In this issue: David Fialkoff | From Disqualifying Deeds to Disqualifying Thoughts: The Early Form of Mishnah Zevahim Elyashiv Cherlow | A Unique Cairo Genizah Manuscript of Babylonian Talmud Tractates Shevu’ot Idan Pinto | "Shulhan shel Arba" of R. Bahya ben Asher: Explorations into Its History and Several of Its Kabbalistic Sources Daniel Abrams | The Awareness of Scribes and Kabbalists to Multiple Versions of Texts in Kabbalistic Manuscripts

How does the past remain present in the urban landscape—in houses, streets, and public squares—even after the culture that once sustained it has been destroyed? What happens when history is not merely an abstract memory but a material reality that continues to shape and unsettle the present? In Bloody Wednesday , Yechiel Weizman traces the ghostly presence of the Jews of Olkusz, a town in south-central Poland whose large Jewish community flourished for centuries, until the Holocaust. Despite their total physical absence, from the end of the war until today the memory of the Jews is palpable and persistent—and at the same time silenced and repressed—in every street corner: in empty houses, in abandoned cemeteries and synagogues, in plaques and monuments, and through the ongoing public debates about property, heritage, and commemoration. Using the case study of a single Polish town, the book shows how the urban topography of Eastern Europe was continuously reshaped and redefined in relation to the legacy of the Second World War, the question of Jewish property, and the politics of Holocaust memory during the Communist period and after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Adopting a microhistorical lens and examining the smallest details of everyday life and urban history, the book reveals how the persistent debate over the presence of the dead Jews in the concrete and imagined spaces of one small town became a dramatic arena for a painful, intimate, and nostalgic confrontation with the violent fingerprints of the twentieth century and with pressing questions of responsibility, ethics, and guilt.

How can a teacher-education institution transform itself so that the preparation of future teachers will foster meaningful and high-quality professional growth? This question lies at the heart of contemporary debates among teacher educators in Israel and worldwide. This book offers a rigorous and data-rich examination of a long-term structural and pedagogical reform that had taken place at the Hebrew University, with the goal of meeting the evolving challenges of teacher education in the twenty-first century. Through detailed analysis of the reform’s achievements and its complexities, the book illuminates the conditions, processes, and dilemmas involved in reshaping teacher education. The study provides an unprecedented, comprehensive, and systematic account of change processes in Israeli teacher education and contributes valuable insights to international scholarship on pedagogical reform, teacher education and institutional innovation.

The book sheds light on the aims and achievements of the twelve first female members, who served in the first Israeli Knesset, and in particular on the perception of the status of women in the early years of the state. This study examines the heated debates that arose with the legislation of the following laws: the Marriage Age Law; the Income Tax Ordinance, which serves as a mirror of the status of the married woman; the Security Service Law, which can contribute to the understanding of Israeli society; and the Women’s Equal Rights Law of 1951, whose enactment concluded the work of the first Knesset. The influence of this legislation is felt to this day.

Immediately upon the establishment of the State of Israel, Israel welcomed approximately 720,000 as part of the Great Aliyah. More than one third of these newcomers, immigrants and refugees, were housed in immigrant camps and later in transit camps known as maabarot . Some were later removed from them or left on their own accord; others remained in the maabarot for many years, and the maabarot remained within them. In their early years, the maabarot played an important social role and gave rise to new interethnic relations and new identities. Within a short period of time, and in a space intended to serve as a temporary way station, a shared form of existence emerged in the maabarot. It established principles of organization, fostered cooperation that crossed boundaries of ethnic and communal origin, and created communal cohesion that developed despite the limitations imposed by the absorbing establishment. This book reexamines life in the maabarot through a division into three distinct subperiods that reflect profound changes in social composition, in patterns of power, and in the immigrants’ consciousness of identity. The elimination of the heterogeneity that had characterized the social fabric not only changed the status of the residents in the eyes of the state and society, but also narrowed the social and future possibilities that had opened before them. Through an examination of diverse sources, a detailed depiction of everyday life, and a thematic analysis of language, religion, and education, a formative chapter in the social history of Israel is revealed through the world of the immigrants as they themselves shaped it. From a charged encounter among diasporas, social groups, and a harsh, brutal, and impossible daily routine, a society emerges that has until now remained at the margins of historical research.

The Italian commedia dell’arte troupes roamed across Europe for two hundred years, captivating wide and diverse audiences. The performances of the commedia dell’arte were improvised, as the actors executed on stage a concise outline of a play, called "scenario". This book presents, for the first time in Hebrew translation, complete scenarios written by one of the greatest men of the Italian Renaissance theater, Flaminio Scala. The scenarios are accompanied by annotations and a comprehensive essay that reviews Scala’s life and work, and presents his scenario as a perfect recipe for comic improvisation. The book will therefore be of interest to theatre enthusiasts and scholars alike, and will provide directors, actors, and acting students with new and refreshing tools for staging comedies.

