Sarah Schenirer is one of the unsung heroes of twentieth-century Orthodox Judaism. The Bais Yaakov schools she founded in interwar Poland had an unparalleled impact on a traditional Jewish society threatened by assimilation and modernity, educating a generation of girls to take an active part in their community. The movement grew at an astonishing pace, expanding to include high schools, teacher seminaries, summer programmes, vocational schools, and youth movements, in Poland and beyond; it continues to flourish throughout the Jewish diaspora. Naomi Seidman explores the movement through the tensions that characterized it, capturing its complexity as a revolution in the name of tradition. She presents the context which led to its founding, examining the impact of socialism, feminism, Zionism, and Polish electoral politics on the process, and recounts its history, from its foundation in interwar Kraków to its near-destruction in the Holocaust, and its role in the reconstruction of Orthodoxy in subsequent decades. A vivid portrait of Schenirer shines through. The book includes selections from her writings published in English for the first time. Her pioneering, determined character remains the subject of debate in a culture that still regards innovation, female initiative, and women’s Torah study with suspicion.

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.

The idea behind the book After the Bell: The World of Leisure for Children and Teenagers was born following a national case study, which was funded by the Chief Scientist of the Ministry of Education. Reviewing the literature for that study revealed a necessity for a comprehensive picture of children and adolescents' leisure world. This book was written to address this need. The uniqueness of the book lies in the fact that it combines theory, data and research findings from international and local settings related to children and adolescents. This book presents the essence of the literature regarding the nature of leisure, relevant theories, motives and factors that affect leisure choices, and perceptions of incentives and rewards obtained from participating in leisure activities. It concludes with a chapter on leisure education summarizing the knowledge on this topic as well as suggesting methods and means for effective leisure education. This book is intended for educational researchers, educators, student teachers, and school teachers. It is also suitable for decision-makers and educators in general as well as for anyone related to children and teenagers' well-being (e.g., educational counselors, social workers, psychologists, youth mentors, youth movement and community leaders).

Folk-culture is typically associated with continuity; how can one engage folk-culture in situations of destruction and extermination - the reality Zionist folklorists confronted facing the Shoah? With the first bits of information regarding the destruction in Europe, many of them assembled in Tel Aviv to form the Yeda Am folklore society; in tandem, the Institute for Jewish Folklore was formed in Jerusalem. The two competing organizations dealt with fragmentary lives in the Diaspora in different ways, in their quest to find new meanings from them. This book examines Zionist folkloristics at this dire hour from a perspective that views fractured reality as a fundamental principle in studying cultures in general, by combining approaches from folklore studies and science and technology studies. This book undermines the distinction between individualist scholarly knowledge and collective folklore by examining everyday scholarly habits: Archival practices, the use of letterheads, jubilee celebrations of scholars as well as practices of editing and laying out scholarly publications. The tension between national culture and ethnic cultures is revealed in new ways, as is the relationship between avant-garde and folklore studies.

Bearing Witness to the Witness examines the different methods of testimony given by trauma victims and the ways in which these can enrich or undermine the ability of the reader to witness them. Years of listening to both direct and indirect testimonies on trauma have lead Dana Amir to identify four modes of witnessing trauma: The “metaphoric mode”, the “metonymic mode,” the “excessive mode”, and the “Muselmann mode.” The author thus demonstrates the importance of testimony in understanding the nature of trauma, and therefore how to respond to trauma more generally in a clinical psychoanalytic setting. In order to follow these four modes of interaction with the traumatic memory, the various chapters of the book present a close reading of three genres of traumatic witnessing: Literary accounts by Holocaust survivors, memoirs (situated between autobiographic recollection and fiction) and ‘raw’ testimonies given by Holocaust survivors. Since every traumatic testimonial narrative contains a combination of all four modes with various shifts between them, it is of crucial importance to identify the singular combination of modes that characterize each traumatic narrative, focusing on the specific areas within which a shift occurs from one mode to another. Such a focus is extremely important, as illustrated and analysed throughout this book, to the rehabilitation of the psychic metabolic system which conditions the digestion of traumatic materials, allowing a metaphoric working through of traumatic zones that were so far only accessible to repetition and evacuation.

