The story recalls the life and work of Josef ha-Cohen, the author of The Chronicles of the French and Ottoman Kings and Sefer Emeq ha-Bakha (The Vale of Tears), published simultaneously. The story reflects a momentous experience of joy and bereavement, love and desire, youth and old age, and most particularly the feeling of human transience.

Vardi and Weitz bring together wide-ranging scholarship to help us understand the roots, effects, and implications of misbehavior in organizations. The book covers key topics that have emerged in scholarly literature in the past decade, such as insidious workplace behavior, bullying and harassment in the workplace, information hiding, cyberbullying, and organizational spirituality. A thorough and up-to-date resource on this crucial and evolving topic in organizational studies, this book provides insights on misbehavior at the individual, position, group, and organizational levels.

The political upheavals, the leadership crisis, and the ideological frustration which the Israeli Labour party went through in the first two decades of the 21st century led it to an unprecedented electoral decline. What happened to the formerly dominant party which established the state? What kind of intrinsic changes did it undergo in the late modernity and due to new sociological generations? What kind of new or old ideological discourses were formed within it? And how can we characterize its renewed ideological discourse? These questions stood at the background of this ethnographic study. The study focuses on young, idealistic activists who joined the Israeli Labour Party during 2006-2009 and asked to promote a social-democratic agenda. The book is based on multi-arena fieldwork and it enables a rare ethnographic reflection on the way macro level political changes take shape and are embodied in interpersonal interactions on the micro level.

The book traces contested visions and representations of al-Andalus/Sepharad in modern Jewish discourse through an in-depth analysis of the work of Sephardi intellectual network in the turn of the twentieth century Palestine/Land of Israel. Against the backdrop of the tumultuous political and social events of that period, and processes of national, ethnic, and religious partitions, the book explores the ways in which these Sephardi intellectuals fundamentally challenged the nationalistic and monolingual ideologies and looks at their efforts to establish a shared Jewish-Arab society based on a symbolic return to the Sephardi/Andalusian medieval legacy of Hebrew-Arabic bilingualism and a Judeo-Muslim joint cultural heritage. By exploring these contested representations of Sephardi identity and culture the book re-examines some fundamental issues that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century and which still accompany us to this day: the national conflict between Jews and Palestinians, the contacts and splits between Hebrew and Arab culture and the formation of ethnic hierarchies between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim. The book aims to contribute to the growing interest in modern Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewish history and to broaden the scope of “Jewish studies” beyond the European Jewish experience.

This study delves into Israeli political life in 1947–1952, focusing on several main emphases: the crucial moment when statehood was decided upon, the election campaign for the Constitutional Assembly (which transformed itself into the First Knesset), Israel’s struggle for de facto and de jure American recognition, and Chaim Weizmann’s term as Israel’s first president.

The book deals with challenges to the identity and stability of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. The first part of the book deals with the challenges that arise from all cultural groups in Israeli society: Arabs, migrant workers, religious Zionists, ultra-Orthodox, traditionalists, Olim from the former Soviet Union, Jews of Ethiopian origin, secular Jews. The second section deals with the ideological challenges that arise from the radical left and the religious and secular nationalist right. The third section deals with the significant issues in which there is a conflict between the Jewish and democratic identity of the State of Israel: the minority status of Arab Israeli citizens; Israeli control of Judea and Samaria; religious and state relations in Israel and the possibility of presenting an outline to strengthen Israel's Jewish and democratic identity at the same time.

In this book, the complicated relationship between religion and nation, as well as the relationship between nationalism and the process of secularization are discussed from a multidisciplinary perspective. In the last decades these issues attracted considerable research and public interest throughout the world. The book consists of articles from renowned scholars dealing with the relations between religion, secularism and nationalism in general, in prominent historical patterns as expressed in German, English, American, Turkish, Polish and Russian nationalism, and in the Jewish-Israeli context . The book's articles shed light on the phenomena of nationalism and secularization, in light of contemporary research on these two fascinating fields .

This book offers a new theoretical approach to the practice of organization consulting. Following Pierre Bourdieu's Theory of Practice, the new approach, "habitus-oriented organizational consulting", sees thinking and behavior a result of social dispositions (habitus) which develop in the interaction between practice and social structures such as culture, organizing metaphors, power relations and practical knowledge. The habitus-oriented organizational consulting incorporates the social with the individual through habitus .

The charm of Agnon’s work lies in an inebriating combination of the funny and the serious, in his famous irony that knocks down every unquestionable certainty and even its very self. Agnon’s humor eludes rhetoric borderlines, does not tolerate confines of a genre and disobeys simple interpretative solutions. In his new book, Roman Katsman suggests a new literary-anthropological method to break down Agnon’s complicated ‘laughter code’—a method based upon the cultural and semiotic interpretation of symbols. His reading of a wide selection of Agnon’s works, including his four major novels, reveals an entire world of his laughter symbols—a world of violence and sacredness, tragic bewilderment and eruption of new possibilities. In this world, arks fly, princes disappear, serpents eat their own tails, angels and demons dance, illusion turns into reality, and other foolish and cruel miracles occur. The research looks for a solution to the riddle: should Agnon's stories be considered serious or ironic, religious or secular, scornful or emphatic, archaic or modernist; or perhaps the reader is intended to swell with pathos or burst into laughter—and how come Agnon always has the last laugh?

Napoleon’s invasion of the Middle East and Palestine marks the beginning of the modern era in the region. The aim of this book is to trace the developments that led to the making of a new and separate geographical-political entity in the Middle East known as Eretz Israel, and to the establishment of the State of Israel within its boundaries. Thus, the time frame of this study spans from Napoleon’s invasion of Eretz Israel/Palestine in 1799 to 1948-1949, the years in which Israel was established. 'Eretz Israel' as the formal term for a separate geographical territory in the modern era first appeared in the early translations into Hebrew of the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, while in the original document the country was referred to as 'Palestine'. During the period of Ottoman rule the territory that would in time be called Eretz Israel/Palestine was not a separate political unit. For hundreds of years it was known as Terra Sancta, the Holy Land, or Palestine, a historical name stemming from that of the Roman province of Palaestina. Among Jews, the most widespread name during the first eight decades of the nineteenth century was 'Eretz Hakodesh' (the Holy Land). Use of 'Eretz Israel' increased only after the beginning of Zionist Aliyot. Had the Zionist movement not arisen, it is doubtful whether the development to which this study is devoted would have occurred at all. The motivating force behind that process is without doubt the Jewish Zionist element. That explains why Jews are the major protagonists in this book. Based on many written sources, it focuses on the major developments and events during a 150-year period that culminated in the establishment of Israel. Click here for the English edition, published by De Gruyter in collaboration with Magnes Press

The idea behind the book After the Bell: The World of Leisure for Children and Teenagers was born following a national case study, which was funded by the Chief Scientist of the Ministry of Education. Reviewing the literature for that study revealed a necessity for a comprehensive picture of children and adolescents' leisure world. This book was written to address this need. The uniqueness of the book lies in the fact that it combines theory, data and research findings from international and local settings related to children and adolescents. This book presents the essence of the literature regarding the nature of leisure, relevant theories, motives and factors that affect leisure choices, and perceptions of incentives and rewards obtained from participating in leisure activities. It concludes with a chapter on leisure education summarizing the knowledge on this topic as well as suggesting methods and means for effective leisure education. This book is intended for educational researchers, educators, student teachers, and school teachers. It is also suitable for decision-makers and educators in general as well as for anyone related to children and teenagers' well-being (e.g., educational counselors, social workers, psychologists, youth mentors, youth movement and community leaders).