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.

Ever Turning Blows the Wind examines the cultural world of Rabbi Chaim Yosef David Azulay - Hida (Jerusalem 1724 - Livorno 1806). This book explores the cultural and intellectual figure of Hida, a native of Jerusalem, who spent many years traveling in North Africa and Europe until he settled in Livorno, Italy. It examines several of his numerous works, representing various genres. The defining aspects of his character, emerge from Hida's writings. The expressions of his self-image, his attitude towards different societies and cultures and different bodies of knowledge, influenced by the cultural spaces he crossed in his travels, are discussed here. Examination of Hida’s writings, with their various genres, shows that Hida’s figure contains some of the old, traditional world where he was born and raised and formed his personality, and the modern world which was discovered to him in his travels and which aroused his interest and its effects on him are clearly evident in his writings. Therefore, the research of Hida’s figure enables an examination of the influence of the new inside the traditional surroundings and the existence of these two entities side by side.

This book examines the essentiality of the component of enjoyment to a good life. John Kekes reflects upon historical episodes and literary works, and shows how literature is a better guide than the search for general theories and principles, which constitute a central part of contemporary deontological ethics, consequentialism, and concrete thought.

Empathy is often conceptualized as the experience of walking in someone else’s shoes. This experience comprises of a cognitive aspect – the ability to identify, understand and adopt the perspective of another, and an affective aspect – sharing the emotions of others, while remaining distinct. Empathy has been widely recognized as central to cognitive and social development, and a key to nurturing interpersonal relationships and encouraging pro-social action. But empathy has drawbacks as well: Its boundaries, limitations and even potential damage have also been recognized and investigated. The articles in this book take multiple perspectives to studying empathy. They discuss how empathy is developed and how it is bounded, and focus on both its positive and negative implications. The articles in the first part of the book take a social sciences perspective to empathy. They define empathy, describe its development from very early age and throughout the life-span, and examine how it affects intra-personal, interpersonal and social processes. The second part of the book discusses the role of empathy in the humanities. The articles in this part address empathy in history, literature and the arts. Together, the articles in this book point to the vast scope of empathy as a phenomenon in both the social sciences and the humanities.

This beautiful volume is the fruit of almost 40 years of collecting by Vivienne Silver-Brody, one of Israel's few photography collectors. She has written and edited a book, which narrates the shared history of photography in a land that in the last century has seen development alongside war and destruction, and that remains divided and conflicted by the two peoples that call it home. The text is accompanied by some 200 exquisite photographs from Silver-Brody’s collection, and includes a special section inspired by the 1983 volume published by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Personal Choice: A Celebration of Twentieth-Century Photographs . In this section, Silver-Brody invited some 60 writers – photographers, scholars, artists, curators, collectors, lovers of photography and others with a special connection to the land – from different religions, national and political tendencies, to choose a single photograph from her collection and to write a short essay relating to it. The result is a fascinating selection of texts that contributes to the overall narrative in the book. This book could speak to a diversified readership; those interested in photography and its history or in the Middle East and Israel / Palestine, especially in light of the ongoing conflict and public debate surrounding it around the world, and in light of the unique voice that attempts to reach beyond politics and religion, and to present a photographic history of the Land of Israel as a shared place rather than as disputed territory. Translated by Daphna Levy

In the preface to his book Emek Hamelech Rabbi Naftali Bacharach lists his ten books, noting that the first is Emek Hamelech , and the second is Gan ha-Melekh , his commentary on the Zohar printed here for the first time. Bacharach's style in Emek Hamelech is similar to his style in Gan Hamelech , however, while Emek Hamelech was written according to the order of Emanation, Gan Hamelech was written as a commentary to the Zohar. In general, the Kabbalistic writing of Bacharach is characterized by the fact that it is full of messianic tension, and unlike most descriptions of the Emanation in Lurianic Kabbalah that we are familiar with, Bacharach also describes the first stages of the Emanation in Messianic terms.

The articles compiled in this volume are studies by Jacob (Kobi) Metzer, which examine economic and political-economy issues in the Mandate era and the State of Israel. Most of the studies were originally published in scholarly journals and collected volumes in English. Their revision and publication in Hebrew under one volume is aimed at making them more accessible to the Israeli readership. The book consists of nine chapters, grouped into three parts. The first part includes four chapters that present the main socio-economic attributes of the Arab and Jewish populations during the Mandate period and examine them in broad comparative frameworks. The three chapters of the second part take up ethno-national aspects of land and settlement in Mandatory Palestine and Israel, and analyze them in comparative perspective. The third part deals with patterns of immigration and employment of Jews as individuals. It contains two chapters. One documents the socio-demographic profile of the immigrants to Palestine in the first decade of the British Mandate, and compares it with the international migration of the time. The other chapter examines comparatively the patterns of Jewish self-employment in the Diaspora and in Mandatory Palestine and Israel, from the early twentieth century onward.

