A letter written during the destruction of the communities of Galicia in the spring of 1943 by Solomea Ochs, née Luft, found among the possessions of a Wehrmacht general and later featured in an exhibition in contemporary Berlin, transforms in the hands of historian Ram Ben-Shalom into a wide-ranging documentary novel. Solomea's letter, in her own handwriting, describes not only the horrors of the massacre and extermination but also touches on the depths of humiliation and devastation felt by the Jews kneeling before their killers. This is the voice of mighty force of nature that has been silenced; something stronger than poetry and lamentation, even if it will surely be remembered alongside the great Jewish laments of the Middle Ages and Bialik's "Upon the Slaughter." Ram Ben-Shalom discovered that this letter is none other than a letter from his aunt to her family before her murder, and that the letter was kept in the drawer of his father's desk at their home in Tel Aviv. From here, a complex search journey emerged, with surprising dimensions that accumulate into a picture of distinctly epic proportions. With craftsmanship, Ben-Shalom weaves a story that is at once a poetics of life, a cultural critique, and an unparalleled delicate analysis of the depths of the selfhood of Israeli Judaism.

The Hebrew University campuses are not just buildings and lawns. They are a huge museum, where walls are paintings, sculptures are stories, and every work of art invites the viewer to a conversation. Art at the Hebrew University is present not only physically, but also in spirit. Art at HUJI presents eighty-three artworks selected from the thousands of pieces on display at the Hebrew University – on the lawns and in enclosed spaces – ranging from well-known works by Henry Moore and Yigal Tumarkin to hidden gems by Marina Abramović and Sigalit Landau. The book is an invitation to embark on a journey through time and discover the stories behind each piece, the artists who created them, and the way in which art has influenced the university. Art at HUJI weaves a dialogue between the works of art displayed at the university and its academic faculty, students, and employees. Inspired by Plato's dialogues, these individuals were invited to choose one work that spoke to them and write about it. Each work featured in this book is accompanied by these reflections, alongside commentary written by the editor of the book and curator of the university, Dr. Michal Mor.

The eighty-four years of Zalman Shazer, the third president of the State of Israel (1889-1974), encompass the great drama of Jewish life from the end of the nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century: the growth of the national and cultural movement in Eastern Europe and the Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel, and the establishment of the state and the struggle for its security and beauty. Along Shazer's journey he encountered famous figures such as Berel Katznelson, David Ben-Gurion, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and his three great loves: Rachel Katznelson, Rachel the poet and Golda Meir. Who was this man? A Hasid who disguised himself as a secularist or a secularist who became a Chabad Hasid? A romantic who met a beautiful goose herder and did not forget her for the rest of his life or a husband who distanced himself from his wife and loved to stay away from home? A deep researcher of the Sabbatarian movement or a politician? Since the founding of the state until the end of his life, Shazar acted as a public figure in the State of Israel, and at the end of his public career he became its number one citizen, its third president. The biography In Two Worlds unfolds the story of his life and discusses the internal tensions and his struggles - between religion and tradition and secularism, between politics and research, between the Diaspora and the Land of Israel, and between the women he loved. Together, these created a unique and fascinating character.

Sabbatian Songs of Faith: Ritual, Community, and Interreligious Encounters in the Late Ottoman Empire unveils the hidden world of the Ma’aminim—followers of the 17th-century Jewish messianic figure, Sabbatai Tzvi. After Tzvi’s dramatic conversion to Islam in 1666, many of his followers returned to mainstream Judaism. However, a dedicated group followed in his footsteps, converted to Islam, and established a new path, blending Sabbatian, Jewish, and Islamic elements within a distinct Ottoman-Sephardi cultural framework. For centuries, the Ma’aminim maintained secrecy, forming distinct communities (known as the Dönme) and playing a multifaceted role in Jewish and Ottoman histories. This book sheds new light on their social life and esoteric traditions through a comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis of previously mostly unexamined mystical manuscripts in Ladino, Hebrew, and Ottoman Turkish. It explores their sacred songs, radical theology, rituals, folklore, and musical practices as reflections of communal reality and developments. By placing the Ma’aminim within a broader historical and cross-cultural perspective, Sabbatian Songs of Faith offers fresh insights into religious transformation, intercommunal exchanges, and the interplay between faith, ritual, and popular culture in the late Ottoman world and beyond.

