In these 48 essays, most of which were published in Haaretz newspaper, Yaacov Shavit wanders between various episodes in Jewish and Christian history and culture.

Israel's recent constitutional political crisis marks the moment when civil duty becomes an existential question: are civilians obliged to obey an administration chosen in a democratic process, even if it means harm to justice, decency or elementary democratic values? The main claim made in this essay is that two types of civil disobedience are to be categorized: disobedience of law or policy, and disobedience of legality.

The collective memory is not an innocent conduit carrying the cargo of the "authentic" past into the present, but a subject of constant struggle between different social forces, which have their own history. The discourse of the Holocaust in Israel has also undergone several incarnations during the last decades that reflected the complex interrelationship between "silence" and speech and the various tensions between private memories and collective memory. In this pioneering book - What Shall We Tell the Little Ones? - Yaakova Sacerdoti examines how Holocaust literature for preschoolers developed in light of the recurring questions on this topic over the years: Is it right to expose children to these horrific events of the past? And if so, how can the indescribable be described? The book examines these questions by describing over thirty children's books about the Holocaust, published since the beginning of the 1990s. Thus, Sacerdoti tries to reveal the literary and poetic techniques - both textual and visual - that children's writers used to try to circumvent the difficulties involved in conveying the experiences of the Holocaust to preschoolers.

The Book of Daniel is one of the later books of the Bible, and perhaps the latest of them. Its composition reaches up to Antiochus IV Epiphanes' persecution of the Jews and ends even before the liberation of Jerusalem and the purification of the Temple. The book is bilingual, written in Aramaic and Hebrew, and was written in the Hellenistic period in two different places: Babylon and the Land of Israel. Chapter 1, written in Hebrew, serves as an introduction to chapters 2-6, which are in Aramaic. The stories in these chapters are about Jewish courtiers in Babylon who manage to maintain their faith and the customs of the ancestors, even when their lives are threatened. They are then saved from the hands of their persecutors, and even rise to greatness in the courts of foreign kings. These chapters are intended to encourage Jews in the Diaspora to maintain their faith. Chapters 7-12 have a completely different tone. Chapter 7 is written in Aramaic and links the two parts of the book. Chapters 8-12 are in Hebrew. These chapters are visions that Daniel had, but required an angel in order to interpret and understand them. These visions are an interpretation of global and local historical events and their vicissitudes, which both occurred during the author's lifetime and are yet to occur in his future. The chapters written in Aramaic are translated into Hebrew, and appear facing the Aramaic text. This is the only book in the Bible that touches upon the resurrection of the dead, among other things. A special appendix is added, which surveys the development of the idea of the remaining soul and the resurrection of the dead.

In this issue: Yiftah Levin | The Key as an Intertextual Symbol in the Six-Day War Shalom Sabar | ‘The Year of the Liberation of Our Holy Sites’ – The Six-Day War in the Mirror of Israeli Folk Art Regina F. Bendix and Galit Hasan-Rokem | Israeli Political Humor: What Was There To Laugh About in 1967? Haim Weiss | ‘The Mountain that Folds Within It All of Israel’s Hopes and Visions’ – Shlomo Goren and the Six-Day War

Uri Zvi Greenberg’s early poetry, composed between 1912 and 1923, offers both a key to understanding his later work, and a means for re-conceptualizing modern lyrical discourse in general and modern Jewish lyrical discourse in particular. Often callow, this early work testifies to the poet’s quest for a way of writing poetry that would give voice to the Jewish experience in Europe just before and after World War I. Like many other Jewish poets of the period, Greenberg was aware of the pressing need to express Jewishness in a way that would allow for the continued existence of Jewish national identity, among nations jostling for independence in a Europe rife with tensions. Similar to many of these poets, Greenberg also knew that this expression would have to be, of necessity, grounded in modern subjectivity. Paying attention to the various literary, historical, and political contexts of Greenberg's writing, Green Mountain and Love traces the poet’s valiant attempt to come to terms with modern subjectivity, and in so doing, reinvestigate the mechanisms of modern lyrical discourse. It yields fresh insights into the nature of poetry; its aims and functions in the cultural, political, and historical arenas; and the reader’s relationship with the poetic word.

The Israel Folktale Archive (IFA), named after founder Dov Noy, was established in 1955 aiming to protect oral traditions at danger of becoming extinct or sinking into oblivion. It currently stores some 25,000 stories told in dozens of ethnic groups, mostly Jewish but also Muslim, Christian and Druze. Poetic Memory deals with the appearance of early Hebrew traditions in the archive tales, from the days of the Bible to the Middle Ages.

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.

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

It is not an easy task to find in any creative field a person who is both an original and groundbreaking artist and a profound thinker-interpreter, who is well versed in the broad scope of the entire culture. Such is Michael Gurevitch – the playwright of "Happiness", "A Fleeting Shadow", "A Word of Love" and "The Dragon's Beloved" (out of more than eighteen plays) – who presented new, local and extremely challenging concepts about the context of a theatre play within the contemporary Israeli existence. Gurevitch designs a new local theatrical language in his plays and in the way he directs. He is an unforgettable director of classics such as "The King's Clothes" by Nissim Aloni, "Life is a Dream" by Calderón de la Barca, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" by Shakespeare, "Uncle Vanya" by Chekhov or "War on the House" by Aristophanes (adaptation by Ilan Hatsor). His theatrical insights are interwoven to the most contemporary Israeli issues without so much as a sensational wink. His theater is a "passing shadow" in the full sense of the word because it is based on one-time work with certain actors, at certain moments in their lives, and in the life of the country at a certain moment, and for that reason it is profoundly unique to theater alone, because it lives only when it is actually performed, hence it is poignant and unforgettable. Gurevitch was born (1951) and raised in Tel Aviv. He lived, breathed and studied local and international theater all his life, but his main strength is in the depths of the emotional, involving his childhood, his parents and his unique personality. In Two Children in The Field: Reflections on Theatre and Life Gurevitch manages to refine, from his rich experience, a series of lucid insights on the relation between theatrical conceptions and the contexts from which they stem.