Preludes is the story of the composer and conductor Noam Sheriff (1935-2018), whose life was dedicated to art and music almost from the moment he could think of it. In the first person Sheriff recounts a personal initiation story, which begins in the small Tel Aviv of the days of the British Mandate and the divided Jerusalem of the first years of the State of Israel, followed by the most renown and magnificent concert halls in Israel and around the world. In doing so, he describes some of the personalities who stood at the heart of world of music: Leonard Bernstein, Gary Bartini, Paul Ben-Haim, Arik Einstein and others. This is a story of pioneering musical activity, part of an enterprise of building Israeli culture. This is also the story of an artist who, looking back from a sober, unapologetic and unselfish perspective - recounts his achievements, doubts and personal and artistic choices.

When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfill Kafka’s last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted his life to championing Kafka’s work, rescuing his legacy from both obscurity and physical destruction. Nearly a century later, an international legal battle erupted to determine which country could claim ownership: the Jewish state, where Kafka dreamed of living, or Germany, where Kafka’s three sisters perished in the Holocaust? Benjamin Balint offers a gripping account of the controversial trial in Israeli courts—brimming with dilemmas legal, ethical, and political—that determined the fate of Kafka’s manuscripts.

According to the conventional understanding, the ultimate goal of Zionism as a national political movement was the establishment of a nation-state. In his new book on the history of the Zionist political imagination from the beginning of the idea of modern Zionism to the establishment of the State of Israel, Dimitri Shomsky challenges a deterministic view by examining unknown writings by the founding fathers of Zionism and by re-examining the known sources, which were interpreted in a tendentious and ahistorical way in the classical literature on Zionism. The author reveals that the leaders of Zionism envisioned the realization of Jewish self-determination in the Land of Israel within a multinational framework. First, they envisioned an autonomous province in the multinational Ottoman Empire, and then - during the British Mandate - a multinational democracy. The book shows that the models of a Jewish state, which were established and developed by the founding fathers of the State of Israel, included recognition of a collective national existence of the Arabs of the Land of Israel. Such political patterns were not the property of marginal figures among Zionists (such as the "Brit Shalom" people), but on the contrary, were presented by the most mainstream Zionists: Yehuda Leib Pinsker, Benjamin Ze'ev Herzl, Ahad Ha'am, Ze'ev Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion. The book focuses on these five figures and presents them and their views in an innovative way, which is known to have an impact on contemporary Israeli discourse.

This book delves into the narrative of Fethullah Gülen and his movement, which essentially encapsulates the broader story of Turkey. The book explores the origins of this movement that undeniably left an unprecedented impact on Turkey, surpassing the influence of any preceding religious movement. This movement, centered around the figure of Gülen, born in 1938, gained prominence mainly during the 1990s when it unfurled its banner of inter-religious tolerance. Gülen actively advocated for the establishment of a global network of schools and even universities, aiming to cultivate a new generation of devout Muslims who were educated and inclined towards Western ideals. By the late 1990s, Gülen's health issues led him to relocate to the United States, ostensibly. With the ascent of the AKP party to power, connections burgeoned between the movement's members and the party, particularly its leader Erdoğan. This mutually beneficial relationship faced turbulence at the onset of the second decade of the 2000s, culminating in the attempted religious coup in 2016, during which Gülen and his movement were accused. Subsequently, Gülen emerged as the foremost adversary of Turkey, rendering his return to the country implausible.This book illuminates the intricacies of the Gülenist movement and endeavors to unravel the persona of its leader. The text delves into the origins of the Gülenist movement, its underlying ideology, and its enduring significance within Turkey. By employing comprehensive research techniques and utilizing archival materials in various languages Dr. Aviv provides insight in an objective as possible way into the dynamic interplay between religion and state in Turkey, as well as the ascent and decline of religious movements within the nation.