Muslim beliefs have inspired charitable giving for over fourteen centuries, yet Islamic history has rarely been examined from this perspective. In Charity in Islamic Societies , Amy Singer explains the basic concepts and institutions of Muslim charity: the obligatory annual payment of zakat together with voluntary donations of all sizes, undertaken at every level of society, and across the span of individual lifetimes. Charitable endowments – established by rulers, wealthy individuals, and even those of more modest means – shaped Muslim societies, cultures, and landscapes in ever era. This book demonstrates how historical circumstances, social status, gender, age, and other factors interacted with religious ideals to produce a vast array of charitable practices, from the early days of Islam to the present. Relying on evidence from written texts, buildings, images, and objects to anchor the discussions in each chapter, the author explores the motivations for charity, its impact on the rich and the poor, and the politicization of giving, arguing that the study of philanthropy affords a unique prism through which to examine the past.

In this issue: Diego Rotman | The Sukkah and Its Double: Copies, Variants, and the Stereoscopic Image Shani Tamari Matan | The First Hebrew Dance-Gathering at Kibbutz Dalia (1944): Decoding of an Archival and Choreographic Event Hagar Salamon and Carmela Abdar | Glory of the “Sets”: Praxis and Meaning of Dressing Children in Haredi Families in Israel Ravit Raufman | The October 7 Massacre in Light of the Folktale “The Wolf and Kid”: A Realization of Primal Fantasy Ronni Shaked | Commemoration and Conflict: How the Palestinian Calendar Shapes Identity and Resistance

If a large rock had collapsed in a desert or a tree had fallen in the heart of a distant forest several hundred miles away from living beings, would it have made a sound upon its fall? Different people will give different answers to this ancient question. Objectively, some will say that a sound would have been heard because sound does not exist only in the mind of the listener. Subjectively, some would say that a sound requires someone to listen to it. What is correct? Is this complex answer related to the essence of sound? It's All in the Sound investigates the phenomenon of sound and tries to understand it and answer, among other things, the above questions. It was written to meet the needs of students and teachers, with a desire to update the teaching of physics and fill the shortage of textbooks in this field, which is associated with teaching the subject of sound waves. The gradual development of the concept of sound is discussed in the book by building structured experimental illustrations, as well as mathematical expressions describing this miraculous phenomenon. The illustrations were chosen so that a curious reader could repeat most of the experiments in a home environment without the need for special laboratory equipment. Even for readers unfamiliar with the basics of physical mathematics that describe sound, this book may provide a unique experience and open up a new window to understanding physics.

In the philosophical and psychological tradition, the concept of imagination is associated, first and foremost, with the human mind’s ability to intend and depict to itself objects that are not directly present before it. In contrast to sensory perception, imagination is often linked to a spectrum of mental states—such as fantasy, hallucination, and dream—that are freed from the burden of factuality and the logic of what is possible within its bounds. Such states are typically of interest because of the creative—sometimes anomalous—potential they hold, even though they are generally understood as secondary additions to the project of human knowledge. Imagination—in all its material expressions—not only presents us with spaces of unrealized possibilities but even with ones that cannot be realized at all in reality, and in this sense, they are beyond reality, "outside," or "above" the real. Thus, in its literal sense, imagination is surrealism. Once we recognize the imagination’s potential to challenge the existing order, it is no longer possible to think of reality and imagination as two entirely separate domains, and the question of the interaction between them becomes more pressing and clear.

The Last Trial deals with the trial of Ivan Demjanjuk, who was tried in the State of Israel in 1986 on charges of being "Ivan the Terrible," the operator of the gas chambers at the Treblinka extermination camp, and was acquitted after a seven-year legal process. The book is based on in-depth archival research and reveals for the first time a rich collection of historical documents from the legal authorities in Israel, the United States, and Germany. The book is also based on in-depth interviews with senior members of the legal system who were involved in the trial – judges, attorneys, and witnesses. The Demjanjuk case was considered both a case with a high chance of conviction and a potential for severe punishment, and a case that was expected to bring the memory of the Holocaust back onto the public agenda, some half a century after the Eichmann trial. It was chosen from among the cases of other suspects to be the first test case for the possibility of extraditing Nazi criminals from the United States to Israel. The results of the trial therefore had a decisive impact on the continued activity of the State of Israel in bringing Nazi criminals to justice. When Demjanjuk was acquitted, it became clear that not only had the prosecution failed to achieve the desired result of convicting the defendant, but also that the legal process in his case had failed to fulfill the educational, documentary, and historical goals that were attached to it. In the final analysis, this resounding failure brought the prosecution of the Nazis and their accomplices in the State of Israel to an end. The tension between the legal field and the historical field, and between legal judgment and factual truth, runs throughout the book. The greatest danger of blurring the lines between "law" and "history" lies in the fact that the legal outcome of a criminal proceeding – "guilty" or "not guilty" – may mistakenly be linked to the historical determination of "did happen" or "did not happen." A misunderstanding of legal acquittal as historical acquittal is one of the biggest obstacles to the influence of criminal law, which ends in acquittal, on collective memory. As the book shows, the case of Demjanjuk's extradition and trial in Israel illustrates the difficulties inherent in dealing with the Holocaust within the courtroom, and also sharpens the problematic nature of using criminal law tools to establish historical truths.

Usury: Moneylending, Money and Society in Rabbinic Literature is a study of the moneylending norms in the early stratum of rabbinic literature. It shows how these norms use the language of legal formalism to construct a community of status-equals, into which rabbinic adherents can buy their entry by making the correct investment choices. Placing these norms in a broad historical and intercultural context, it is a fresh look at Jewish moneylending norms, the first in over 30 years.