In 1980, the Italian publisher Einaudi wanted to publish a series of personal anthologies of its authors. Primo Levi quickly arose to the challenge and submitted La ricerca delle radici ( The Search for Roots ): thirty excerpts from thirty masterpieces of world literature, accompanied by thirty short introductions he wrote. Every such introduction is a brilliant commentary on the work, and a reflection of Primo Levi himself - as a kind of self-portrait, in which the painter produces his collage from materials created by others. These excepts - published for the first time in Hebrew - reveal some of the important ethical and aesthetic influences on Primo Levi and his work. Levi quotes from Job, Lucretius, Rabelais‏, Babel, Shalom Aleichem, de Saint-Exupéry and more, but also from Darwin's On Origin of Species and even from Practical Organic Chemistry. Thus, it is possible to trace his extensive and diverse, humanistic and scientific education, the roots from which his unique literary work grew.

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 collection presents short stories by Yiddish writers who worked in Israel and wrote about it. The stories chosen and translated into Hebrew especially for this book unfold a fascinating mosaic, a synthesis between the literary traditions of Yiddish in Eastern Europe and America and the Israeli language, landscape, characters, and world of images; Between the Jewish home that was destroyed in the Holocaust and the formulating reality in Israel. Yiddish fiction written in Israel confronts the reader with the kibbutz and the urban landscape, Holocaust survivors and Sabars, Arabs, Bedouins, and Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and all over the world. The stories can also be read as an expression of the changes that took place in Israel, from the establishment of the state to the Lebanon War and the first Intifada, from the waves of mass immigration of the Mizrahim and of Holocaust survivors and their settlement in "abandoned villages" to the immigration of Soviet Union Jews in the 1990s.

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.

The collective memory is not an innocent conduit carrying the cargo of the "authentic" past into the present, but a subject of constant struggle between different social forces, which have their own history. The discourse of the Holocaust in Israel has also undergone several incarnations during the last decades that reflected the complex interrelationship between "silence" and speech and the various tensions between private memories and collective memory. In this pioneering book - What Shall We Tell the Little Ones? - Yaakova Sacerdoti examines how Holocaust literature for preschoolers developed in light of the recurring questions on this topic over the years: Is it right to expose children to these horrific events of the past? And if so, how can the indescribable be described? The book examines these questions by describing over thirty children's books about the Holocaust, published since the beginning of the 1990s. Thus, Sacerdoti tries to reveal the literary and poetic techniques - both textual and visual - that children's writers used to try to circumvent the difficulties involved in conveying the experiences of the Holocaust to preschoolers.

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.

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.

Identity and Its Discontents is an intellectual, gothic journey, which explores and interprets for the readers the personal story and thought of fourteen "marginal Jews", Jewish intellectuals from a variety of disciplines who lived in Europe from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Jacob Golomb does a good job of describing the twisted Jewish-European identity of these spiritual giants in the face of the fractured European humanist ideal. The book is structured as a fabric created from the intersecting stories of key thinkers who left a singular intellectual mark on the twentieth century and the shaping of Jewish consciousness in it - from Kafka to Freud, from Bruno Schulz to Gensin, from Ahad Ha'am to Berdichevsky, from Herzl and Nordau to Martin Buber and Zeev Jabotinsky, and from Stefan Zweig to Primo Levi. The original key that Golomb offers to understanding the mechanisms of the identity construction of the "fringe Jews" is the attitude of these thinkers to the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, and the ways in which this illuminates the question of identity politics and the internal struggle in modern Judaism between nationalism and universal humanism. Identity in Discomfort is the fruit of the author's many years of important research work on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and their acception in Hebrew literature and thought. Prof. Hagi Kenaan

In his autobiography, Abraham Halevi Fraenkel describes growing up as an Orthodox Jew in Germany and his development as a mathematician at the beginning of the twentieth century. In his memoir, originally published in German in 1967, Fraenkel painted a unique picture of the complexity of Jewish life in Germany with special emphasis on the developments in the Orthodox community. He described the world of mathematics in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, in the context of the great mathematicians he met, many of whom were Jews or had Jewish roots. In his personal life, Fraenkel merged the worlds of orthodox Judaism, liberal Zionism and mathematics, in a period of global and national upheavals, which included the two World Wars and the establishment of the State of Israel. The last chapter of the book, which describes his extensive public activity in Israel from the 1930s until his death in 1965, was written by Prof. Jiska Cohen-Mansfield. Introductions were added by Prof. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel and Prof. Menachem Magidor, the former president of the Hebrew University.

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.