It is not an easy task to find in any creative field a person who is both an original and groundbreaking artist and a profound thinker-interpreter, who is well versed in the broad scope of the entire culture. Such is Michael Gurevitch – the playwright of "Happiness", "A Fleeting Shadow", "A Word of Love" and "The Dragon's Beloved" (out of more than eighteen plays) – who presented new, local and extremely challenging concepts about the context of a theatre play within the contemporary Israeli existence. Gurevitch designs a new local theatrical language in his plays and in the way he directs. He is an unforgettable director of classics such as "The King's Clothes" by Nissim Aloni, "Life is a Dream" by Calderón de la Barca, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" by Shakespeare, "Uncle Vanya" by Chekhov or "War on the House" by Aristophanes (adaptation by Ilan Hatsor). His theatrical insights are interwoven to the most contemporary Israeli issues without so much as a sensational wink. His theater is a "passing shadow" in the full sense of the word because it is based on one-time work with certain actors, at certain moments in their lives, and in the life of the country at a certain moment, and for that reason it is profoundly unique to theater alone, because it lives only when it is actually performed, hence it is poignant and unforgettable. Gurevitch was born (1951) and raised in Tel Aviv. He lived, breathed and studied local and international theater all his life, but his main strength is in the depths of the emotional, involving his childhood, his parents and his unique personality. In Two Children in The Field: Reflections on Theatre and Life Gurevitch manages to refine, from his rich experience, a series of lucid insights on the relation between theatrical conceptions and the contexts from which they stem.

The articles compiled in this volume are studies by Jacob (Kobi) Metzer, which examine economic and political-economy issues in the Mandate era and the State of Israel. Most of the studies were originally published in scholarly journals and collected volumes in English. Their revision and publication in Hebrew under one volume is aimed at making them more accessible to the Israeli readership. The book consists of nine chapters, grouped into three parts. The first part includes four chapters that present the main socio-economic attributes of the Arab and Jewish populations during the Mandate period and examine them in broad comparative frameworks. The three chapters of the second part take up ethno-national aspects of land and settlement in Mandatory Palestine and Israel, and analyze them in comparative perspective. The third part deals with patterns of immigration and employment of Jews as individuals. It contains two chapters. One documents the socio-demographic profile of the immigrants to Palestine in the first decade of the British Mandate, and compares it with the international migration of the time. The other chapter examines comparatively the patterns of Jewish self-employment in the Diaspora and in Mandatory Palestine and Israel, from the early twentieth century onward.

Despite many decades of research, we seem to linger in a state of confusion regarding what leadership is and if or how it might be cultivated. The book offers a new perspective on leadership, whereby what defines leadership is not one’s position or successful conduct but action of a certain kind. More specifically, leadership is about realizing the human potential to think, create or act outside the boundaries of what is known and safe in order to serve the greater good. What distinguishes “acts of leadership” is that they take place in a sphere of ambiguity and uncertainty. As such, acts of leadership are essentially risky, bold and adventurous. Obstacles and opponents are to be expected and no measure of success can be guaranteed. By placing leadership in its unique sphere of action, we realize that widely accepted prescriptions for rational or sensible conduct do not apply and that relying on them may shut us down before we even begin. We further appreciate that such acts exemplify “action” in its deepest sense: what we choose to do as free individuals in an uncertain universe, and how we do it, is a self-defining act; it makes us who we are.

Tens of thousands of intellectuals - refugees, displaced people, voluntary immigrants and emissaries - have left their homeland in modern times and moved to other countries in Europe and overseas. In a world-wide panorama, Peter Burke describes the important figures in the great waves of immigration since the fifteenth century: starting with the Greeks who came to Italy following the conquest of Byzantium by the Ottomans and ending with those fleeing from the Bolsheviks, the Fascists and the Nazis in the twentieth century. The migrations in the early modern period were mostly for religious reasons - for example, the Jews and Moriscos from the Iberian Peninsula, the Huguenots (French Calvinists) following the cancellation of the Edict of Nantes, and Catholics from Protestant countries. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, the migrations were mainly due to racial persecution and political and ideological reasons. Exiles and Expatriates in the History of Knowledge clarifies the difficulties of the scholars to integrate in the host countries and the choice between assimilation and seclusion in the expatriate community. But mainly he came to point out the enormous contribution of expatriates and immigrants to the creation of new knowledge and its dissemination, not only in immigration countries such as the United States and Israel, but in the entire world - from China in the East to Brazil in the West. Burke especially discusses the contribution of scholars in the humanities and social sciences: historians, researchers of the history of art and literature, philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists. Besides academics who managed to integrate into universities in the host countries, there were also other cultural mediators: printers and publishers, translators, merchants who settled for many years in distant lands, missionaries and scholars who were invited to the courts of rulers who sought to advance their country to modernity. The damage caused by the "brain drain" from the countries of origin eclipsed the gains produced by the world of knowledge as a whole: liberation from provincialism, bridging traditions, mutual fertilization. The detailed review in Peter Burke's book, which was written in 2015 as a warning against Brexit (Britain's exit from the European Union), is intended to convey a very important message even today: the reception of immigrants and refugees enriches the local and global culture and is the main antidote against the depletion of the spirit and narrow horizons.