Problems of Discipline explores the social and cultural function of the state system of secondary education in the Russian empire’s north-western provinces in the second half of the nineteenth century. It shows how schools facilitated socialization into informal, yet non-radical forms of political and social activism, and demonstrates, furthermore, how ideas of civil activism and communal commitment, typical to the contemporary Russian critical public discourse, led to the creation of a distinctive Jewish student subculture which contributed, subsequently, to the emergence of a new socially committed Jewish-Russian elite. Thus Problems of Discipline suggests a new conceptualization of the emergence of local – Jewish and other – elites and, in a broader view, a new understanding of the modes of Russian imperial socialization.

Despite many decades of research, we seem to linger in a state of confusion regarding what leadership is and if or how it might be cultivated. The book offers a new perspective on leadership, whereby what defines leadership is not one’s position or successful conduct but action of a certain kind. More specifically, leadership is about realizing the human potential to think, create or act outside the boundaries of what is known and safe in order to serve the greater good. What distinguishes “acts of leadership” is that they take place in a sphere of ambiguity and uncertainty. As such, acts of leadership are essentially risky, bold and adventurous. Obstacles and opponents are to be expected and no measure of success can be guaranteed. By placing leadership in its unique sphere of action, we realize that widely accepted prescriptions for rational or sensible conduct do not apply and that relying on them may shut us down before we even begin. We further appreciate that such acts exemplify “action” in its deepest sense: what we choose to do as free individuals in an uncertain universe, and how we do it, is a self-defining act; it makes us who we are.

The spread of the Assyrian Empire over the entire Fertile Crescent in the second half of the 8th century BC introduced various forms of cooperation between the neighboring nomadic Arabs and the imperial authorities. The geographical conditions and resultant lifestyle of the Arabs facilitated a mutual dependence and delicate equilibrium between themselves and the Assyrian rulers, eager to capitalize on their unprecedented regional might. Henceforth, the Arabs appear as an organic component of the Fertile Crescent history rather than mere desert raiders.

From this volume: Emanuel Tov | The Septuagint Translation of the Torah Was Based on Palestinian Sources Sholomo Bahar | Circular Patterns in Biblical Thought Ariel Kopilovitz | Regalia Deformed and Restored: Ezekiel’s View of Israel’s Future Leadership Rama Manor, Avi Gvura and Pnina Tromer | The Verb Lekh in the Bible: From a Verb of Motion to Urging of Action Mordechai Weintraub | A New Page of ‘Sefer Tagey’ from the Cairo Genizah Yigal Bloch | ʾEzrāḥ: and Dĕrôr: Two Instances of Assyrian Linguistic Influence in the Holiness Code and Nili Samet | The Origin of the Day of Yahweh Tradition: A New Suggestion

Tens of thousands of intellectuals - refugees, displaced people, voluntary immigrants and emissaries - have left their homeland in modern times and moved to other countries in Europe and overseas. In a world-wide panorama, Peter Burke describes the important figures in the great waves of immigration since the fifteenth century: starting with the Greeks who came to Italy following the conquest of Byzantium by the Ottomans and ending with those fleeing from the Bolsheviks, the Fascists and the Nazis in the twentieth century. The migrations in the early modern period were mostly for religious reasons - for example, the Jews and Moriscos from the Iberian Peninsula, the Huguenots (French Calvinists) following the cancellation of the Edict of Nantes, and Catholics from Protestant countries. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, the migrations were mainly due to racial persecution and political and ideological reasons. Exiles and Expatriates in the History of Knowledge clarifies the difficulties of the scholars to integrate in the host countries and the choice between assimilation and seclusion in the expatriate community. But mainly he came to point out the enormous contribution of expatriates and immigrants to the creation of new knowledge and its dissemination, not only in immigration countries such as the United States and Israel, but in the entire world - from China in the East to Brazil in the West. Burke especially discusses the contribution of scholars in the humanities and social sciences: historians, researchers of the history of art and literature, philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists. Besides academics who managed to integrate into universities in the host countries, there were also other cultural mediators: printers and publishers, translators, merchants who settled for many years in distant lands, missionaries and scholars who were invited to the courts of rulers who sought to advance their country to modernity. The damage caused by the "brain drain" from the countries of origin eclipsed the gains produced by the world of knowledge as a whole: liberation from provincialism, bridging traditions, mutual fertilization. The detailed review in Peter Burke's book, which was written in 2015 as a warning against Brexit (Britain's exit from the European Union), is intended to convey a very important message even today: the reception of immigrants and refugees enriches the local and global culture and is the main antidote against the depletion of the spirit and narrow horizons.