The book traces contested visions and representations of al-Andalus/Sepharad in modern Jewish discourse through an in-depth analysis of the work of Sephardi intellectual network in the turn of the twentieth century Palestine/Land of Israel. Against the backdrop of the tumultuous political and social events of that period, and processes of national, ethnic, and religious partitions, the book explores the ways in which these Sephardi intellectuals fundamentally challenged the nationalistic and monolingual ideologies and looks at their efforts to establish a shared Jewish-Arab society based on a symbolic return to the Sephardi/Andalusian medieval legacy of Hebrew-Arabic bilingualism and a Judeo-Muslim joint cultural heritage. By exploring these contested representations of Sephardi identity and culture the book re-examines some fundamental issues that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century and which still accompany us to this day: the national conflict between Jews and Palestinians, the contacts and splits between Hebrew and Arab culture and the formation of ethnic hierarchies between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim. The book aims to contribute to the growing interest in modern Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewish history and to broaden the scope of “Jewish studies” beyond the European Jewish experience.

Contiruptance: Poetical Fluctuations in Naomi Frankel’s Work is the first book dedicated to Frankel's literary work, offering an in-depth reading of her entire fictional oeuvre. The concept of "Contiruptance," which indicates ruptures and continuity, provides insight into Frankel's poetics; suggesting that it may serve to deepen the analysis of the works of other authors.

In his book History, Literature, Critical Theory (2013), the historian Dominique La Capra presented the ways in which the voice of the narrator in the 19th and 20th century novel came to a collapse, which reflects the modern traumatic experience. This study employs this theoretical prism in order to construct a cultural dimension of 20th century Jewish poetics - a dimension in which trauma is reflected in its linguistic representation, but also shapes this same representation. The book offers an understanding of Jewish literature in the 20th century as a far-reaching cultural experience, in which the human figure is not made possible by words, but rather collapses into the animal, the absence, the broken witness, the Muslim, the eastern, the Arab and the queer.

This is the first comprehensive introduction to India’s history and civilization in Hebrew. It reflects decades of teaching by both authors, often together, at the Hebrew University, as well as long periods of residence in India. The book is structured chronologically, from prehistoric times to the twenty-first century, and includes, within a historical framework, numerous anecdotes, stories, and poems never before translated into Hebrew. Taken together, these are meant to give the lay readers--backpackers, couch travelers, India lovers, and other curious minds - a savory taste of India’s rich cultural menu.

The Hebrew Bible is the cornerstone of Judaism and Jewish culture; as such, it also provides the foundation for the other two monotheistic religions, Christianity and Islam. It is a book that embodied numerous revolutions, the most prominent of which was the Monotheistic Revolution, the replacement of polytheism with the belief in one all-powerful God who both created the world and governs it. Among the other revolutionary ideas that are put forward by the Bible we find the establishment of the Sabbath, the granting of one city — Jerusalem — a monopoly over holiness, the opposition to human kingship, and the moral dimensions of prophecy, to name just a few. Over the centuries and millennia, these revolutionary ideas have continued to attract and inspire readers, believers, interpreters and artists.

The book is concerned with the main trends in Jewish Liturgy during Late Antiquity and its connections and inter relations with Aramaic Targum, Midrash, mysticism, popular beliefs, structure and rhyme patterns as performed amid Late Antique Synagogues in Palestine, as well as the later spread of these fertile products to Southern Italy and then to the rest of Europe. The book discusses the different layers of poets and performers as presented in ancient manuscripts which were preserved in the Cairo Geniza collections and later in European Mahzorim, and the fascinating struggle of survival of the different liturgical cycles.

Articles: Svetlana Natkovich | Maskil and the City: Representations of the Maskilic Subjectivity and Urban Habitus in the Literature of Russian Maskilim, 1862-1888 Natasha Gordinsky | ‘Sideways from Moscow: Uri Nissan Gnessin’s Provincial Writing’ Dina Berduchewsky | Brenner’s London as a Crossroads in the Story of Early Hebrew Modernism Lilach Nethanel | Literary Modernism: The Retreat. Shklov by Zalman Shneour Allison Schachter | Elisheva Bikhovksy’s Novel Side-Streets Representing a Non-national, Minority Hebrew Culture Rafi Tsirkin-Sadan | The Curse of the Forbidden City: Haim Lensky’s St. Petersburg Sonatas and the Images of St. Petersburg in Russian and Hebrew Literature Maya Barzilai | The Lost German City: Berlin of Leah Goldberg

Articles: Yona Sabar | Grandpa Ephraim and Grandpa Menashe: Two Opposite Characters, Based on Personal and Communal Childhood Memories Dov Cohen | ‘The Holy Island of Chios’: New Findings Concerning the Purported Burial Place of R. YaꜤakov ben Asher (BaꜤal Ha-Turim) on the Island of Chios and Pilgrimages to His Gravesite Itamar Drori | Rabbi Israele Costa’s ‘Miḳweh Yisrael’ (1851): The Beginning of the Adapted Jewish Story for Youth Carmela Abdar | Reflections on Magical Texts on Jewelry and Amulets of Jewish Women and Children from Yemen and Habban Tom Fogel | JaꜤle – Yemenite Nostalgia in a Jerusalem Café Jacqueline Laznow | ‘I Recognized the Holidays According to the Food’: Tradition and Memory in the Jewish Community of Argentina Reviews: Eli Yassif | The First Book of Jewish Jokes: The Collection of L. M. Büschenthal, ed. Elliott Oring, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018 Dudu Rotman | Vered Tohar, The Book of Tales, Sermons and Legends. Anthology of Hebrew Stories from the Print Era: An Annotated Edition, Tel Aviv: Hakibbuz Hameuchad 2017, 201 pp.

Many Voices in the Prose of Shulamith Hareven by Yael Balaban is the first book-size monograph dedicated to Hareven’s oeuvre. It offers for the first time a deep understanding of Hareven’s fiction, including her early short stories, City of Many Days, and Thirst – the Desert Trilogy . Hareven’s unique voice has been missed by contemporary critics, as both her ideas and her poetics were ahead of her time: She wrote about sexual abuse long before the subject ever entered public discourse; wrote about the “second generation” of Holocaust survivors before the term was established; and created Mizrahi and Arab characters very different from the stereotypic characters in contemporary Hebrew literature. It is time to re-read Shulamith Hareven’s work and discover beautiful stories suffused with moral and social sensitivity and a profound commitment to language and literature .

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?