Sovereignty in Miniature examines the formative period of Israel’s relations with the United Nation through the lens of Jerusalem’s history. According to the UN resolution, Jerusalem was to become a demilitarized international city. Yet following the results of the war, the city was divided de facto between Israel and Jordan. An exception was the exclave of Mount Scopus, which remained demilitarized under UN control. Drawing on documents from four continents, this study investigates Israel’s actions vis-à-vis Jordan, the UN and other international actors to assert its claim to sovereignty over its share of the exclave. The book uses the vantage point of the absolute exceptional – a demilitarized zone under UN control – to expose the Israeli understanding of sovereignty. Telling a largely forgotten story, Sovereignty in Miniature demonstrates how, once Israel recognized the potential significance of the Jewish institutions on Mount Scopus – the Hebrew University, National Library and Hadassah Hospital – it leveraged their ownership to consolidate its grip on the exclave. For similar reasons, Israel attempted with varying degrees of success to claim direct or indirect control over sites beyond its immediate possession, including the British military cemetery, the German Augusta Victoria compound and the Palestinian village of Issawiya.

In The Taste of Hidden Things Sara Sviri weaves a tapestry in which Sufi motifs and images are highlighted: the perfume of Attar's and Rumi's poetry, the boldness of Ibn al-Arabi's mystical speculation, the ecstatic experiences and dreams of old and modern seekers, and the richness of the Naqshbandi masters, past and present. A special place is given to al-Hakim at-Tirmidhi, a ninth century mystic from Central Asia. Many passages from his work, including his wife’s teaching dreams, are published here for the first time in Hebrew.

Against the backdrop of war and the political crisis in Israel, volume 73 of Iyyun turns a philosophical spotlight on the concept of law, which has become acute in contemporary Israeli discourse. The articles in this volume deal with a variety of systems of laws, which stress the fundamental difference between theoretical and normative laws, and the understanding that the validity of the law and its compulsory nature are heterogenic by nature.

When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfill Kafka’s last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted his life to championing Kafka’s work, rescuing his legacy from both obscurity and physical destruction. Nearly a century later, an international legal battle erupted to determine which country could claim ownership: the Jewish state, where Kafka dreamed of living, or Germany, where Kafka’s three sisters perished in the Holocaust? Benjamin Balint offers a gripping account of the controversial trial in Israeli courts—brimming with dilemmas legal, ethical, and political—that determined the fate of Kafka’s manuscripts.

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.

When is a state authorized to demand of its civilians to sacrifice their lives in war? When is it authorized to demand of its soldiers to kill soldiers of an opposing army in war? According to politico-liberal theory, a state is authorized to oblige its civilians to participate only in a defensive war. However, some groups in Israel believe that a state is authorized to demand of its civilians to participate in a war of necessity, such as a war rooted in religious elements.

This volume is the first attempt at broad and deep research from a gender perspective into the halakhic attitude towards abortion. With the argument that halakhah reflects the male outlook and the consequent gender biases taken as its starting point, it examines the influence of gender concepts on contemporary halakhic rulings about abortion, in light of bio-ethical, conservative, liberal, and feminist theories, as well as the ideas of feminist legal theory and the feminist critique of the reigning epistemology. The book analyzes the gender implications of the stringent halakhic rulings of the twentieth century and the way they construct women. It asserts that the halakhic stance that takes the ban on abortion as a Torah-based prohibition constricts the idea of the sanctity of life to biological terms only and thereby highlights the reduction of women to mainly an entity for reproduction. The research raises a number of questions that have never been asked before: How do the decision makers see the female essence in general, and specifically in the context of abortion? Where do the woman’s needs rank on the scale of the decision makers' considerations? Are women perceived as subjects with their own interests and will—or are these deemed irrelevant and appropriated for the benefit of the collective (the family, the Jewish people)? These questions serve as the foundation for the discussion in the present volume. Even though it deals mainly with abortion, I suggest that it be seen as demonstrating the masculine identity of the halakhic discourse in general.

