The eighty-four years of Zalman Shazer, the third president of the State of Israel (1889-1974), encompass the great drama of Jewish life from the end of the nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century: the growth of the national and cultural movement in Eastern Europe and the Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel, and the establishment of the state and the struggle for its security and beauty. Along Shazer's journey he encountered famous figures such as Berel Katznelson, David Ben-Gurion, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and his three great loves: Rachel Katznelson, Rachel the poet and Golda Meir. Who was this man? A Hasid who disguised himself as a secularist or a secularist who became a Chabad Hasid? A romantic who met a beautiful goose herder and did not forget her for the rest of his life or a husband who distanced himself from his wife and loved to stay away from home? A deep researcher of the Sabbatarian movement or a politician? Since the founding of the state until the end of his life, Shazar acted as a public figure in the State of Israel, and at the end of his public career he became its number one citizen, its third president. The biography In Two Worlds unfolds the story of his life and discusses the internal tensions and his struggles - between religion and tradition and secularism, between politics and research, between the Diaspora and the Land of Israel, and between the women he loved. Together, these created a unique and fascinating character.

Prayer in Israel is not only a personal and occasional expression of man's relationship with his God, but a complete way of life, organized around a set of daily prayers, on weekdays, on Shabbat and on holidays. But many questions hover around the genesis of this system: When was it designed? At what stages? What is the relationship between its different parts and between its different ways - blessing, reading and prayer? What is the difference between public prayer and individual prayer? Extensive literature has already been written on the history of the prayer, but since the main design of the prayer emerged from the Talmudic literature - Tanna'im and Amora'im - it is essential to place the study of the prayer on the basis of a detailed analysis of the Talmudic material, according to the ways of updated Talmudic science. From this a reliable picture of the prayer in Israel may be drawn from within the literature of the Sages. This essay seeks to present basic chapters from this task.

Sabbatian Songs of Faith: Ritual, Community, and Interreligious Encounters in the Late Ottoman Empire unveils the hidden world of the Ma’aminim—followers of the 17th-century Jewish messianic figure, Sabbatai Tzvi. After Tzvi’s dramatic conversion to Islam in 1666, many of his followers returned to mainstream Judaism. However, a dedicated group followed in his footsteps, converted to Islam, and established a new path, blending Sabbatian, Jewish, and Islamic elements within a distinct Ottoman-Sephardi cultural framework. For centuries, the Ma’aminim maintained secrecy, forming distinct communities (known as the Dönme) and playing a multifaceted role in Jewish and Ottoman histories. This book sheds new light on their social life and esoteric traditions through a comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis of previously mostly unexamined mystical manuscripts in Ladino, Hebrew, and Ottoman Turkish. It explores their sacred songs, radical theology, rituals, folklore, and musical practices as reflections of communal reality and developments. By placing the Ma’aminim within a broader historical and cross-cultural perspective, Sabbatian Songs of Faith offers fresh insights into religious transformation, intercommunal exchanges, and the interplay between faith, ritual, and popular culture in the late Ottoman world and beyond.

Sovereignty in Miniature examines the formative period of Israel’s relations with the United Nation through the lens of Jerusalem’s history. According to the UN resolution, Jerusalem was to become a demilitarized international city. Yet following the results of the war, the city was divided de facto between Israel and Jordan. An exception was the exclave of Mount Scopus, which remained demilitarized under UN control. Drawing on documents from four continents, this study investigates Israel’s actions vis-à-vis Jordan, the UN and other international actors to assert its claim to sovereignty over its share of the exclave. The book uses the vantage point of the absolute exceptional – a demilitarized zone under UN control – to expose the Israeli understanding of sovereignty. Telling a largely forgotten story, Sovereignty in Miniature demonstrates how, once Israel recognized the potential significance of the Jewish institutions on Mount Scopus – the Hebrew University, National Library and Hadassah Hospital – it leveraged their ownership to consolidate its grip on the exclave. For similar reasons, Israel attempted with varying degrees of success to claim direct or indirect control over sites beyond its immediate possession, including the British military cemetery, the German Augusta Victoria compound and the Palestinian village of Issawiya.

Rav Kook’s theological positions have moulded the attitudes and beliefs of generations of religious Zionists. Newly published writings reveal his innovative approaches to such key topics as non-Jewish religions, morality, heresy, and animal sacrifice. Lucidly presented here, these ideas will foment much discussion and shape new ideological directions among Rav Kook’s followers. Rav Kook (1865–1935), the first chief rabbi of pre-state Israel, was a revered thinker whose ideas were in the vanguard of religious Zionist ideology. His theological positions have continued to mould the attitudes and beliefs of successive generations. Newly published writings, however, reveal ideas that have not yet entered mainstream consciousness. Marc Shapiro has grappled with the complexity of the language of these difficult Hebrew texts and identified themes he sees as of critical importance for modern Jewish Orthodoxy. His study will be welcomed as an attempt to make these teachings more broadly accessible despite the complexity of Kook’s exposition. A key development in Kook’s thinking is that he points to the religious significance of non-Jewish religions, and even raises the possibility that non-Jews may also have experienced their own religious revelations. This is a major departure from the traditional rabbinic approach. Another innovative concept is "valorization of the masses," a view that recognizes that basic morality has been preserved in a purer form among the uneducated pious masses than among learned scholars. He similarly reconsiders the nature of heresy and dogma and develops the idea of the "unintentional heretic," a category that could be said to include many in the modern world who are no longer tied to traditional religious understandings. Perhaps most controversially for Orthodox Jewish circles, he also presents an innovative understanding of the animal sacrifice of Temple ritual that allows for its abolition in messianic times. Taken together, these ideas will reverberate, foment much discussion, and shape new ideological directions in the world of religious Zionism.

