement to Menahem Kahana's previous book, The Two Mekhiltot on the Amalek Portion . The book is based on new text editions of Mekhilta d'Rabbi Ishmael and Mekhilta d'Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai on the Jethro portion. It includes a systematic and detailed commentary on the exegeses of the Mekhiltot, shedding new light on many exegeses – their literal meaning, their real and historical context, and the worldviews reflected in them. The book reviews the previous editions of The Two Mekhiltot on the Jethro Portion and presents the important contribution of fragments from the Cairo Geniza that were discovered after the previous editions were published. It compares the traditions of the two Mekhiltot in their language, style, and content, and establishes the insight that in the Jethro portion, as in the Amalek portion, the tradition of Mekhilta d'Rabbi Ishmael generally takes precedence.

Kobez Al Yad , an annual of the Mekize Nirdamim Society, is a forum for the publication from manuscript sources of ancient texts in Jewish studies that are shorter than book-length. The articles in this issue: Shulamit Elizur | Rahitim and Siluk for Yom Kippur about the revelation of God to Elijah at Horeb Dan Greenberger and Y. Zvi Stampfer | ' On the Obligation of Prayer ' by Rav Saadia Gaon Eli Gurfinkel | The Reason for the Shew-Bread Table and the Candelbara ( Menora ) from Rabbi Samuel Ibn Tibon Yossef Elizur | Rabbi Joseph Hayyun's Commentary on the Book of Zephania Yohanan Kapah | Rabbi Joseph Hayyun's Commentary on the Book of Haggai Yaron Nisenholz | The Proclamations of the Great Rabbinical Court of Prague in the 18 th Century

A letter written during the destruction of the communities of Galicia in the spring of 1943 by Solomea Ochs, née Luft, found among the possessions of a Wehrmacht general and later featured in an exhibition in contemporary Berlin, transforms in the hands of historian Ram Ben-Shalom into a wide-ranging documentary novel. Solomea's letter, in her own handwriting, describes not only the horrors of the massacre and extermination but also touches on the depths of humiliation and devastation felt by the Jews kneeling before their killers. This is the voice of mighty force of nature that has been silenced; something stronger than poetry and lamentation, even if it will surely be remembered alongside the great Jewish laments of the Middle Ages and Bialik's "Upon the Slaughter." Ram Ben-Shalom discovered that this letter is none other than a letter from his aunt to her family before her murder, and that the letter was kept in the drawer of his father's desk at their home in Tel Aviv. From here, a complex search journey emerged, with surprising dimensions that accumulate into a picture of distinctly epic proportions. With craftsmanship, Ben-Shalom weaves a story that is at once a poetics of life, a cultural critique, and an unparalleled delicate analysis of the depths of the selfhood of Israeli Judaism.

The economy of symbolic goods is at the heart of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology. In Le marché des biens symboliques , published in 1971, Bourdieu lays the foundation for his theory of the conditions of production and distribution of cultural products. This text is of crucial importance for understanding his later writings on artistic fields and cultural practices. Against the illusion that artworks are independent from social conditions, Bourdieu reminds us that these are the results of a production process that involves not only the individual artist or writer, but a whole system of intermediaries (galleries, publishers, etc.) and institutions of consecration (criticism, prizes, academies, etc.). However, in contrast to the Marxist approach, which reduces works to a "reflection" of class relations, Bourdieu argues that the fields of cultural production enjoy relative autonomy. In this text, Bourdieu constructs the concept of the field for the first time systematically, using Max Weber's concept of legitimacy and his sociology of religion: the symbolic value of cultural works is based on trust and the accumulation of symbolic capital. Bourdieu also combines the concept of the field here for the first time with other concepts that he was developing then - "reproduction," "symbolic violence," "habitus." Drawing on art historians and on examples from empirical research he was conducting, the text also proposes a socio-historical study of the conditions for the emergence of the fields of art and literature as relatively autonomous worlds.

In The Taste of Hidden Things Sara Sviri weaves a tapestry in which Sufi motifs and images are highlighted: the perfume of Attar's and Rumi's poetry, the boldness of Ibn al-Arabi's mystical speculation, the ecstatic experiences and dreams of old and modern seekers, and the richness of the Naqshbandi masters, past and present. A special place is given to al-Hakim at-Tirmidhi, a ninth century mystic from Central Asia. Many passages from his work, including his wife’s teaching dreams, are published here for the first time in Hebrew.

The book offers a new reading of Israeli prose written primarily in the 1980s and 1990s. During these decades, Hebrew literature freed itself from the aspiration to address a general (male) audience and began cultivating a new, more diverse readership. This audience was constructed through the direct address of literary texts to their readers. For women, who are often culturally directed to identify with the position of the (seemingly) passive listener of the story rather than the protagonist, this strategy offers a vital mode of engagement. Through close readings of contemporary Hebrew literature—including works by Orly Castel-Bloom, Yoel Hoffmann, Lea Aini, Yuval Shimoni, and Eda Zoritte—the book reclaims this position and demonstrates how it can be both productive and active.

This is a groundbreaking book in the field of inner biblical allusion. Using methodologies from the field of literary studies the book examines the Song Ha'azinu (Deut 32) and the Book of Isaiah and uncovers the fascinating connections between the two. The recognition of this relationship sheds new light on the subject of inner biblical allusion, the Song Ha'azinu and the Book of Isaiah.