Rabbi Judah Leib Alter of Ger, a famed nineteenth-century Hasidic master, wrote an influential collection of Hebrew homilies. But it seems that R. Judah Leib’s sermons were also transcribed by his students, some of whom recorded their teacher’s words in the original Yiddish rather than Hebrew translation. This monograph is based on a newly-discovered Yiddish manuscript of sixty pages. It presents a synoptic edition of the Yiddish text alongside the Hebrew version, thus enabling comparison of the witnesses and demonstrating the development of the various texts. The introduction uses this manuscript to explore broader historical and theoretical issues such as the relationship between written texts and oral culture, the development of written Yiddish, the nature and boundaries of translation, and the complex pathways of transmission from teachers to their students.

These two collections of Yiddish letters date from the second half of the 17th century and are being published here in full for the first time. The opening five-letter collection was archived together with extensive information about three Jews from Hamburg-Altona, who had been arrested and investigated in Copenhagen in August 1666. The second collection consists of eighteen letters exchanged between Hamburg-Altona and Copenhagen in January 1678. They concern the family and business affairs of a range of people, among them some of Glikl Hamel’s relatives, business associates and acquaintances. Together, the two collections provide a wealth of illuminating new details about the economic, cultural, social, and family life of early modern Ashkenazi Jews in Northern Europe, and also shed light on the practice of Yiddish letter-writing at the time. The English section consists of an introduction followed by a synopsis of each letter, while the Hebrew section comprises a transcription of the original texts as well as their facsimile images.

Articles: Yona Sabar | Grandpa Ephraim and Grandpa Menashe: Two Opposite Characters, Based on Personal and Communal Childhood Memories Dov Cohen | ‘The Holy Island of Chios’: New Findings Concerning the Purported Burial Place of R. YaꜤakov ben Asher (BaꜤal Ha-Turim) on the Island of Chios and Pilgrimages to His Gravesite Itamar Drori | Rabbi Israele Costa’s ‘Miḳweh Yisrael’ (1851): The Beginning of the Adapted Jewish Story for Youth Carmela Abdar | Reflections on Magical Texts on Jewelry and Amulets of Jewish Women and Children from Yemen and Habban Tom Fogel | JaꜤle – Yemenite Nostalgia in a Jerusalem Café Jacqueline Laznow | ‘I Recognized the Holidays According to the Food’: Tradition and Memory in the Jewish Community of Argentina Reviews: Eli Yassif | The First Book of Jewish Jokes: The Collection of L. M. Büschenthal, ed. Elliott Oring, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018 Dudu Rotman | Vered Tohar, The Book of Tales, Sermons and Legends. Anthology of Hebrew Stories from the Print Era: An Annotated Edition, Tel Aviv: Hakibbuz Hameuchad 2017, 201 pp.

Smocza is the biography of a street in Warsaw that was completely destroyed in World War II. The book reveals the story of a Jewish microcosm between two world wars. It is based on historical and literary sources that piece together a multicultural mixture of a society in transition, where orthodox Jews, Bundists, Zionists, shoemakers, tailors, poets, actors, prostitutes, and others lived side by side.

Articles: Haim Weiss | ‘From That Hour the Doom Was Sealed’: On Class Reversals in the ‘Legends of Destruction’ Vered Tohar | ‘Rabbi Hanina and the Frog’: An Ancient Ashkenazi story Adapted for Children by Asher Barash Lital Lieberman-Avital | ‘Take the Illness and Give the Medicine’: Removal by Salt – Traditional Women’s Healing Practice on a Socio-Cultural Borderline Yuval Harari | Wonders and Sorceries in Yeruham: A Magical-Political Rashomon Dalia Marx | Welcoming the Sabbath in the Kibbutzim: Secular Religiosity Narmina Abdulaev | Narration Surfing: Folklore Published on the Internet and Its Analysis Shany Kotler-Fux | ‘Hitler-Pants’ Parodies: Folklore in Israel’s Virtual Sphere Reviews: Aharon Maman | [Review of:] Yosef Tobi and Tsivia Tobi, Judeo-Arabic Literature in Tunisia, 1850–1950, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2014, 367 pp. Jacqueline Laznow | [Review of:] Tsivia Tobi, From Bride to Daughter-in-Law: The World of Jewish Women in Southern Tunisia and Its Reflection in Popular Literature, Jerusalem 2016, 344 + [iv] pp. [Hebrew] Tzila Zan-Bar Zur | [Review of:] Idit Pintel-Ginsberg, The Angel and the Tcholent: Food Representations in Folktales, Haifa 2016, 176 pp. [Hebrew] English Abstracts

Folk-culture is typically associated with continuity; how can one engage folk-culture in situations of destruction and extermination - the reality Zionist folklorists confronted facing the Shoah? With the first bits of information regarding the destruction in Europe, many of them assembled in Tel Aviv to form the Yeda Am folklore society; in tandem, the Institute for Jewish Folklore was formed in Jerusalem. The two competing organizations dealt with fragmentary lives in the Diaspora in different ways, in their quest to find new meanings from them. This book examines Zionist folkloristics at this dire hour from a perspective that views fractured reality as a fundamental principle in studying cultures in general, by combining approaches from folklore studies and science and technology studies. This book undermines the distinction between individualist scholarly knowledge and collective folklore by examining everyday scholarly habits: Archival practices, the use of letterheads, jubilee celebrations of scholars as well as practices of editing and laying out scholarly publications. The tension between national culture and ethnic cultures is revealed in new ways, as is the relationship between avant-garde and folklore studies.