Yaakov Shabtai is best known for his path-breaking novel Zichron Devarim (1977; translated into English as Past Continuous ), one of the most important works of prose in Hebrew if not in world literature due to its original structure. Shabtai discovered his gift for the theater in his twenties, and moved from Kibbutz Merchavia to Tel Aviv where he made his living authoring and translating plays and writing songs for entertainment evenings. In 1972 he published a collection of short stories entitled Uncle Peretz Takes Off . His novel-memoire Sof Davar (1984; Past Perfect ) was published posthumously. This biography interweaves a detailed description of Shabtai's life, his ideological evolution, and an analysis of his difficult path to literary achievement. His plays, though considered mediocre by some, emerge as essential for the crystallization of his novels.

The book seeks to examine Trust as a culture-dependant concept, offers a definintion for it, places it within a general framework of the pair of the Overt and the Hidden, and characterises it within Arabic-speaking Islamic culture. The book reviews the expressions of trust in a variety of fields in Arabic-speaking Islamic cultures, distills from them their common principles, compares them to their counterparts in Western cultures, chiefly American, and makes suggestions for making decision about it.

In recent years, information technology has become a significant factor in public policy, whether as an area in which to pursue policy, as a tool for implementing policy, or as a reflection on the social environment in which policy is shaped. The aim of this edited collection of articles is to present to the academic and general public a vivid updated picture of the relationship between the spread of the use of various information technologies and the design and operation of public policy. This is the first book in Hebrew to shed light on the changes taking place in public policy in the 21st century as a result of new techno-social processes. The collection includes articles written by researchers from various fields of knowledge: communications, law, education, political science, and public policy. The diversity of knowledge bases, theoretical frameworks, and research methods allows for a comprehensive and complex discussion of the relationships between information technology and public policy. These relationships raise several key issues discussed in the articles included in the edited collection. The first issue is that information technologies are a new area of public policy, and as such, these technologies and their distribution create multiple challenges for the state as designer and regulator of its citizens' living environment. A second issue concerns the penetration of information technologies into the field of civic participation in policymaking and policy implementation. The wide distribution of social networks, as well as the assembly and analysis of big data are being used to reshape the civil participation environment. A third issue relates to the fact that information technologies are resources in their own right in democratic processes in general, and in policy design in particular. For example, significant parts of the public debate on a variety of policy topics take place through social networks, which are privately owned by Internet platforms. Additionally, access to social networks and advanced technological capabilities can be seen as an important resource for influencing policymaking processes.

This is the ninth volume of the series Judaica Latinoamericana , edited by AMILAT – Israeli Association of Researchers of Latin American Jewry. It is based on studies presented at the Latin American Section of the Seventeenth World Congress of Jewish Studies (2017). Former volumes of the series may be accessed at http://amilat.online. The book is a multi-disciplinary collection of 23 articles – 19 in Spanish, two in Portuguese and two in English –in five thematic sections: Jewish communities – internal processes presents studies on identities, migrations and religion in Argentina and Mexico, as well as informal education and the history of a peripheral community in Chile. Migrations analyzes processes of migration, acculturation and integration in different periods in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and Mexico. Antisemitism, Shoah, Memory deals with Peruvian attempts to rescue Jews, silence and memory of the Holocaust in Mexico and Uruguay, as well as visual components of racism and memory in Cuba and Argentina. Zionism and the State of Israel analyzes Socialist Zionism in Uruguay and recent Brazilian policy toward the Middle East conflict. Literature presents a variety of topics, such as history of migration and post-migration literature, Shoah and exile, and contemporary Jewish literature in Argentina, Brazil and the US.