Examining the convergence of cafés, their urban milieu, and Jewish creativity, Shachar Pinsker shows how cafés anchored a silk road of modern Jewish culture. He uncovers a network of interconnected cafés that were central to the modern Jewish experience in a time of migration and urbanization, from Odessa, Warsaw, Vienna, and Berlin to New York City, Tel Aviv, as well as cities in the Arab world. A Rich Brew explores the Jewish culture created in these social spaces, drawing on a vivid collection of newspaper articles, memoirs, archival documents, photographs, caricatures, and artwork, as well as stories, novels, and poems in many languages set in cafés. Pinsker shows how Jewish modernity was born in the café, nourished, and sent out into the world by way of print, politics, literature, art, and theater. What was experienced and created in the space of the coffeehouse touched thousands who read, saw, and imbibed a modern culture that redefined what it meant to be a Jew in the world.

Atlas of East Galilee Caves is published in a challenging period for the Upper Galilee, with hopes for a swift return to routine in this beautiful and region, bountiful with caves. The Atlas is published following studies and surveys conducted over the past decades. The boundaries of the area defined in the Atlas are the Hula Valley in the east, the border of Lebanon in the north and northwest, the sources of the streams flowing eastward in the west and the Issachar highlands in the south. The Atlas presents the basic data of the caves, and contains a concise multidisciplinary overview of what is known about them from a geological, historical, archaeological and biological point of view. The data is accompanied by plans and illustrations that expand the overall picture of each cave.

How might a poem acquire divine forgiveness? Ariel Zinder’s book Arise and Sing follows medieval Jewish poets from Iraq and al-Andalus as they seek answers to this pressing question. The book presents close readings of liturgical poems (piyyutim) written in the 10th and 11th centuries, and brings them into contact with contemporary literary theory as well as modern philosophical discussions of the possibility of forgiveness.

In 1925, teacher David Idelson shared a pivotal insight with his colleague Yehuda Polani, reflecting on their educational endeavors in Tel Aviv: 'We were the novelty!' Both had migrated to Jerusalem from Germany in 1905 and were united by a vision for innovative Jewish education, inspired by cutting-edge Central European pedagogical methods. This journey from theory to practice reached its peak in 1922 with the founding of a distinctive school in Tel Aviv, promoting autonomy for teachers and child-led learning. The Children Community School stands as one of four key studies in this book, examining significant themes in the educational discourse in pre-state Israel and the formation of Hebrew education. The work delves into important milestones in the history of Hebrew education spanning more than half a century: the revival of the Hebrew language; building Hebrew teacher training; pedagogical innovation and its relationship with political ideologies; and the role of Eros in education. This historical perspective offers valuable insights, pertinent to ongoing educational debates.

After four volumes primarily focused on the British Mandate period, the fifth volume of the History of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem series delves into the first two decades of the State of Israel: 1948–1967. This comprehensive and diverse volume explores the intricate relationship between the university and the nation-state. The 1948 war and the “sovereign turn” sharply altered the university's status from an institution of higher education under British rule to an institution pertaining to an independent state. The university of the Jewish people, located on Mount Scopus, became an Israeli university with campuses scattered across a divided Jerusalem. Bringing together articles by senior and early-career researchers, this volume analyzes the university's history between rupture and continuity, as an autonomous institution strongly tied to the establishment of the state. It examines the university within its external geo-political context on one hand and considers its internal structure as a research and teaching institution on the other. Editorial assistance: Amit Levy

Kobez Al Yad , an annual of the Mekize Nirdamim Society, is a forum for the publication from manuscript sources of ancient texts in Jewish studies that are shorter than book-length. The articles in this issue: Omri Livnat | From Masorah to Poetry, from Poetry to Masorah: on Saadia Gaon’s ‘Ohel Mekhon Binyanay’ Simcha Emanuel | A Collection of Laws from the German ' Genizah' Amir Boas | Kodesh Kodashim – An Annotated Critical Edition with an Introduction Noam Lev-El | ’Questions to the Sages of the Land of Israel’: Kabbalistic Responsa from the Mid-Sixteenth Century—Introduction and Edition

