The book deals with the conceptual and practical transformation of history as modern science and art between 1740 and 1940. The book concentrates on the work of six major historians who turned history from its rhetorical classical models of "teaching by examples" into a meaningful investigation narration of human life. Common to them as was the belief that human life and history are made by human being like themselves, by themselves.

The Babylonian Talmud is the Jewish composition of greatest scope, and its influence on Jewish life is decisive. Jewish sages have devoted more time and energy to its study and halakhic interpretation than to any other book, including the Bible, to the extent that "talmud Torah," Torah study, is mainly perceived as the study of the Babylonian Talmud. Its academic study, in contrast, is still in its initial stages. Critical editions, with the text based on the best manuscripts and an exhaustive and thorough critical commentary, have been published of only a few of the thirty-seven tractates of the Babylonian Talmud. Central questions pertaining to the manner of the formulation of the Talmud, its redaction, and its transmission are still unresolved. This is different from the state of research of other Rabbinic works, the study of which has taken significant strides in recent decades. Critical, balanced, and cautious interpretation of talmudic sugyot (discursive units) will likely illustrate the treasures to be revealed by a scholarly reading of the Babylonian Talmud: illuminating new facets of which traditional study is unaware; the consistent presentation of its meticulous literary fashioning, its contentual depth, and the creative force embodied in this corpus. All these find expression even in sugyot that seem tenuous and bothersome to the traditional student. Tiqqun Olam (Repairing the World) seeks to advance the research of the Babylonian Talmud with an annotated edition of the fourth chapter of Tractate Gittin, which contains various regulations that were enacted "for tiqqun olam." This chapter was chosen for the wide variety of its topics and the redactive methods employed, and for the benefit to be gained from their critical analysis. The widespread study of this chapter in high schools and yeshivot also influences its selection, in the hope it will aid both students and scholars in highlighting his difficulties and in exposing the overt and covert trends of the Amoraim and the redactors of the sugyot. The first chapter of this book examines the meanings of the term "tiqqun olam" in the Mishnah and the Tosefta, along with the structure of the tannaitic units containing regulations "for the repairing of the world" in these two tannaitic works. The main body of the book contains a systematic discussion of these mishnayot and sugyot, using philological-historical methodology, alongside the literary analysis, which has not been sufficiently developed in talmudic research to now. The talmudic text is divided into forty-nine sugyot. For each the book offers a new text based on MS. Firkovich 187, a list of parallels, a selection of textual variants and discussion of their originality, and a commentary. The commentary includes a detailed explanation of the sugyot and an analysis of their strata. A unique attempt is made to glean from within the traces of the difficulties within the sugyot and the dissonance they exhibit the aims of the redactors, who frequently formulated new laws, while devoting sophisticated literary effort in order to mask these innovations, and to impart to the sugyah a harmonious composition. In this book, much effort was invested to reveal the plain meaning of the Talmud, employing the tools of scholarly research - which, for various reasons, are not integrated into the widespread study of the Talmud today. The book undertakes to open a window to the academic world and its methodology, to enable Talmud students to come to know the world of Babylonian Talmud scholarship that is both demanding and profound, but also intriguing, while offering new insights.

According to its Declaration of Independence, the State of Israel "will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex". However, the equality between men and women in Israel was not de facto. What did Israeli women have to say about that? The book presents views and opinions of Israeli women in the 1950s and the early 1960s about their roles and duties in the public and the domestic spheres, based on contemporary women's sections in the press and women's magazines. It shows what women said about women in the Israeli parliament (Knesset) and about Golda Meir; women's service in the Israeli Defense Force and the exclusion of women from the public sphere; motherhood and parenthood, woman's right to choose to have an abortion and women's struggle for peace; women's duties as housewives and the discrimination of women as employees. The book also uncovers a forgotten feminist journal, sheds light on a famous adoption story of a Yemenite baby and discusses a protest of female cadets in the Israeli Air Force flight course that was ignored and silenced for many years. The book unveils Israeli women's voices from the past, which show that in an era of many fateful decisions, Israeli women also made choices that affected their status in society. Readers might find these decisions relevant vis-à-vis women's status in Israeli society nowadays.

