For Louis Jacobs, the quest—the process of engaging with and thinking about Jewish faith—was a lifelong pursuit. He offered a model in the 1960s, a period characterized by general religious crisis, of an observant, committed, but intellectually curious Judaism that empowered individual seekers to address challenges to faith. In Orthodox Judaism at the time a battle was under way for religious control. Generating a widespread controversy in British Jewry known as the "Jacobs Affair", his thought offers a lens for examining the trajectory of Orthodoxy. In a contemporary context marked by the changing cultural and intellectual concerns of a "post-secular" age, the focus of some of these debates over religious control has shifted. Yet Jacobs' emphasis on a personal quest is as relevant as ever, perhaps more so. This first book-length analysis of his theology unpacks the building blocks of his thought. It argues that, despite its particularities and limitations, his approach can provide a powerful model for contemporary religious seekers in the context of a growing impetus away from established, denominationally bound forms of religion. Many orthodox believers across a range of faiths continue to prefer the certainty of unquestionable religious truth claims rather than pursuing a subjective search for religious meaning. For those seeking alternative models for the contemporary Jewish quest, a reconsideration of Jacobs’ theology can offer valuable tools.

A jubilee volume in honor of Prof. Menahem Ben-Sasson. The book, which contains 22 articles written by Prof. Ben-Sasson's colleagues, students, friends, and family members is dedicated to phenomena of leadership in the Jewish world . The various articles examine conceptions, practices and ways of Jewish leadership from diverse perspectives and in varied times and places. They are based on variegated sources: historical and judicial documents, biblical exegeses, poetry, letters, Responsa, polemical and philosophical writings. The volume is a tribute to Prof. Ben Sasson's extensive academic and public activity.

An Internal-External Journey presents an interdisciplinary educational approach, a toolbox and lesson plans developed by the author on the topic of creative education: integrating the arts in teaching and education. The approach was developed following many years of experience in the field of education, and the lesson plans were passed on to teaching students at Kibbutzim College. The book is intended for educators engaged in guidance, teaching and training of teachers. Creative education and the integration of arts in teaching allow students to embark on a two-way journey: inward to themselves, and outward to the cultural and academic texts. The book describes an initiation process using paint, newspaper clippings, glue and plasticine, and a combination of meditation, writing, reading and the play, knowing that it is important for future teachers to experience the springs of creativity up close. "This is an educational gem. It is a very unusual book with a lot of pedagogical understanding, a very interesting work, based on the wisdom of the field and a lot of experience." - Prof. Anat Zohar, School of Education, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

To the Water , a monograph on the writer Yosef Haim Brenner, seeks to reimagine the conventional perspective on Brenner, shifting the focus from his role as a national prophet to that of a modernist writer. The chapters of the book collectively form a life story, not only of the writer himself but also of his artistic era, the era of early Hebrew modernism. This innovative literary language, forged through the wanderings of Brenner and his cohort of young, provincial writers in early 20th-century Europe, transcended mere "style". It constituted a profound way of thinking and experiencing the world, swiftly captivating its creators, bursting forth in their works with great originality, and, paradoxically, vanishing with the same swiftness with which it had arrived. The book strives to recontextualize Brenner's creative output, asserting that his style does not merely continue the tradition of European realism from the 19th century. Instead, it stands as a bold and uniquely Hebrew creation, distinct from anything that preceded it.

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.

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.

A new paradigm for relations between religions, one of acceptance and collaboration, requires not only a willingness to move beyond a tradition of hostility and competition but also significant theological rethinking. Within Jewish Orthodoxy there have been very few voices that have advanced and justified a vision of other faiths in this light: to this day, the reigning paradigm is one of practical collaboration while avoiding theologically based engagement or reflection. Two of the most important Orthodox Jewish voices advocating change have been those of Irving Yitz Greenberg and Jonathan Sacks. This book presents the theological, moral, and social views of these two leading rabbis. It focuses on the significance of covenant for both, and how they adapt this concept to enable the development of a Jewish view of other religions. In considering how they may have influenced each other, it also studies the limitations and internal contradictions that characterize their work as they attempt to point the way forward, in a spirit of dialogue, to continuing theological reflection on Judaism’s approach to world religions.

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.

In this issue: Ohad Abudraham | A New Reading of a Mandaic Incantation Bowl in the Miami University Art Museum Erhard Blum | A “Neglected” Aramaic Dialect: The Literary Idiom of the Kingdom of Aram-Damascus Moshe Bar-Asher | Problems in the Description of the Morphology of Mishnaic Hebrew Haim Dihi | Some Linguistic Innovations in the Book of Ben Sira: The Contribution of MS F from the Cairo Geniza Shai Heijmans | Pretonic Reduction of Greek Loanwords in the Mishna and Its Significance And more...

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.

This volume - Zevahim, Menahot, Hullin - is the ninth in the series Sources and Traditions: Commentaries on the Talmud . Like its predecessors, it distinguishes between sources (the original sayings in the Talmud) and traditions (sayings that have been changed in the course of transmission).