Folk-culture is typically associated with continuity; how can one engage folk-culture in situations of destruction and extermination - the reality Zionist folklorists confronted facing the Shoah? With the first bits of information regarding the destruction in Europe, many of them assembled in Tel Aviv to form the Yeda Am folklore society; in tandem, the Institute for Jewish Folklore was formed in Jerusalem. The two competing organizations dealt with fragmentary lives in the Diaspora in different ways, in their quest to find new meanings from them. This book examines Zionist folkloristics at this dire hour from a perspective that views fractured reality as a fundamental principle in studying cultures in general, by combining approaches from folklore studies and science and technology studies. This book undermines the distinction between individualist scholarly knowledge and collective folklore by examining everyday scholarly habits: Archival practices, the use of letterheads, jubilee celebrations of scholars as well as practices of editing and laying out scholarly publications. The tension between national culture and ethnic cultures is revealed in new ways, as is the relationship between avant-garde and folklore studies.

This book is the first attempt to review the history and the fall of the Jewish community that existed in Beit She' an from the late 19th century until the outbreak of the Arab Revolt in 1936. The story of the community, which has been almost completely forgotten by the public and academic consciousness, is based on an initial study of several public and local archives, as well as a thorough study of dozens of primary and secondary sources of various types: press clippings, academic and autobiographical sources, oral interviews and others. Beside presenting the history of the community itself, which includes the unique challenges it experienced during its fifty years of existence and the organizational and ideological processes which characterized it, the study is also a base for a better assessment and understanding of the several small Jewish communities that existed during this period in a number of Arab cities and towns: Be'er Sheva, Ramle, Nazareth, Samakh, Jericho and others. This is accomplished by comparing the events in Beit She' an to those which took place in other communities, while trying to identify the factors that led to the collapse of these communities during the Mandate period, and to the withdrawal of the Zionist movement from its substantial support to their continued existence. The book also deals with different questions of ethnic and national Jewish identity, the relations between marginal communities and the leading national institutions, and issues relating to Zionist historiography over the past century.

Ada Rapoport-Albert has been a key player in the profound transformation of the history of hasidism that has taken shape since the 1970s. She has never lacked the courage to question conventional wisdom, but neither has she overturned it lightly. The essays in this volume show the erudition and creativity of her contribution to rewriting the master-narrative of hasidic history. Thanks to her we now know that eighteenth-century hasidism evolved in a context of intense spirituality rather than political, social, economic, or religious crisis. It did not represent the movement’s ‘classic period’ and was not a project of democratization, ameliorating the hierarchical structuring of religion and spirituality. Eighteenth-century hasidism is more accurately described as the formative and creative prelude to the mature movement of the nineteenth century: initially neither institutionalized nor centralized, it developed through a process of differentiation from traditional ascetic-mystical hasidism. Its elite leaders only became conscious of a distinctive group identity after the Ba’al Shem Tov’s death, and they subsequently spent the period from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century experimenting with various forms of doctrine, literature, organization, leadership, and transfer of authority. Somewhat surprisingly there was no attempt to introduce any revision of women’s status and role; in the examination of this area of hasidism Rapoport-Albert’s contribution has been singularly revealing. Her work has emphasized that, contrary to hasidism’s thrust towards spiritualization of the physical, the movement persisted in identifying women with an irredeemable materiality: women could never escape their inherent sexuality and attain the spiritual heights. Gender hierarchy therefore persisted and, formally speaking, for the first 150 years or so of hasidism’s existence women were not counted as members of the group. Twentieth-century Habad hasidim responded to modernist feminism by re-evaluating the role of women, but just as Habad appropriated modern rhetorical strategies to defend tradition, so it adopted certain feminist postulates in order to create a counter-feminism that would empower women without destabilizing traditional gender roles. The essays in this volume are a fitting statement of Professor Rapoport-Albert’s importance to the study of hasidism, to Jewish studies as a whole, and to the academic scrutiny of religion. Written over a period of forty years, they have been updated for this volume with regard to significant detail and to take account of important works of scholarship written after they were originally published.

Baruch Kimmerling (1939-2007) was one of Israel's outstanding critical sociologists. In this volume, Israeli and Palestinian scholars of several disciplines and generations offer a series of studies on Israel and Palestine, past and present, in dialogue with the research agenda Kimmerling has advanced. Essays discuss Zionism and militarism, frontier and colonization, social protest and the limits of democracy, the sociology of fear and the politics of home -- and Kimmerling's own trajectory.

The self is one of the most important concepts in Western culture and in philosophical, sociological, and psychoanalytical literature. This title sheds light on the elusive nature of the concept, addressing it from an interdisciplinary perspective that examines the contribution of various social structures to the human self.

The ‘Jewish mother’ figure is a hallmark of Jewish culture, one which appears in the works of rabbis, artists, poets, and activists across time and place. While depictions of mothers and motherhood abound in Jewish writings, they vary significantly according to social context. These representations therefore offer important insights into the Jewish cultural imagination, and the ways in which writers resort to the figure of the Jewish mother to comprehend and construct their world. The contributors to this volume highlight the complex network of symbols and images associated with Jewish mothers and motherhood as well as the vast array of social, historical, and cultural patterns that characterizations of mothers reflect. Each essay treats the topic from a specific perspective, spanning from mother--daughter relationships in the Talmud to depictions of mothers in twentieth-century American Jewish children’s literature. Collectively, they present a provocative examination of the ways mothers shape and problematize Jewish identity. This volume seeks to give the figure of the mother a new and enhanced place at the heart of Judaism: not only as a central figure in family life, but also as a key agent in the transmission of Jewish religion and culture.

Israeli Religious Zionism underwent dramatic changes following the Six-Day War. The authors of this title argue that the war generated a trend of maturity that destabilized the fundamental ethe and myths of the traditional Religious Zionism ideas.

The heroes of this book are the rabbis of small and medium-sized communities in Eastern Europe. Who were these rabbis? What were their training processes? Did they get their job because of their scholastic or rhetorical skills, because of their family ties, or because they had the capital to buy this position? Did they win "permanence" or was the threat of dismissal constantly hovering over their heads? How were their terms of employment and wages determined, and what was their economic situation? Were they perceived as spiritual leaders? What was their relationship with the community's power centers? How did they navigate between their duties as halakhic authorities and their desire to engage in learning and teaching? The book attempts to answer these questions based on an examination of the world of over a thousand rabbis. Click here for the English edition, published by De Gruyter in collaboration with Magnes Press

This book examines a particular aspect of the hatred of women in nineteenth and twentieth century Russian literature. A man is involved in a romantic relationship with a woman. He feels he is superior to the woman and almost divine, deserving the woman's admiration or even worship. But instead of demonstrating her esteem and respect toward him, she treats him as if he were inferior to her. He feels humiliated and despised by the woman. He feels castrated by her, because she behaves like a man and assigns him the role of a woman. He wishes to restore his own self-respect and avenge himself on her for the bad feelings she gives him. He wants to murder her, and if it is not in his power to hurt her, he harms himself. He becomes an alcoholic, mentally ill or commits suicide. The book discusses the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Lev Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Michail Zoschenko, Yuri Trifonov, Nikolai Leskov, Ivan Turgenev, Alexandr Kuprin, Michail Bulgakov, Boris Vasilyev, Vasily Grossman, Valentin Rasputin, Sergei Dovlatov, Yiri Nagibin, Yuri Polyakov, Galina Tcherbakova, Dina Rubina, Lyudmila Ulitzkaya, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya and Irina Grekova.

Mesopotamian and biblical societies in antiquity were characterized by their patriarchal structure. The father was head of the family unit, and his rule extended over many areas of life. He had broad legal authority over the members of his household, including his offspring. It is therefore expected that in the ancient sources a dominant father figure would be mentioned alone or almost alone. And yet, in Mesopotamian and biblical texts, particularly legal writings, the exclusivity of the father is not always explicit. In many of the Mesopotamian and biblical writings, especially legal texts, the mother is mentioned in various contexts and in a range of realms, mainly those pertaining to her offspring. This intriguing phenomenon raised the question whether the mother in the ancient Near East and ancient Israel had legal authority in the household. The book The Legal Status of the Mother in the Ancient Near East and the Bible sheds light on the world of the ancient mothers and their status within the households and the societies in which they lived. This study demonstrates that the mother acted by virtue of the legal status she possessed in matters related to her sons and daughters’ marriages and their behavior towards her. This book is for those walking in the fields of Mesopotamian and biblical research, and for readers interested in the universal subject in question - the relations between the mother and her offspring.

In recent years, more and more students have been taking Health Economics courses in the framework of different academic programs. These students are mostly health professionals who had not been exposed to the world of economics before. This textbook aims to introduce the material intuitively, in an informal and non-technical way, and above all – in Hebrew. The book is the fruit of extensive experience, its author having taught the course at the Hebrew University, Ben Gurion University, Tel Aviv University and Yale University.