This first-of-its-kind book deals with education policy and administration, and sociology in the context of entrepreneurship in the education field as a new phenomenon. The book introduces recent empirical studies in the field, focusing on the Israeli education system, which examines the key issues in the field of entrepreneurship in education. The book creates a systematic and theory-based discourse on entrepreneurship in the education system, presenting a clear empirical context for the research fields surrounding the work of schools.

MA'ARAG: The Israel Annual of Psychoanalysis is a democratic forum for psychoanalytic research, practice, and criticism published through the initiative and cooperation of the Sigmund Freud Center for Study and Research in Psychoanalysis of the Hebrew University, Israeli Association for Self Psychology and the Study of Subjectivity, Israel Society for Analytical Psychology, Israel Psychoanalytic Society, Israel Institute for Group Analysis, Tel-Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and the Israel Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. This issue contains the following essays: Hila Elyakam and Devora Rosner-Wachs | THE ROLE OF THE BODY EN ROUTE TO BUILDING THE BIONIAN CONTAINER: INTEGRATING SOMATIC EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHODYNAMIC PYCHOTHERAPY Dana Amir | STUDIUM AND PUNCTUM IN PSYCHOANALYTIC WRITING Dana Amir | THE ‘NEWSPEAK’ OF THE PERPETRATOR: REFLECTIONS ON THE PHENOMENON OF SCREEN CONFESSIONS Dorit Ashur | FREUD AS “MIDWIFE TO THE SOUL”: THE RESTORATION OF MATERNAL SEMIOTIC PROFUSION IN H.D.’S ANALYSIS WITH FREUD Micha Weiss | ETHICAL PRESENCE IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC ENCOUNTER: APOLOGY AS A POSSIBILITY Naomi Teller | TWO POEMS: TO CONTAIN DESIRE Moshe Landau | ON TRANSFORMATION FROM CHAOS AND BECOMING TO RHYTHM AND MENTALIZATION, AND THE RHYTHM IN THE TRANSFORMATION PROCESS FROM ‘O’ TO ‘K’ Rivka Matzner | PSYCHOANALYTIC CONSIDERATIONS ON THE MEETING POINT BETWEEN THE LURIANIC CONCEPT OF “LIGHTS AND VESSELS” AND BION’S CONCEPT OF “CONTAINER-CONTAINED” Ruth Netzer | ‘LISTEN TO HER’: POEMS ON THE ANALYST-PATIENT RELATIONSHIP Gila Ofer, Batya Shoshani and Michael Shoshani | WHEN ONE PLUS ONE EQUALS ONE: THE VICISSITUDES OF CHOSING BETWEEN TRUTH AND BLINDNESS IN THE OEDIPAL MYTH, AND THE FILM “INCENDIES” Gal Kachman | SILENT GRAVES AND TRANSIENT LIFE: ON SUBJECTIVITY AND MELANCHOLY IN THE WRITINGS OF ABRAHAM AND TOROK Victor Rubinov | THE CAPACITY FOR SUBJECTIVITY Merav Roth | TEARING UP THE LETTER AND THE URGE TO GET RID OF THE OBJECT Alejandra Sternschein | MY LANGUAGE, MY SPEECH, AND MY EXPRESSION: REFLECTIONS ON MULTIPLE LANGUAGES IN THE PSYCHIC SPACE OF THE ANALYTIC PROCESS Ofer Shinar Levanon | BETWEEN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC AND THE ARTISTIC ENCOUNTER: REFLECTIONS ON THE SHARED WORK OF THE COMPOSER YONI RECHTER AND THE POETS AVRAHAM HALFI, DAHLIA RAVIKOVITCH AND ELI MOHAR