This book is the first in Israel to be dedicated to the work of Bauhaus photographer Moshé Vorobeichic-Raviv (Moï Ver, 1904–1995) and accompanies an exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Moï Ver, who studied in Wilna, Germany, and Paris with some of the most prominent artists of his time, engaged with contemporary avant-garde and modernist movements. His work is linked to New Photography, also known as New Vision, which ignited European imaginations and paved the way for revolutionary modes of creation and thought. For two and a half decades (1925–1954), Moï Ver oscillated between documentation and the creation of reality, deconstructing and reassembling the subjects he documented. While a documenting photographer captures moments, a creator of reality constructs experimental visual statements and original modes of perception. Moï Ver moved between documenting the traditional Jewish community in Wilna, life in modern Paris, the traditional Jew in Poland, and Zionist photography. In the past decade, the Moï Ver Archive has enabled further research on this innovative photographer, situating his work in relation to other European immigrants who heralded modernism. This book presents new research findings on his work with Zionist organizations and showcases works and photographs from all his periods, many of which are published for the first time.

The Other War articulates the anatomy of World War II. For that purpose, it takes an unusual perspective: instead of following the conventional horizontal historical axis, from Nazi Germany eastwards and westwards, it directs the view from the global south to the north. Both axes, the continental and the colonial, were, of course, not disconnected; to expose their intersections, this book lays the focus on Jewish Palestine. The focus on Palestine, as part of a broad British defense parameter protecting the Indian subcontinent, reveals the entanglement of two conflicts: the European war, that escalated into a world war, and the Jewish-Arab-British war over Palestine. In their discreet competition, each of these conflicts remained, for its rival, a foreign war.

This is a groundbreaking book in the field of inner biblical allusion. Using methodologies from the field of literary studies the book examines the Song Ha'azinu (Deut 32) and the Book of Isaiah and uncovers the fascinating connections between the two. The recognition of this relationship sheds new light on the subject of inner biblical allusion, the Song Ha'azinu and the Book of Isaiah.

This book examines the overt and covert engagement with the immigrant experience in American cinema in the decade preceding World War II. It presents the story of a gallery of creators, mostly Jewish, who had emigrated to the United States, some by force and others by choice. An examination of the films they created reveals their attitudes towards their countries of origin, the nation that gave them a new home, and the Jewish identity they were forced to rediscover. This Jewish identity was at times a burden, sometimes a painful reminder of their past, and at other times a source of great inspiration and hope.

With the social and cultural upheavals of early modern Europe, rabbis were constantly struggling to preserve Jewish tradition. Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi (1658—1718), the independent-minded chief rabbi of Amsterdam, came to be regarded as one of the leading halakhic authorities of this tumultuous era. The battles he waged changed Jewish practice in his lifetime and came to define rabbinic norms in the decades that followed, with relevance to the present day. The challenges for a leading rabbi in a time of ferment were many. With advances in communication and the early stirrings of political emancipation in Jewish and secular society, how could one establish halakhic authority? How were rabbis to navigate the new reality in which mystical texts—once the exclusive province of the elite—became accessible to the masses? As geographical boundaries shifted and cultural barriers crumbled, how could one build a bridge between the worlds of Ashkenaz and Sepharad? How were the keepers of tradition meant to respond to the religious laxity that accompanied acculturation? And how could the religious establishment engage sectarians in general, and crypto-Sabbatians in particular? Hakham Tsevi didn’t always win the battles he fought, but his arguments have endured. Products of his fierce independence, some of his responsa have attained near-canonical status., Today’s halakhic discussions of such contemporary issues as brain death and artificial intelligence often begin with the words he committed to posterity. Hundreds of years after his death, Hakham Tsevi and his work remain at the frontier of halakhic discourse.

A Ramble in the Hive is an eco-philosophical text that deals with the relationship between humans and honeybees from the dawn of humanity to the present day, interlinking mythology, folklore, literature, art and science from different historical periods. A Ramble in the Hive works as both popular science and philosophy, combining a study of the history of beekeeping and its multitude of inventions, with a philosophical and poetic view of the human encounter with honeybees as reflected in the imagination of our culture. It suggests approaching the hive as an archetype of living mythology that works on our collective imagination. A Ramble in the Hive presents the planetary honeybee crisis as a fascinating window through which to observe wide-ranging ecological issues. How did the honeybee get such a lofty and critical role – holding responsibility for both the future of humanity and the earth? What do the bees tell us in their current state? This book is an attempt to answer these questions.

The book relates the story of the Jewish movement in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s as perceived by its participants. On the basis of interviews with almost 300 activists from over 60 cities, it portrays the movement's evolution in all its facets. It examines the activist's personality and background and the path he or she took prior to becoming active, including the presentation of documents to the authorities, that branded him or her as a social pariah and potential traitor. The book discusses the emergence of a refusenik community that enabled their struggle with the all-powerful regime to leave the country while maintaining a "normal" existence for an unpredictable duration. Two chapters view the variety of instruments to which the activists had recourse as they developed the tactics and strategy of that struggle, while three final chapters review specific topics that were an inseparable part of the movement's story. They cover the confrontation with the KGB – the persistent shadowing, interrogations, arrests, trials and camps; the return to Judaism in the search for roots and identity; and the movement's links with the Jewish and non-Jewish world outside.