The essay Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles , first published in 1758, was written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a response to the essay Geneva by Jean d'Alembert which appeared in the Encyclopédie. d'Alembert proposed to establish a theatre in Geneva. Rousseau opposed the idea, arguing that the move would harm the city’s delicate social fabric.

The Carved Wooden Torah Arks found in eastern Europe from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries were magnificent structures, unparalleled in their beauty and mystical significance. The work of Jewish artisans, they dominated the synagogues of numerous towns both large and small throughout the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, inspiring worshipers with their monumental scale and intricate motifs. Virtually none of these superb pieces survived the devastation of the two world wars. Bracha Yaniv’s pioneering work therefore breathes new life into a lost genre, making it accessible to scholars and students of Jewish art, Jewish heritage, and religious art more generally. Making use of hundreds of pre-war photographs housed in local archives, she develops a vivid portrait of the history and artistic development of these arks, the scope and depth of her meticulous research successfully compensating for the absence of physical remains. In this way she has succeeded in producing a richly illustrated and comprehensive overview of a classic Jewish religious art form. Professor Yaniv’s analysis of the historical context in which these arks emerged includes a broad survey of the traditions that characterized the local workshops of Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. She also provides a detailed analysis of the motifs carved into the Torah arks and explains their mystical significance, among them representations of Temple imagery and messianic themes—and even daring visual metaphors for God. Fourteen arks are discussed in particular detail, with full supporting documentation; appendices relating to the inscriptions on the arks and to the artisans’ names will further facilitate future research. This seminal work throws new light on long-forgotten traditions of Jewish craftsmanship and religious understanding.

The book includes articles, documentation and a catalog of the Ethnographic Department of the Museum of the Contemporary. It is the fruit of a long-term project carried out at the Mamuta Art and Research Center and curated by the Sala-Manca Group. It contains articles by Yoram Bilu, Rachel Elior, Freddie Rokem and Diego Rotman on the Dybbuk; by Galit Hasan-Rokem and Daphna Ben-Shaul on Sukkot, and on the Eternal Sukkah project; by Shalom Sabar on electric Shabbat candles, and by Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman on different art projects. The book also includes documentation of artworks and a project by Itamar Mendes-Flohr, Yeshaiahu Rabinowtz, Ktura Manor, Hannan Abu Huseein, Reuven Zehavi, Sala-Manca, Samuel Rotman, Shira Borer, Nir Yahalom, Chen Cohen, Pessi Komar, Adi Kaplan, and Shahar Carmel, among others.

Entremses are short, comic theatrical performances which usually appeared between acts in a longer comedy in 16th and 17th century Spain. Miguel de Cervantes was a gifted and creative Entremses playwright, who placed social moral conflicts in the centre of his works.

Dr. Amitai Mendelsohn investigates the various appearances of the figure of Jesus in Israeli art as a significant, multifaceted and ever-present phenomenon. Through works by prominent artists from different generations, it discusses in depth the evolving attitudes of Jewish, Zionist pre-state, and Israeli art towards Jesus, from the second half of the nineteenth century until today: from artists laboring "In the shadow of the Cross" to artists who saw Jesus as a symbol of the rebirth of the Jewish people in the land of Israel, and artists whose engagement with Jesus is detached from the complex and fraught relations between Christianity and Judaism, and who see him as symbolizing the suffering artist. The book examines the different directions taken by Israeli artists in portraying the figure of Jesus, and proves the extent of this phenomena and its ever present importance.

Dr. Amitai Mendelsohn investigates the various appearances of the figure of Jesus in Israeli art as a significant, multifaceted and ever-present phenomenon. Through works by prominent artists from different generations, it discusses in depth the evolving attitudes of Jewish, Zionist pre-state, and Israeli art towards Jesus, from the second half of the nineteenth century until today: from artists laboring "In the shadow of the Cross" to artists who saw Jesus as a symbol of the rebirth of the Jewish people in the land of Israel, and artists whose engagement with Jesus is detached from the complex and fraught relations between Christianity and Judaism, and who see him as symbolizing the suffering artist. The book examines the different directions taken by Israeli artists in portraying the figure of Jesus, and proves the extent of this phenomena and its ever present importance.

Pygmalion was claimed by Shaw to be a didactic drama about phonetics, and its antiheroic hero, Henry Higgins, is a phonetician, but the play is a humane comedy about love and the English class system. The play is about the training Higgins gives to a Cockney flower girl to enable her to pass as a lady and is also about the repercussions of the experiment’s success.

The Erudite Comedy introduces the Hebrew reader to three saucy Italian comedies. These comic gems were written in the first quarter of the 16th century, the period in which Western classical theatre was reborn. Each of them possesses unique historical and artistic values: Ludovico Ariosto’s ‘La Cassaria’ (1508) is well-known as ‘The first modern play’; Bernardo Dovizi’s ‘La Calandra’ (1513) is remarkable for its ingenious plot, bold erotic allusions and surprisingly feminist soliloquies; Niccolo Machiavelli’s ‘Clizia’ (1525) contains autobiographical elements, reflecting the aging Renaissance genius’ love affair with a well-known young courtesan .

The papers collected in this volume represent the proceedings of a May 2011 conference organized by the 2008–2011 research group on ‘The Interpretive Imagination: Connections between Religion and Art in Jewish Culture in Its Contexts’ at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center for Jewish Studies—a center that owes its existence to the vision and the generosity of the Mandel Foundation. The four undersigned editors of this volume, all professors at the Hebrew University, were the senior members of the group, which also included five younger scholars: Dr. Yonatan Benarroch, Dr. Irina Chernetsky, Anat Danziger, Dr. Vered Madar, and Tehila Mishor. In its research and activities, the group attempted an integrated examination of the religious and the artistic, and of their aesthetic, experiential, and interpretive aspects—and the present volume exemplifies the work which was carried out during the years at Scholion. The subjects in this title: Singing with the Sirens: Probing the Boundaries of Interpretation Sabba-Yanuka and Enoch-Metatron as James Hillman’s Senex-Puer Archetype: a Post-Jungian Inquiry into a Zoharic Myth The Vision of Florence as a New Rome: Some Rhetorical and Visual Aspects Authority and Its Discontent in 17th Century Amsterdam Jewry: Fin-de-Siècle Visual Interpretations Communities of Voice at Times of Twilight: Real and Imagined Spaces of Sound among Central European Jews at the Opening and Closing of the Gates Religion on the Opera Stage: Source of Conflict, Possibility for Reconciliation Allegory, Excess, Stuttering: On the Reading of Kafka’s Writing Machine A Permanent Shadow: Ilse Aichinger and Franz Kafka ‘Deus ex Machina’ in the Modern Theatre: From Brecht’s Threepenny Opera to the ‘plumpes Denken’ of Walter Benjamin Listening and Exegesis in a Women’s Vocal Community Agnon’s Biblical Ethnographies: “Edo and Enam” and the Quest for the Ultimate Song

Two Plays by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: The Bathes of Algeria The Great Sultana Dona Catalina de Oviedo A bilingual book in Spanish and Hebrew. Full symmetry of meter and Rhyme of both languages.