Replacing Myself with Myself is the fifth selection of Michael Handelzalts's weekly columns, written and published in the Haaretz newspaper between June 2005 and November 2008. Anchoring his amused musings in the headlines, he ponders, among other things, on the kind of fruit with which the Snake and Eve had tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden, on the virtues of good spirit, and on other matters, most of them highly immaterial. A selection of his columns, Histoires d’en lire, was published in French in 2001 by Gallimard.

There over 1,300 species of bats in the world, which constitute one-third of the total sum of mammals in Israel. Most people are not aware of them and their fantastic ways of living, because contrary to other mammals, bats do not walk or swim (although they are capable of doing both), but rather fly actively. They are also nocturnal, and unlike most mammals and birds their main sense is not sight but hearing. In order to find their way around, bats omit calls and listen to the echoes they produce in order to navigate. This is also how they find their prey, which is comprised of a variety of animals such as insects, scorpions, fish, frogs, and toads, as well as nectar and fruit. Each species of bats has a special diet and unique behavioural , anatomical and physiological adaptations for this purpose. Bats are beneficial to people by pollinating flowers of many plants, consuming enormous quantities of insects that spread malaria and damage agricultural crops and producing valuable fertilizer-guano. In spite of these benefits, people around the world have created many superstitious beliefs and legends about bats and their behavior. This book describes the biology of bats and their complex relationships with humanity.

The Stage as a Temporary Home : On Dzigan and Shumacher's Theater (1927-1980) has been designated as the winner of the prestigious Shapiro Award for 2019 for the best book in Israel Studies The Stage as a Temporary Home takes us through the fascinating stages in the life and career of the duo Shimen Dzigan and Isroel Shumacher , over the course of half a century - from the beginning of their work at the Ararat avant-garde Yiddish theater in Łodz, Poland, and to their Warsaw theater, where they produced bold, groundbreaking political satire. The book further discusses their wanderings through the Soviet Union during the Second World War and their attempt to revive Jewish culture in Poland after the Holocaust, and finally describes their arrival in Israel, first as guest performers and later as permanent residents. Despite the restrictions on Yiddish actors in Israel, the duo insisted on performing in their own language and succeeded in translating the new Israeli reality into unique and timely satire. In the 1950s, they voiced a political and cultural critique of a kind that was not heard on any of the Hebrew stages. After they parted ways, and following the death of Shumacher in 1961, Dzigan continued to perform on his own and with other Israeli artists until his death in 1980 . The book is based on rare recordings, transcriptions, programs, personal diaries, letters, photographs, oral testimonies, and critical articles, all of which come together to create the first critical portrait of this extraordinary duo. The book also examines their art, the connection between theater and politics, and the complex relationship between majority culture and minority language . The study includes several valuable indexes: of titles of programs and plays, of the artists who participated in them, of writers and the drafts they wrote, of actors and the programs in which they participated, and a general name index. The book also includes a facsimile of the manuscript Der Nayer Dybbuk [The New Dybbuk]. Click here for the English edition, published by De Gruyter in collaboration with Magnes Press

The heroes of this book are the rabbis of small and medium-sized communities in Eastern Europe. Who were these rabbis? What were their training processes? Did they get their job because of their scholastic or rhetorical skills, because of their family ties, or because they had the capital to buy this position? Did they win "permanence" or was the threat of dismissal constantly hovering over their heads? How were their terms of employment and wages determined, and what was their economic situation? Were they perceived as spiritual leaders? What was their relationship with the community's power centers? How did they navigate between their duties as halakhic authorities and their desire to engage in learning and teaching? The book attempts to answer these questions based on an examination of the world of over a thousand rabbis. Click here for the English edition, published by De Gruyter in collaboration with Magnes Press

The book includes articles, documentation and a catalog of the Ethnographic Department of the Museum of the Contemporary. It is the fruit of a long-term project carried out at the Mamuta Art and Research Center and curated by the Sala-Manca Group. It contains articles by Yoram Bilu, Rachel Elior, Freddie Rokem and Diego Rotman on the Dybbuk; by Galit Hasan-Rokem and Daphna Ben-Shaul on Sukkot, and on the Eternal Sukkah project; by Shalom Sabar on electric Shabbat candles, and by Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman on different art projects. The book also includes documentation of artworks and a project by Itamar Mendes-Flohr, Yeshaiahu Rabinowtz, Ktura Manor, Hannan Abu Huseein, Reuven Zehavi, Sala-Manca, Samuel Rotman, Shira Borer, Nir Yahalom, Chen Cohen, Pessi Komar, Adi Kaplan, and Shahar Carmel, among others.

Articles Dina Stein - Rabbinic Tales in the Israel Folktale Archives: Holy Men and Tricksters Osnat Sharon - Elephant, Leviathan and Nineveh the Great City: Sibbuv Rabbi Petachia and Midrash Yonah, Printed Side by Side Nina Pinto-Abecasis - The Piropo as a Bridge between Cultures in Tetuan (Northern Morocco) Adam Ratzon - Al ma yismash kbiru , ya alt tadbiru [Whoever would not listen to elders will not manage in life]: A Literary-Cultural Reading of the Proverbs and Personal Narratives of an Egyptian-Israeli Woman Jacqueline Laznow - ‘I didn’t know I wanted to be a rabbi, there was no name for what I wanted to be’: Life Stories of Women Rabbis Living in Israel Towards a History of Folklore Meir Nizri - Israel and the Sabbath as Bride and Groom in Various Sabbath Hymns