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.

When is a state authorized to demand of its civilians to sacrifice their lives in war? When is it authorized to demand of its soldiers to kill soldiers of an opposing army in war? According to politico-liberal theory, a state is authorized to oblige its civilians to participate only in a defensive war. However, some groups in Israel believe that a state is authorized to demand of its civilians to participate in a war of necessity, such as a war rooted in religious elements.

Problems of Discipline explores the social and cultural function of the state system of secondary education in the Russian empire’s north-western provinces in the second half of the nineteenth century. It shows how schools facilitated socialization into informal, yet non-radical forms of political and social activism, and demonstrates, furthermore, how ideas of civil activism and communal commitment, typical to the contemporary Russian critical public discourse, led to the creation of a distinctive Jewish student subculture which contributed, subsequently, to the emergence of a new socially committed Jewish-Russian elite. Thus Problems of Discipline suggests a new conceptualization of the emergence of local – Jewish and other – elites and, in a broader view, a new understanding of the modes of Russian imperial socialization.

This volume is the first attempt at broad and deep research from a gender perspective into the halakhic attitude towards abortion. With the argument that halakhah reflects the male outlook and the consequent gender biases taken as its starting point, it examines the influence of gender concepts on contemporary halakhic rulings about abortion, in light of bio-ethical, conservative, liberal, and feminist theories, as well as the ideas of feminist legal theory and the feminist critique of the reigning epistemology. The book analyzes the gender implications of the stringent halakhic rulings of the twentieth century and the way they construct women. It asserts that the halakhic stance that takes the ban on abortion as a Torah-based prohibition constricts the idea of the sanctity of life to biological terms only and thereby highlights the reduction of women to mainly an entity for reproduction. The research raises a number of questions that have never been asked before: How do the decision makers see the female essence in general, and specifically in the context of abortion? Where do the woman’s needs rank on the scale of the decision makers' considerations? Are women perceived as subjects with their own interests and will—or are these deemed irrelevant and appropriated for the benefit of the collective (the family, the Jewish people)? These questions serve as the foundation for the discussion in the present volume. Even though it deals mainly with abortion, I suggest that it be seen as demonstrating the masculine identity of the halakhic discourse in general.

Nietzsche is not ordinarily considered a philosopher of law, and despite the voluminous literature on almost every other aspect of his thought, little has been written about his reflections on the role of law in the social, intellectual, and personal spheres. Yet careful reading of his works reveals a significant body of critical reflection on socio-jurisprudential questions regarding the nature of law, obedience to the law, the criminal mindset, punishment, and more. The book presents for the first time, a comprehensive collection of aphorisms gathered from the entire Nietzschean corpus that explicitly or implicitly addresses the subject of law, arranged thematically, along with contextualization, annotation, and commentary. The book contains six chapters - The Self in the Presence of Law, The Criminal: A Profile, Causation, Action, Free Will, Punishment, Rights and Obligations, Religion and State. It thus provides a panoramic view of Nietzsche’s critical discourse on law and legal culture.

This book's aim is to assist school counselors with ethical and professional dilemmas in various complex situations. It is structured as a series of case studies written in collaboration with professionals and students, presenting versatile solutions based on the seven steps model detailed in this book. This pioneering book is designated for school counselors, school principals, teachers and parents.

Imagine 100 high school-aged teens – boys and girls, city and suburb dwellers, “heavy smartphone users” and regular users – disconnecting from their smartphones for one whole week. It may sound fictional, but this exactly is what occurred as part of a fascinating experiment that we recently conducted, which serves as the basis of this book. For a long and challenging week, these teenagers documented their experiences in personal diaries, and described them in personal and group interviews. They described their physical and psychological feelings about life without their devices, the effect that disconnecting from their devices had on their social life, their family life, and their management of time and routine tasks. The participants described how their lives looked without a smartphone in school and during their free time, how they missed their device and felt its absence upon waking in the morning and in the moments before falling asleep, and how they even felt it in their dreams, which were filled with longing for the digital friend that had been taken from them. This book provides deep insights into the role of the smartphone in the daily lives of teenagers, and the culture of “cellphones natives,” members of Gen Z. The book offers a new point of view on questions occupying researchers, parents, educators, and professionals: how and why did the smartphone become the dominant medium of communication in the lives and culture of teenagers? How does it shape and influence their daily lives? Can the relationship with the smartphone really be characterized as dependence and perhaps even as an addiction, as many claim, or is it relationship of a completely different nature? In a world full of technology, the aspiration to better understand teenagers and even ourselves requires acknowledging the ways in which these technologies are woven into every moment of our daily lives, for good and for bad.

This volume offers rich accounts of pioneering leadership development projects and other education-related programs operated or supported by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation over the last thirty years - initiatives designed to advance the Foundation’s mission to enhance the vitality of the Jewish people and to strengthen Israel as a just, compassionate and inclusive society. Scholars, educational leaders and philanthropists will find much to ponder in this book. It offers multiple perspectives on the qualities needed for effective leadership; on leadership development, with attention to the role of the humanities and policy studies in this process; on ways to foster educational and social change; on philanthropic engagement; and on the role of research and profound ideas in efforts to strengthen educational practice and communal life.

This book focuses on space, borders and ethics in contemporary Hebrew prose written in the shadow of the Occupation and the Intifadas and reads a corpus of works written between 1987 and 2007. Israeli literary representations of the Occupation and the two Intifadas raise critical ethical questions about militarism, humanism, the nature of the State of Israel as a democracy, national identity and its borders, the nature of Zionist education, and the acknowledgment of the Other. The book deals with the portrait of the Israeli soldier, depicts the settings of the Occupied Territories, but also describes life in cities such as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It examines realistic writing as well as fantastic-grotesque, in the works of A. B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, Ronit Matalon, Asher Kravitz, Michal Govrin, and Orly Castel-Bloom and many others.

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.

Why is is so hard to improve the Israeli education system? Despite the fact that individual innovative pedagogy projects are successful on a small-scale level, creating islands of excellency, it seems that they are unable to connect to form a comprehensive change. Endless reforms are implemented, and yet the Israeli education system is stuck in terms of the quality of learning and teaching. This book alerts that processes of change in education tend to focus on a technical and superficial dimension, while a more comprehensive change demands detailed strategic planning and systematic work on the core of teaching and learning processes.

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.