16 October 1943 is one of the most intense, troubling and spectacular works ever written on a single event in the Holocaust of Europe's Jews. This text embodies a stylistic combination of almost real-time journalism, powerful poetic and emotional literature and a profound philosophical essay on the Nazi's behavioral patterns. Giacomo Debenedetti, a distinguished Jewish-Italian author, journalist, and literary critic and theorist describes in 16 October 1943 the terrors of the raid of the Ghetto of Rome. The story (for it is first and foremost a story) unfolds, with piercing, terrifying language, the deportation of one Jewish community within the Nazi extermination mechanism.

The charm of Agnon’s work lies in an inebriating combination of the funny and the serious, in his famous irony that knocks down every unquestionable certainty and even its very self. Agnon’s humor eludes rhetoric borderlines, does not tolerate confines of a genre and disobeys simple interpretative solutions. In his new book, Roman Katsman suggests a new literary-anthropological method to break down Agnon’s complicated ‘laughter code’—a method based upon the cultural and semiotic interpretation of symbols. His reading of a wide selection of Agnon’s works, including his four major novels, reveals an entire world of his laughter symbols—a world of violence and sacredness, tragic bewilderment and eruption of new possibilities. In this world, arks fly, princes disappear, serpents eat their own tails, angels and demons dance, illusion turns into reality, and other foolish and cruel miracles occur. The research looks for a solution to the riddle: should Agnon's stories be considered serious or ironic, religious or secular, scornful or emphatic, archaic or modernist; or perhaps the reader is intended to swell with pathos or burst into laughter—and how come Agnon always has the last laugh?

Smocza is the biography of a street in Warsaw that was completely destroyed in World War II. The book reveals the story of a Jewish microcosm between two world wars. It is based on historical and literary sources that piece together a multicultural mixture of a society in transition, where orthodox Jews, Bundists, Zionists, shoemakers, tailors, poets, actors, prostitutes, and others lived side by side.

The characters of the Yanuka (the Zoharic Wunderkind) and the Sava (the wise old man), appear in various Zoharic stories, revealing themselves to the sages of the Zohar (Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai and his disciples). These two figures are among the most meaningful and complex mythical figures in Zoharic literature. The main argument in this work is that the Sava and Yanuka characters are portrayed as the embodiment of God and his Son (and the Messiah). This book is the first attempt to grasp the full extent and depth of these mythical figures and the close ties that exist between them. At the same time, the book reveals an important chapter in the history of Jewish myth and contributes to the understanding of the messianic consciousness that characterizes the stories of the Sava and Yanuka in the Zohar and exposes their hidden and polemical ties with Christianity. The book is currently available as an ebook. A print edition will be available soon.

Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī’s Mishkat al-Anwar (The Niche of Lights) is justly included in the Hall of Fame of world mysticism as an immortal masterpiece for generations to come. Its subject matter is an arcane mystical interpretation of the Light Verse, sura An-Nur (Qur’an, verse 35), whose text has become a central symbol for the mainstream of Sufi mysticism. The book centres on the light and the mystery of light within a Sufi’s world. Its central importance caused The Niche of Lights to be translated to Hebrew twice in the Middle Ages, and for many generations it provided a source of inspiration in the realm of Judaism for philosophers and Kabbalists alike. This essay has now been re-translated to contemporary Hebrew. This classic inspirational text, a guide for the perplexed of the internal journey to the mystery of Divine Light, is an important, central chapter in the history of human spirituality; and occupies centre stage in the endeavour to establish prophesy, divine inspiration and a new Israeli spirituality.

The book Praise of Fools , which was printed twice - in 1880 and 1910 - is an unusual satire/parody in Hebrew satiric literature. It is intended not only for certain circles or people in the Jewish context, but also has a universal character: it makes fun of and derides a long list of philosophers, writers, intellectuals and scholars a nd others , presenting them as useless, plagiarists and fools. All this i s done in order to supposedly praise ignorance and stupidity and to propose finding within them security and peace. The book accorded to Rubin the title "the Jewish Erasmus," however, the introduction places the book within the extensive European "fool literature".

