The book Shamanism and Literary Criticism deals with the unique attention that scholars of art and literature pay to the object of their study. This specific attention is based on a communitarian approach, a special type of research empathy, and a contemplation radically focused on literature, art, and the community of its readers. What do scholars of literature do in a community where literature is created, read, and interpreted by them? What is the attitude of these scholars to literature and its readers? What is the role entrusted to them by their community? This book offers a new theory about the attitude of the study of literature toward literature, art, and communality. It illustrates the theory and its features as a method of research and interpretation in the works of Uri Nissan Gnessin, Micha Yosef Berdyczewski, Shimon Halkin, A. B. Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Ronit Matalon, Orly Castel-Bloom, and Anna Hermann.

The book examines the relations between Oriental, local Jews and Palestinian Arabs in Mandatory Palestine. It focuses on the role of Oriental Jews as possible mediators from a cultural, political and social perspective, as those who sought to bridge Jewish-Arab culture, Jewish-Arab nationalism, and Jewish-Arab identity. Examining these relations from the perspective of Oriental and local Jews sheds new light on the history and historiography of Zionism, the Yishuv, and the Jewish-Arab conflict.

MA‘ARAG: The Israel Annual of Psychoanalysis is a democratic, refereed annual publication, evaluated and edited by academicians, intellectuals in related fields, and clinicians. The journal, dedicated to research in psychoanalytic theory, practice and criticism, is the fruit of the initiative and cooperation of the Sigmund Freud Center for the Study and Research in Psychoanalysis of the Hebrew University, the Israeli Association for Self Psychology and the Study of Subjectivity, Israel Society for Analytical Psychology, Israel Psychoanalytic Society, Clinical Division of the Israel Psychological Association, Israel Institute for Group Analysis, Israel Institute of Jungian Psychology, The Sigmund Freud Chair of Psychoanalysis of the Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University, Tel-Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, The Winnicott Center in Israel and the New Israeli Jungian Association. In this issue: Merav Roth | FROM “FUNES THE MEMORIOUS” TO FORGETFUL AGNES: ON DEAD REMEMBERED MEMORIES AND THE ALIVE FORGOTTEN Emmanuel Amrami | ON SEXUALITY IN PSYCHOANALYSIS: TWO PHASES, THREE FACES, AND A BRIEF GLANCE TOWARD LOVE Anat Tzur-Mahalel | “WRITING LIKE A DOG DIGGING A HOLE; A RAT DIGGING ITS BURROW:” NARRATIVES OF SEPARATION THROUGH THE PERSPECTIVE OF FREUD’S PATIENTS Rakefet Efrat (Levkovich) Holzer | “YOUR ENDLESS UNRETURN”: MELANCHOLY AND ABYSMAL DOUBLE NEGATION Ayelet Naeh | THE SELF THAT IS NOT ONE: ON THE REFLECTIVE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE SELF AND AWARENESS THROUGH A KABBALISTIC PERSPECTIVE Yifat Eitan-Persico | OEDIPAL CONFIGURATIONS IN SAME-SEX FAMILIES Omri Blum | THE UNCANNY: A STUDY OF THE UNCANNY IN LITERATURE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS Ruth Netzer | MYTHS AND REALITIES: ON INCEST, SIN AND REDEMPTION Moshe Alon | TRANSFERENCE, COUNTERTRANSFERENCE AND THE WOUNDED HEALER: A JUNGIAN ANALYTIC-PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP Tziki Cohen | BETWEEN MONAD AND DYAD: THE MULTIFACETED NATURE OF SELF-CONSTITUTION Alina Schellekes | SENTENCED TO LIFE: REFLECTIONS ON THE INABILITY TO SUSTAIN VITALITY, FOLLOWING THE MOVIE “TURTLES CAN FLY” Dafna Ben-Zvi | HOW DOES THE ‘ISLAND OF MAYBE’ HEAL? REPETITION AND REPARATION IN “THE JOURNEY TO THE ISLAND OF MAYBE” BY MIRIAM YALAN-STEKELIS

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 ethcis in contemporary Hebrew prose written in the shadow of the Occupation and the Intifadas and reads 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.

Zionists without Borders tells the story of the Halutz movement in Poland and its role in helping the Labor movement rise to the leadership of the Zionist Movement in the interwar period. It describes the founding of a mass national and socialist movement, which changed the face of the Zionist map. The leaders of the Labor movement in Israel established strong ties with pioneers from Poland, thus making the Halutz a cross-border movement, connecting Jews by means of politics, nationalism and socialism.

Therapeutics and Salvation: Freud and Schelling on Freedom proposes a new conceptual perspective on the history of the philosophy of freedom. The book focuses on Sigmund Freud’s theory of freedom, and its fundamental, yet uncharted, connection with the groundbreaking philosophy of the unconscious of F.W.J Schelling. The analysis radically challenges conventional liberal and rationalistic conceptions of freedom in psychoanalysis. The main argument of the book is that Freud formulated his theory of human nature with Schelling’s basic philosophical architecture, in particular Schelling’s concept of freedom, but, at the same time, subverted Schelling’s search for a new theology at the end of the latter's philosophical career. The detailed comparison of Freud’s work with the philosophy of Schelling backtracks a momentous shift from Schelling’s late theo-philosophy, at the endpoint of German Idealism, to the secular system of Freud, in which human reality ousted godly revelation and therapeutics replaced divine salvation. By delineating the move from Schelling’s God-subject relations to Freud’s human-subject relations, the book offers a new perspective on the historical evolution of German Idealism into modern secular thought.

Chronicle of French and Ottoman Kings was written by a sixteenth-century Jewish doctor of Spanish origin living in Italy. According to the writer, his intention was to document the hardships and injustices suffered by Jews in the Diaspora - especially the expulsion of Jews from Spain and France - and include them in the history of the conflict between the French kinds and Ottoman Empire over the rule in "the land of Judea and Jerusalem." In effect, this is a story, set in chronological order, of selected events in world history, similar in structure and content to hundreds of writings published at the time. It was written in fine biblical Hebrew, and as such was aimed at an audience who knew the language and could appreciate the conflict between the French kings and the Ottoman Empire as representing world history.

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. ‎