This is the story of an adventurous journey into a magical, unknown and incomprehensible world where nature is alive and has a psyche, including trees. Do trees have a spirit? Does a tree have a soul? Scientists may question the notion that trees have a mind, soul or spirit, but there are cultures where trees have a soul and a mind of their own. The book describes the mind-blowing experience of entry into a world of spirits and trees, a world of animism – the field of anthropology that ascribes a psyche to all natural elements. Written in the form of travel log accompanied by illustrations, the book reveals the wisdom and sensitivities of villagers in northern Burma, who opened their home, their trees and their hearts to the author, allowing him to touch and understand their beliefs, and through them understand his own self.

The book contains the first-ever Hebrew translation of a collection of medieval Arabic stories, entitled The Hundred and One Nights . The chapters of the book deal with a variety of issues, for instance, the work’s origins and history, extant versions and manuscripts, language, material culture, poetics, the ideas and themes reflected in the stories, and Jewish background elements that can occasionally be discerned in some of the stories.

Although rabbinic compilations were composed hundreds of years after the destruction of the Second Temple, and despite differences in language, genre, and cultural setting, Dynamics of Midrashic Traditions seeks to demonstrate that both corpora preserve a common heritage, albeit replete with conflicting traditions and polemics. The integrative study carried out in this book sheds light on both corpora, paying special attention to the dynamics that shape and reshape the midrashic traditions throughout their transmission. The book deals with exegetical aspects incorporated in textual variants of the Bible, in Second Temple Literature (especially the "rewritten Bible", Sirach, Book of Jubilees, the Dead Sea scrolls, Hellenistic Jewish works, Philo of Alexandria), as well as passages of Paul and early Christian writers, scrutinizing them in tandem with parallels from rabbinic literature, Targum and ancient piyyutim . Among the themes discussed are the following: the knowledge of good and evil given to Adam; Abraham the monotheist; Moses’s death; Pesher and allegoristic interpretation; and halakhic issues in rabbinic literature and the Dead Sea scrolls. Table of Contents in English

The fourth volume of Meḥqerei Talmud published on behalf of the Department of Talmud at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is dedicated to Professor David Rosenthal on the occasion of his eightieth jubilee. Professor David Rosenthal is one of the leading researchers of the Mishnah and the Talmud , and his research also encompasses diverse bordering fields. In his bright studies and his captivating teaching, he produced countless brilliant and pulsating innovations. Some of them, which constitute the core of Talmud research, changed research concepts and set the research agenda with basic questions. Prof. Rosenthal, together with his colleagues, edited the series Meḥqerei Talmud from its inception in 1959. The articles in the collection are the fruit of the research of his colleagues and students, in his main fields of activity and in bordering fields.

The Rebellion of the Daughters reveals for the first time the phenomenon of young Jewish women from Orthodox families escaping their homes in Krakow and its surroundings at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. In extreme cases, hundreds of these young women sought refuge in a convent in Krakow and converted to Catholicism there, and in other cases they sought to exercise their right to higher education, including at a university that recently opened its doors to women. The book relies on an abundance of archival documents, including police and court investigations, correspondence and memos of government ministries as well as personal letters, press reports and literary works, including the well-known story "Tehila" by S.Y. Agnon. Through all of these, the stories of three of the young women who run away are reconstructed and the background to their escape is revealed, the struggle of their families in trying to bring them back to their home, and the stormy discussions that the phenomenon of the Rebellious girls provoked in Jewish society in its various guises. The last part of the book describes how the crisis of rebellious girls later motivated Sarah Schnirer, a young woman from Krakow, to establish an afternoon school for girls, an institution that provided girls with religious education in a formal framework and later developed into the Beit Ya'akov educational chain.

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.