Articles: Haim Weiss | ‘From That Hour the Doom Was Sealed’: On Class Reversals in the ‘Legends of Destruction’ Vered Tohar | ‘Rabbi Hanina and the Frog’: An Ancient Ashkenazi story Adapted for Children by Asher Barash Lital Lieberman-Avital | ‘Take the Illness and Give the Medicine’: Removal by Salt – Traditional Women’s Healing Practice on a Socio-Cultural Borderline Yuval Harari | Wonders and Sorceries in Yeruham: A Magical-Political Rashomon Dalia Marx | Welcoming the Sabbath in the Kibbutzim: Secular Religiosity Narmina Abdulaev | Narration Surfing: Folklore Published on the Internet and Its Analysis Shany Kotler-Fux | ‘Hitler-Pants’ Parodies: Folklore in Israel’s Virtual Sphere Reviews: Aharon Maman | [Review of:] Yosef Tobi and Tsivia Tobi, Judeo-Arabic Literature in Tunisia, 1850–1950, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2014, 367 pp. Jacqueline Laznow | [Review of:] Tsivia Tobi, From Bride to Daughter-in-Law: The World of Jewish Women in Southern Tunisia and Its Reflection in Popular Literature, Jerusalem 2016, 344 + [iv] pp. [Hebrew] Tzila Zan-Bar Zur | [Review of:] Idit Pintel-Ginsberg, The Angel and the Tcholent: Food Representations in Folktales, Haifa 2016, 176 pp. [Hebrew] English Abstracts

Bearing Witness to the Witness examines the different methods of testimony given by trauma victims and the ways in which these can enrich or undermine the ability of the reader to witness them. Years of listening to both direct and indirect testimonies on trauma have lead Dana Amir to identify four modes of witnessing trauma: The “metaphoric mode”, the “metonymic mode,” the “excessive mode”, and the “Muselmann mode.” The author thus demonstrates the importance of testimony in understanding the nature of trauma, and therefore how to respond to trauma more generally in a clinical psychoanalytic setting. In order to follow these four modes of interaction with the traumatic memory, the various chapters of the book present a close reading of three genres of traumatic witnessing: Literary accounts by Holocaust survivors, memoirs (situated between autobiographic recollection and fiction) and ‘raw’ testimonies given by Holocaust survivors. Since every traumatic testimonial narrative contains a combination of all four modes with various shifts between them, it is of crucial importance to identify the singular combination of modes that characterize each traumatic narrative, focusing on the specific areas within which a shift occurs from one mode to another. Such a focus is extremely important, as illustrated and analysed throughout this book, to the rehabilitation of the psychic metabolic system which conditions the digestion of traumatic materials, allowing a metaphoric working through of traumatic zones that were so far only accessible to repetition and evacuation.

Replacing Myself with Myself is the fifth selection of Michael Handelzalts's weekly columns, written and published in the Haaretz newspaper between June 2005 and November 2008. Anchoring his amused musings in the headlines, he ponders, among other things, on the kind of fruit with which the Snake and Eve had tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden, on the virtues of good spirit, and on other matters, most of them highly immaterial. A selection of his columns, Histoires d’en lire, was published in French in 2001 by Gallimard.

Music, which speaks in the language of tones, tends to elude attempts at a description in words. Precisely for this reason, perhaps, it has always posed a great challenge to authors, who have been writing musical works and performances throughout the generations. Contrary to what might be expected, literature is far from unanimous in praising music. Frequently, it assigns it dark powers and presents it as dangerous. This two-volume study is the most massive attempt yet to survey the moment musicaux (musical moments) of world literature. Volume I contains a thematic mapping of some 250 literary representations of music; volume II offers an in-depth analysis of 30 of them .

One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things , by Lucretius—a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions. The copying and translation of this ancient book-the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age-fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.

This study of the Parable of the Three Rings is the first full account in Hebrew of the history and the literary and allegorical origins of the parable, as well as of its reception from the early Middle Ages to the Early Modern period. The study provides evidence for the non-Western origins of the parable, which are known mostly through its Western European renderings in Lessing's Nathan the Wise and Boccaccio's Decameron . In some of its versions, the parable contains the idea of religious relativism. This idea was often accommodated in its particular cultural and religious surroundings, but at other times negated and altered to suit the preferences of the other narrators and audiences. Whether the original, relativist, possibly tolerant, message were upheld or not – makes the history of the parable more intriguing to modern readers. The study of the parable tracks the religious idea -- presented in various allegorical forms -- back to its Muslim origins. It also reveals the Eastern origins of the parable's literary framework. The discussion follows the evolution of the parable and its entrance into Catholic Europe, analyzing it contextually and with reference to prevalent contemporary religious ideas among Muslims, Jews, and Christians between the eighth and the sixteenth centuries . A Hebrew translation of Avishai Margalit's “The Ring: On Religious Pluralism” provides a logical-philosophical perspective on the idea of religious pluralism .