Nietzsche is not ordinarily considered a philosopher of law, and despite the voluminous literature on almost every other aspect of his thought, little has been written about his reflections on the role of law in the social, intellectual, and personal spheres. Yet careful reading of his works reveals a significant body of critical reflection on socio-jurisprudential questions regarding the nature of law, obedience to the law, the criminal mindset, punishment, and more. The book presents for the first time, a comprehensive collection of aphorisms gathered from the entire Nietzschean corpus that explicitly or implicitly addresses the subject of law, arranged thematically, along with contextualization, annotation, and commentary. The book contains six chapters - The Self in the Presence of Law, The Criminal: A Profile, Causation, Action, Free Will, Punishment, Rights and Obligations, Religion and State. It thus provides a panoramic view of Nietzsche’s critical discourse on law and legal culture.

This book's aim is to assist school counselors with ethical and professional dilemmas in various complex situations. It is structured as a series of case studies written in collaboration with professionals and students, presenting versatile solutions based on the seven steps model detailed in this book. This pioneering book is designated for school counselors, school principals, teachers and parents.

This book focuses on space, borders and ethics in contemporary Hebrew prose written in the shadow of the Occupation and the Intifadas and reads a corpus of works written between 1987 and 2007. Israeli literary representations of the Occupation and the two Intifadas raise critical ethical questions about militarism, humanism, the nature of the State of Israel as a democracy, national identity and its borders, the nature of Zionist education, and the acknowledgment of the Other. The book deals with the portrait of the Israeli soldier, depicts the settings of the Occupied Territories, but also describes life in cities such as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It examines realistic writing as well as fantastic-grotesque, in the works of A. B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, Ronit Matalon, Asher Kravitz, Michal Govrin, and Orly Castel-Bloom and many others.

The Babylonian Talmud is the Jewish composition of greatest scope, and its influence on Jewish life is decisive. Jewish sages have devoted more time and energy to its study and halakhic interpretation than to any other book, including the Bible, to the extent that "talmud Torah," Torah study, is mainly perceived as the study of the Babylonian Talmud. Its academic study, in contrast, is still in its initial stages. Critical editions, with the text based on the best manuscripts and an exhaustive and thorough critical commentary, have been published of only a few of the thirty-seven tractates of the Babylonian Talmud. Central questions pertaining to the manner of the formulation of the Talmud, its redaction, and its transmission are still unresolved. This is different from the state of research of other Rabbinic works, the study of which has taken significant strides in recent decades. Critical, balanced, and cautious interpretation of talmudic sugyot (discursive units) will likely illustrate the treasures to be revealed by a scholarly reading of the Babylonian Talmud: illuminating new facets of which traditional study is unaware; the consistent presentation of its meticulous literary fashioning, its contentual depth, and the creative force embodied in this corpus. All these find expression even in sugyot that seem tenuous and bothersome to the traditional student. Tiqqun Olam (Repairing the World) seeks to advance the research of the Babylonian Talmud with an annotated edition of the fourth chapter of Tractate Gittin, which contains various regulations that were enacted "for tiqqun olam." This chapter was chosen for the wide variety of its topics and the redactive methods employed, and for the benefit to be gained from their critical analysis. The widespread study of this chapter in high schools and yeshivot also influences its selection, in the hope it will aid both students and scholars in highlighting his difficulties and in exposing the overt and covert trends of the Amoraim and the redactors of the sugyot. The first chapter of this book examines the meanings of the term "tiqqun olam" in the Mishnah and the Tosefta, along with the structure of the tannaitic units containing regulations "for the repairing of the world" in these two tannaitic works. The main body of the book contains a systematic discussion of these mishnayot and sugyot, using philological-historical methodology, alongside the literary analysis, which has not been sufficiently developed in talmudic research to now. The talmudic text is divided into forty-nine sugyot. For each the book offers a new text based on MS. Firkovich 187, a list of parallels, a selection of textual variants and discussion of their originality, and a commentary. The commentary includes a detailed explanation of the sugyot and an analysis of their strata. A unique attempt is made to glean from within the traces of the difficulties within the sugyot and the dissonance they exhibit the aims of the redactors, who frequently formulated new laws, while devoting sophisticated literary effort in order to mask these innovations, and to impart to the sugyah a harmonious composition. In this book, much effort was invested to reveal the plain meaning of the Talmud, employing the tools of scholarly research - which, for various reasons, are not integrated into the widespread study of the Talmud today. The book undertakes to open a window to the academic world and its methodology, to enable Talmud students to come to know the world of Babylonian Talmud scholarship that is both demanding and profound, but also intriguing, while offering new insights.