Is Israel really a “villa in the jungle”? Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, who have each used this expression, expressed a condescending popular perception among Israel’s leadership — and the public more broadly — that did not see Israel as politically, economically, or culturally part of the Middle East. This volume of essays addresses Israel’s place in the Middle East from a variety of strategic, political, educational, and academic perspectives. The book shows that, contrary to common Israeli perceptions of a besieged state destined to live alone, Israel has played varied roles in the Middle East, both overt and covert, during both war and peace. The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, and the ensuing war, place the question of Israel’s regional standing to a critical test.

Sovereignty in Miniature examines the formative period of Israel’s relations with the United Nation through the lens of Jerusalem’s history. According to the UN resolution, Jerusalem was to become a demilitarized international city. Yet following the results of the war, the city was divided de facto between Israel and Jordan. An exception was the exclave of Mount Scopus, which remained demilitarized under UN control. Drawing on documents from four continents, this study investigates Israel’s actions vis-à-vis Jordan, the UN and other international actors to assert its claim to sovereignty over its share of the exclave. The book uses the vantage point of the absolute exceptional – a demilitarized zone under UN control – to expose the Israeli understanding of sovereignty. Telling a largely forgotten story, Sovereignty in Miniature demonstrates how, once Israel recognized the potential significance of the Jewish institutions on Mount Scopus – the Hebrew University, National Library and Hadassah Hospital – it leveraged their ownership to consolidate its grip on the exclave. For similar reasons, Israel attempted with varying degrees of success to claim direct or indirect control over sites beyond its immediate possession, including the British military cemetery, the German Augusta Victoria compound and the Palestinian village of Issawiya.

Polin , established in 1986 by the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies, has acquired a well-deserved reputation for publishing authoritative material on all aspects of Polish Jewry. Contributions are drawn from many disciplines—history, politics, religious studies, literature, linguistics, sociology, art, and architecture—and from a wide variety of viewpoints. Polin is published by the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. It is sponsored by the Institute of Polish–Jewish Studies, which is an associated institute of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and of the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London, and by the American Association for Polish–Jewish Studies, which is linked with the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University.

This book is the first in Israel to be dedicated to the work of Bauhaus photographer Moshé Vorobeichic-Raviv (Moï Ver, 1904–1995) and accompanies an exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Moï Ver, who studied in Wilna, Germany, and Paris with some of the most prominent artists of his time, engaged with contemporary avant-garde and modernist movements. His work is linked to New Photography, also known as New Vision, which ignited European imaginations and paved the way for revolutionary modes of creation and thought. For two and a half decades (1925–1954), Moï Ver oscillated between documentation and the creation of reality, deconstructing and reassembling the subjects he documented. While a documenting photographer captures moments, a creator of reality constructs experimental visual statements and original modes of perception. Moï Ver moved between documenting the traditional Jewish community in Wilna, life in modern Paris, the traditional Jew in Poland, and Zionist photography. In the past decade, the Moï Ver Archive has enabled further research on this innovative photographer, situating his work in relation to other European immigrants who heralded modernism. This book presents new research findings on his work with Zionist organizations and showcases works and photographs from all his periods, many of which are published for the first time.

The Other War articulates the anatomy of World War II. For that purpose, it takes an unusual perspective: instead of following the conventional horizontal historical axis, from Nazi Germany eastwards and westwards, it directs the view from the global south to the north. Both axes, the continental and the colonial, were, of course, not disconnected; to expose their intersections, this book lays the focus on Jewish Palestine. The focus on Palestine, as part of a broad British defense parameter protecting the Indian subcontinent, reveals the entanglement of two conflicts: the European war, that escalated into a world war, and the Jewish-Arab-British war over Palestine. In their discreet competition, each of these conflicts remained, for its rival, a foreign war.

This is a groundbreaking book in the field of inner biblical allusion. Using methodologies from the field of literary studies the book examines the Song Ha'azinu (Deut 32) and the Book of Isaiah and uncovers the fascinating connections between the two. The recognition of this relationship sheds new light on the subject of inner biblical allusion, the Song Ha'azinu and the Book of Isaiah.

This book examines the overt and covert engagement with the immigrant experience in American cinema in the decade preceding World War II. It presents the story of a gallery of creators, mostly Jewish, who had emigrated to the United States, some by force and others by choice. An examination of the films they created reveals their attitudes towards their countries of origin, the nation that gave them a new home, and the Jewish identity they were forced to rediscover. This Jewish identity was at times a burden, sometimes a painful reminder of their past, and at other times a source of great inspiration and hope.