In his book History, Literature, Critical Theory (2013), the historian Dominique La Capra presented the ways in which the voice of the narrator in the 19th and 20th century novel came to a collapse, which reflects the modern traumatic experience. This study employs this theoretical prism in order to construct a cultural dimension of 20th century Jewish poetics - a dimension in which trauma is reflected in its linguistic representation, but also shapes this same representation. The book offers an understanding of Jewish literature in the 20th century as a far-reaching cultural experience, in which the human figure is not made possible by words, but rather collapses into the animal, the absence, the broken witness, the Muslim, the eastern, the Arab and the queer.

This is the first comprehensive introduction to India’s history and civilization in Hebrew. It reflects decades of teaching by both authors, often together, at the Hebrew University, as well as long periods of residence in India. The book is structured chronologically, from prehistoric times to the twenty-first century, and includes, within a historical framework, numerous anecdotes, stories, and poems never before translated into Hebrew. Taken together, these are meant to give the lay readers--backpackers, couch travelers, India lovers, and other curious minds - a savory taste of India’s rich cultural menu.

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 Hebrew Bible is the cornerstone of Judaism and Jewish culture; as such, it also provides the foundation for the other two monotheistic religions, Christianity and Islam. It is a book that embodied numerous revolutions, the most prominent of which was the Monotheistic Revolution, the replacement of polytheism with the belief in one all-powerful God who both created the world and governs it. Among the other revolutionary ideas that are put forward by the Bible we find the establishment of the Sabbath, the granting of one city — Jerusalem — a monopoly over holiness, the opposition to human kingship, and the moral dimensions of prophecy, to name just a few. Over the centuries and millennia, these revolutionary ideas have continued to attract and inspire readers, believers, interpreters and artists.

The book is concerned with the main trends in Jewish Liturgy during Late Antiquity and its connections and inter relations with Aramaic Targum, Midrash, mysticism, popular beliefs, structure and rhyme patterns as performed amid Late Antique Synagogues in Palestine, as well as the later spread of these fertile products to Southern Italy and then to the rest of Europe. The book discusses the different layers of poets and performers as presented in ancient manuscripts which were preserved in the Cairo Geniza collections and later in European Mahzorim, and the fascinating struggle of survival of the different liturgical cycles.

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.

Articles: Svetlana Natkovich | Maskil and the City: Representations of the Maskilic Subjectivity and Urban Habitus in the Literature of Russian Maskilim, 1862-1888 Natasha Gordinsky | ‘Sideways from Moscow: Uri Nissan Gnessin’s Provincial Writing’ Dina Berduchewsky | Brenner’s London as a Crossroads in the Story of Early Hebrew Modernism Lilach Nethanel | Literary Modernism: The Retreat. Shklov by Zalman Shneour Allison Schachter | Elisheva Bikhovksy’s Novel Side-Streets Representing a Non-national, Minority Hebrew Culture Rafi Tsirkin-Sadan | The Curse of the Forbidden City: Haim Lensky’s St. Petersburg Sonatas and the Images of St. Petersburg in Russian and Hebrew Literature Maya Barzilai | The Lost German City: Berlin of Leah Goldberg

Articles: Yona Sabar | Grandpa Ephraim and Grandpa Menashe: Two Opposite Characters, Based on Personal and Communal Childhood Memories Dov Cohen | ‘The Holy Island of Chios’: New Findings Concerning the Purported Burial Place of R. YaꜤakov ben Asher (BaꜤal Ha-Turim) on the Island of Chios and Pilgrimages to His Gravesite Itamar Drori | Rabbi Israele Costa’s ‘Miḳweh Yisrael’ (1851): The Beginning of the Adapted Jewish Story for Youth Carmela Abdar | Reflections on Magical Texts on Jewelry and Amulets of Jewish Women and Children from Yemen and Habban Tom Fogel | JaꜤle – Yemenite Nostalgia in a Jerusalem Café Jacqueline Laznow | ‘I Recognized the Holidays According to the Food’: Tradition and Memory in the Jewish Community of Argentina Reviews: Eli Yassif | The First Book of Jewish Jokes: The Collection of L. M. Büschenthal, ed. Elliott Oring, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018 Dudu Rotman | Vered Tohar, The Book of Tales, Sermons and Legends. Anthology of Hebrew Stories from the Print Era: An Annotated Edition, Tel Aviv: Hakibbuz Hameuchad 2017, 201 pp.

In his article entitled "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness", David Chalmers divides the study of consciousness into two parts: the easy problems and the hard problems. The easy problems are those related to neurological/functional/cognitive processes. In contrast, the hard problem is the study of consciousness which is related to the subjective experience. In recent decades brain researchers have joined the race to understand consciousness. Most of them adopt an approach according to which any advance made in the study of neurological activity is also an advance in the study of consciousness. I contend that the gap between brain activities and the subjective experience cannot be bridged, among other things because consciousness is not confined within the brain. This book hence proposes that consciousness extends from the brain to the body and from only from there does it burst forth into the world. One of the book’s main arguments is that the world itself serves as our best model, without any need for representation or a central control system within our brains. Therefore, to better understand the subjective experience we must examine how human beings are present and act within the world.

Many Voices in the Prose of Shulamith Hareven by Yael Balaban is the first book-size monograph dedicated to Hareven’s oeuvre. It offers for the first time a deep understanding of Hareven’s fiction, including her early short stories, City of Many Days, and Thirst – the Desert Trilogy . Hareven’s unique voice has been missed by contemporary critics, as both her ideas and her poetics were ahead of her time: She wrote about sexual abuse long before the subject ever entered public discourse; wrote about the “second generation” of Holocaust survivors before the term was established; and created Mizrahi and Arab characters very different from the stereotypic characters in contemporary Hebrew literature. It is time to re-read Shulamith Hareven’s work and discover beautiful stories suffused with moral and social sensitivity and a profound commitment to language and literature .

16 October 1943 is one of the most intense, troubling and spectacular works ever written on a single event in the Holocaust of Europe's Jews. This text embodies a stylistic combination of almost real-time journalism, powerful poetic and emotional literature and a profound philosophical essay on the Nazi's behavioral patterns. Giacomo Debenedetti, a distinguished Jewish-Italian author, journalist, and literary critic and theorist describes in 16 October 1943 the terrors of the raid of the Ghetto of Rome. The story (for it is first and foremost a story) unfolds, with piercing, terrifying language, the deportation of one Jewish community within the Nazi extermination mechanism.