MA'ARAG: The Israel Annual of Psychoanalysis is a democratic forum for psychoanalytic research, practice, and criticism published through the initiative and cooperation of the Sigmund Freud Center for Study and Research in Psychoanalysis of the Hebrew University, Israeli Association for Self Psychology and the Study of Subjectivity, Israel Society for Analytical Psychology, Israel Psychoanalytic Society, Israel Institute for Group Analysis, Tel-Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and the Israel Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. This issue contains the following essays: Hila Elyakam and Devora Rosner-Wachs | THE ROLE OF THE BODY EN ROUTE TO BUILDING THE BIONIAN CONTAINER: INTEGRATING SOMATIC EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHODYNAMIC PYCHOTHERAPY Dana Amir | STUDIUM AND PUNCTUM IN PSYCHOANALYTIC WRITING Dana Amir | THE ‘NEWSPEAK’ OF THE PERPETRATOR: REFLECTIONS ON THE PHENOMENON OF SCREEN CONFESSIONS Dorit Ashur | FREUD AS “MIDWIFE TO THE SOUL”: THE RESTORATION OF MATERNAL SEMIOTIC PROFUSION IN H.D.’S ANALYSIS WITH FREUD Micha Weiss | ETHICAL PRESENCE IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC ENCOUNTER: APOLOGY AS A POSSIBILITY Naomi Teller | TWO POEMS: TO CONTAIN DESIRE Moshe Landau | ON TRANSFORMATION FROM CHAOS AND BECOMING TO RHYTHM AND MENTALIZATION, AND THE RHYTHM IN THE TRANSFORMATION PROCESS FROM ‘O’ TO ‘K’ Rivka Matzner | PSYCHOANALYTIC CONSIDERATIONS ON THE MEETING POINT BETWEEN THE LURIANIC CONCEPT OF “LIGHTS AND VESSELS” AND BION’S CONCEPT OF “CONTAINER-CONTAINED” Ruth Netzer | ‘LISTEN TO HER’: POEMS ON THE ANALYST-PATIENT RELATIONSHIP Gila Ofer, Batya Shoshani and Michael Shoshani | WHEN ONE PLUS ONE EQUALS ONE: THE VICISSITUDES OF CHOSING BETWEEN TRUTH AND BLINDNESS IN THE OEDIPAL MYTH, AND THE FILM “INCENDIES” Gal Kachman | SILENT GRAVES AND TRANSIENT LIFE: ON SUBJECTIVITY AND MELANCHOLY IN THE WRITINGS OF ABRAHAM AND TOROK Victor Rubinov | THE CAPACITY FOR SUBJECTIVITY Merav Roth | TEARING UP THE LETTER AND THE URGE TO GET RID OF THE OBJECT Alejandra Sternschein | MY LANGUAGE, MY SPEECH, AND MY EXPRESSION: REFLECTIONS ON MULTIPLE LANGUAGES IN THE PSYCHIC SPACE OF THE ANALYTIC PROCESS Ofer Shinar Levanon | BETWEEN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC AND THE ARTISTIC ENCOUNTER: REFLECTIONS ON THE SHARED WORK OF THE COMPOSER YONI RECHTER AND THE POETS AVRAHAM HALFI, DAHLIA RAVIKOVITCH AND ELI MOHAR

This study delves into Israeli political life in 1947–1952, focusing on several main emphases: the crucial moment when statehood was decided upon, the election campaign for the Constitutional Assembly (which transformed itself into the First Knesset), Israel’s struggle for de facto and de jure American recognition, and Chaim Weizmann’s term as Israel’s first president.

Man and Nature , the most notable work by A. D. Gordon (1860-1922) was written mostly during the second decade of the twentieth century. It is an original philosophical work, which revolves around the ethics, aesthetics and philosophy of religion. In addition to presenting a comprehensive philosophical theory in Hebrew, Gordon discusses issues which became more and more central in the generations that followed him – like ecology, gender and the rejuvenation of Judaism. By returning to nature Gordon advocates a full life of creation. This new edition contains sections from the Dgania Alef archives, which were omitted from previous editions. In the introduction, the editors describe how the text deviates from the time and place in which it was written, explaining the recent wave of renewed interest in Gordon’s writings.

A dialogue between Michal Zmora-Cohen and Moshe Zuckermann on the development of music in the 20th century. While Zmora-Cohen criticized this development, Zuckermann defended it. The discourse has musicological, historical and philosophical dimensions.

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

In his book History, Literature, Critical Theory (2013), historian Dominique La Capra presented how the narrator's voice in the 19th and 20th century novel came to a collapse that reflects modern traumatic experience. This study uses this theoretical prism in order to construct a cultural dimension of twentieth-century Jewish poetics, a dimension in which trauma is reflected in its linguistic representation, and vice versa: shapes that representation itself. The book offers to understand Jewish literature in the twentieth century as a far-reaching cultural experience, in which the human figure is not made possible by words but instead, 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.

In the few years after his retirement from public life and before he was sentenced to suicide, the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote the majority of his texts, which included over one hundred letters of wisdom ( espistulae morales) sent to his friend Lucilius. These letters are considered the first appearance of literary letters in Roman prose. The letters are philosophical essays written by a very wise and witty old man concluding his life, an autobiography of our spiritual world. The issues that interested Seneca are eternally relevant.

This book sheds new light on the history of the sanctity of Jerusalem in Islam. It is noticed already in the Quran which describes Muhammad's vision of a nocturnal journey from the "sacred mosque" (al-masjid al-ḥarām) in Mecca to the "far-off mosque" (al-masjid al-aqṣā) namely, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. In his night journey to the site of the demolished Temple, Muhammad signaled to his contemporary Jews the course of salvation in which already Moses had led the Children of Israel to their promised land. On the other hand, the Quran praises also the Abrahamic sanctity of Mecca, especially in sūras which reflect the polemical rift with the Jews who eventually refused to recognize Muhammad as their messianic savior. After the death of Muhammad, when the first Muslims came from Arabia to Palestine, their awareness of the Quranic sanctity of al-Masjid al-Aqṣā resurfaced. This book elucidates major aspects of the renewed and growing sanctity of Jerusalem and al-Sham at large, as reflected in the available Islamic traditions. These traditions show also how patterns of the sanctity of Jerusalem were eventually adapted to Mecca in reaction to the growing prestige of Jerusalem, especially during the Umayyad period.