It is not an easy task to find in any creative field a person who is both an original and groundbreaking artist and a profound thinker-interpreter, who is well versed in the broad scope of the entire culture. Such is Michael Gurevitch – the playwright of "Happiness", "A Fleeting Shadow", "A Word of Love" and "The Dragon's Beloved" (out of more than eighteen plays) – who presented new, local and extremely challenging concepts about the context of a theatre play within the contemporary Israeli existence. Gurevitch designs a new local theatrical language in his plays and in the way he directs. He is an unforgettable director of classics such as "The King's Clothes" by Nissim Aloni, "Life is a Dream" by Calderón de la Barca, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" by Shakespeare, "Uncle Vanya" by Chekhov or "War on the House" by Aristophanes (adaptation by Ilan Hatsor). His theatrical insights are interwoven to the most contemporary Israeli issues without so much as a sensational wink. His theater is a "passing shadow" in the full sense of the word because it is based on one-time work with certain actors, at certain moments in their lives, and in the life of the country at a certain moment, and for that reason it is profoundly unique to theater alone, because it lives only when it is actually performed, hence it is poignant and unforgettable. Gurevitch was born (1951) and raised in Tel Aviv. He lived, breathed and studied local and international theater all his life, but his main strength is in the depths of the emotional, involving his childhood, his parents and his unique personality. In Two Children in The Field: Reflections on Theatre and Life Gurevitch manages to refine, from his rich experience, a series of lucid insights on the relation between theatrical conceptions and the contexts from which they stem.

Yaakov Shabtai is best known for his path-breaking novel Zichron Devarim (1977; translated into English as Past Continuous ), one of the most important works of prose in Hebrew if not in world literature due to its original structure. Shabtai discovered his gift for the theater in his twenties, and moved from Kibbutz Merchavia to Tel Aviv where he made his living authoring and translating plays and writing songs for entertainment evenings. In 1972 he published a collection of short stories entitled Uncle Peretz Takes Off . His novel-memoire Sof Davar (1984; Past Perfect ) was published posthumously. This biography interweaves a detailed description of Shabtai's life, his ideological evolution, and an analysis of his difficult path to literary achievement. His plays, though considered mediocre by some, emerge as essential for the crystallization of his novels.

By 1917 the European war seemed to be endless. Both sides in the fighting looked to new weapons, tactics and ideas to break a stalemate that was itself destroying Europe. In the German government a small group of men had a brilliant idea: why not sow further confusion in an increasingly chaotic Russia by arranging for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the most notorious of revolutionary extremists, currently safely bottled up in neutral Switzerland, to go home? Catherine Merridale's Lenin on the Train recreates Lenin's extraordinary journey from harmless exile in Zürich, across a Germany falling to pieces from the war's deprivations, and northwards to the edge of Lapland to his eventual ecstatic reception by the revolutionary crowds at Petrograd's Finland Station. With great skill and insight Merridale weaves the story of the train and its uniquely strange group of passengers with a gripping account of the now half-forgotten liberal Russian revolution and shows how these events intersected. She brilliantly uses a huge range of contemporary eyewitnesses, observing Lenin as he travelled back to a country he had not seen for many years. Many thought he was a mere 'useful idiot', others thought he would rapidly be imprisoned or killed, others that Lenin had in practice few followers and even less influence. They would all prove to be quite wrong.

Was Niccolò Machiavelli really the cynical schemer of legend - or was he a profound ethical thinker, who tried to save the democratic freedom of Renaissance Florence as it was threatened by ruthless dynasties? This revelatory biography shows us a man of fox-like dissimulation: a master of disguise in dangerous times.

Few articles in this issue: Gilad Shapira | Hermenautics as Poetics: The Case of Midrash HaGadol Moshe Shoshan | The Road to Lydda: A Survivor's Story: Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai's Flight from Jerusalem According to Eicha Rabba 1:5 Richard Hidary | Why Are There Lawyers in Heaven?: Rabbinic Aggadot on the Divine Courtroom Kedem Golden | Solving a Riddle of Judah Halevi Idit Einat-Nov | 'Everybody wants to live': A Literary Reading of the Maqama by Yehuda Al-Harizi, 'The Rooster'

David Biale’s Gershom Scholem traces Scholem’s tumultumous life, tying together his scholarly studies with his political activism and cultural criticism. By mining a rich trove of diaries, letters and other writings, Biale shows how Scholem’s inner life must be understood as the necessary background to understanding his most important writings. Far from a dry, ivory-tower scholar, Scholem emerges as a passionately engaged man of his times, whose life encompassed the most significant events of the Jewish twentieth-century: World War I, the rise of Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust, and the creation of the state of Israel.

It has been said: " No two people have ever read the same book." This is true for literature where the reader has to imagine a world presented by words. It doesn't seem appropriate for cinema which presents a world ready-made to be seen and heard. But films, almost since their early beginnings, and especially in the recent decades, have been capable not to present, not to show, but to allude to off-screen events and images. One could say about most of the movies discussed in this book: " No two people have ever watched the same film ".

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.

Many tend to think of post-Zionism Jerusalem as a forsaken provincial Ottoman town, entangled in a net of hatred originating in its various religions. This image coincided with the Zionist redemption vision, which sought to revive the deserted land. Lemire, studying Jerusalem of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century from within its own context – the writings of its inhabitants, documents of its governing bodies, maps, and economic reports – depicts a completely different picture. For over seventy years, members of the different religions - Jews, Christians, and Muslims - lived a life of incredible coexistence. Mutual respect and reciprocation dominated the city and its enlightened Ottoman rulers were aware of the needs of its various communities. Only the rise of nationalism and the city’s partition into quarters destabilized its unique social fabric. Vincent Lemire did not write a nostalgic document about a long-lost past, but rather illustrated an important political outlook, demonstrating that the national and religious animosity in Jerusalem is not necessarily inherent to the city.

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.

ARITCLES Arnon Azmon - Editing and Meaning in Pesikta de-Rav Kahana, Pesikta Rabbati and Midrash Tanhuma on ‘Vayehi Beyom Chalot Moshe’ (Num 7:1) Yuval Fraenkel - The Hand-Leaning Controversy: Controversy and Authority Noam Samet - ‘The Wise Shall Inherit Glory’ (Prov 3:35) - The Redaction of the Sugya on Human Dignity Rachel Hitin-Mashiah and Tamar Lavi - Two Supplications (בקשות) by Rabbi Yedidya Monsoñego Amir Banbaji - The Maskilim as ῾Defenders of the Text’: A Third Paradigm of Jewish Enlightenment Tamar Salmon-Mack - The Weakening of the Parents’ Home and the Development of Other Kinship Relations in Epistolary Hebrew Literature in the 19th century Einat Baram Eshel - The Story of the Flood and its Representations in Hebrew Children’s Literature Shira Stav - Be My Mother and Brother: Rachel and Bialik Lilach Nethanel - Zalman Shneour’s Book of Wanderings Haya Shacham - ‘The World is a Riddle but the Riddle is a World’ Tal Holz - Slave of Time: The Work of Mourning in Israeli Holocaust Literature of the ‘1948 Generation’