Letters can often be spontaneous expressions of their writer's search for meaning, redemption and identity. Such are the letters of Bruno Schulz, one of the most sensitive, and most tormented European-Jewish writers. In this collection of letters - published here for the first time in Hebrew, translated by Miriam Bornstein and edited by Jacob Golomb - Schulz expresses his most hidden thoughts in the most poignant way. These letters were a vital lifeline for him that connected his remote city of Drohowicz to the turbulent cultural and literary centers of Poland in the interwar period. Schulz's desperate need to gain public recognition resonates with them, along with a strong sense of loneliness and existential isolation. These letters can be read as works of art in their own right, and they have the potential to shed new light on Schulz's work, its mysteries and embarrassments. The book includes some of his spectacular paintings and a selection of the review notes he wrote and published. Schultz reveals himself as a sharp, attentive and sensitive critic. Oftentimes, his critical lists not only talk about the works, but reflect his own personality.

Identity and Its Discontents is an intellectual, gothic journey, which explores and interprets for the readers the personal story and thought of fourteen "marginal Jews", Jewish intellectuals from a variety of disciplines who lived in Europe from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Jacob Golomb does a good job of describing the twisted Jewish-European identity of these spiritual giants in the face of the fractured European humanist ideal. The book is structured as a fabric created from the intersecting stories of key thinkers who left a singular intellectual mark on the twentieth century and the shaping of Jewish consciousness in it - from Kafka to Freud, from Bruno Schulz to Gensin, from Ahad Ha'am to Berdichevsky, from Herzl and Nordau to Martin Buber and Zeev Jabotinsky, and from Stefan Zweig to Primo Levi. The original key that Golomb offers to understanding the mechanisms of the identity construction of the "fringe Jews" is the attitude of these thinkers to the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, and the ways in which this illuminates the question of identity politics and the internal struggle in modern Judaism between nationalism and universal humanism. Identity in Discomfort is the fruit of the author's many years of important research work on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and their acception in Hebrew literature and thought. Prof. Hagi Kenaan

Kierkegaard: Between Authentic Faith and Self-Deception approaches Kierkegaard through a refreshing combination of Jewish and non-Jewish philosophies. It deals with Kierkegaard/Hegel's debate and offers valuable insights into questions of self-deception, grace, and Kierkegaard's relation to Judaism and to Jews.

The didactic emphasis on Nietzsche's presence in the life and work of Yoseph Hayim Brenner in unprecedented scope and depth aims to stress Brenner's Hebraism. What has been his utmost concern is the typical existentialist question, free of any national boundaries and religions: "Who is a Man? Brenner is the most important modern Hebrew writer who wished to create his own personal authenticity. He did not believe that secularization will lead to disintegration or to assimilation but to the creation of a new type of an authentic Hebrew, who will be able to write for himself, mainly by his own resources, his own unique book of life. Brennner's 'secret sweetness' is nurtured by three central 'burning fires' (as is the Yiddish meaning of his name): 1. His personal and immediate direct relation to God of Abraham, Yitzhak and Yaacov, and not to the rabbinical rites and lore. 2. His burning desire to foster a vibrant modern Hebrew literature. 3. His longing for a genuine authentic Mensch that will replace the unattainable Nietzschean ideal of the Übermensch. Hence one of the main tenets of this research is that we cannot explain or understand Brenner solely by using the Nietzschean prism. Brenner's ultimate effort to write in a half-dead language (Hebrew) to a half-alive people (the Jewish people) is his "why of life" that helped him accept almost "any how". Brenner used Nietzsche to overcome his attraction to prevalent political-cultural ideologies that ended with an 'ism', such as communism, socialism, anarchism, or Bundism. Thus he used Nietzsche in a Nietzschean way to overcome his initially strong attachment to the "Herald of Zarathustra" (the fictive literary personification of the authentic hero). Brenner gladly embraced Zarathustra's bid to his pupils: "Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you".

This a philosophical novel by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, composed in four parts between 1883 and 1885 and published between 1883 and 1891. Much of the work deals with ideas such as the "eternal recurrence of the same", the parable on the "death of God", and the "prophecy" of the Übermensch, which were first introduced in The Gay Science . Thus Spoke Zarathustra was conceived while Nietzsche was writing The Gay Science ; he made a small note, reading "6,000 feet beyond man and time," as evidence of this. More specifically, this note related to the concept of the eternal recurrence, which is, by Nietzsche's admission, the central idea of Zarathustra; this idea occurred to him by a "pyramidal block of stone" on the shores of Lake Silvaplana in the Upper Engadine, a high alpine region whose valley floor is at 6,000 ft. Nietzsche planned to write the book in three parts over several years. He wrote that the ideas for Zarathustra first came to him while walking on two roads surrounding Rapallo, according to Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche in the introduction of Thomas Common's early translation of the book. Although Part Three was originally planned to be the end of the book, and ends with a strong climax, Nietzsche subsequently decided to write an additional three parts; ultimately, however, he composed only the fourth part, which is viewed to constitute an intermezzo. Nietzsche commented in Ecce Homo that for the completion of each part: "Ten days sufficed; in no case, neither for the first nor for the third and last, did I require more" (trans. Kaufmann). The first three parts were first published separately, and were subsequently published in a single volume in 1887. The fourth part remained private after Nietzsche wrote it in 1885; a scant forty copies were all that were printed, apart from seven others that were distributed to Nietzsche's close friends. In March 1892, the four parts were finally reprinted as a single volume. Since then, the version most commonly produced has included all four parts. The original text contains a great deal of word-play. An example of this is the use of words beginning über ("over" or "above") and unter ("down" or "below"), often paired to emphasise the contrast, which is not always possible to bring out in translation, except by coinages. An example is Untergang, literally "down-going" but used in German to mean "setting" (as of the sun), which Nietzsche pairs with its opposite Übergang (going over or across). Another example is Übermensch (overman or superman), discussed later in this article.

The book breaks with Nietzsche's previous essay style (as in The Birth of Tragedy). It is a collection of aphorisms, largely concerned with human psychology. He criticizes social Darwinism in it: Wherever progress is to ensue, deviating natures are of greatest importance. Every progress of the whole must be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures retain the type, the weaker ones help to advance it. Something similar also happens in the individual. There is rarely a degeneration, a truncation, or even a vice or any physical or moral loss without an advantage somewhere else. In a warlike and restless clan, for example, the sicklier man may have occasion to be alone, and may therefore become quieter and wiser; the one-eyed man will have one eye the stronger; the blind man will see deeper inwardly, and certainly hear better. To this extent, the famous theory of the survival of the fittest does not seem to me to be the only viewpoint from which to explain the progress of strengthening of a man or of a race.§224 Nietzsche also distinguishes in this work the obscurantism of the metaphysicians and theologians from the more subtle obscurantism of Kant's critical philosophy and modern philosophical skepticism, claiming that obscurantism is that which obscures existence rather than obscures ideas alone: "The essential element in the black art of obscurantism is not that it wants to darken individual understanding but that it wants to blacken our picture of the world, and darken our idea of existence" (Vol. II, Part 1, 27).

Aristotle's Poetics is the earliest surviving work of dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory.