This volume of original essays, by some of Israel's most remarkable public and academic voices, offers a series of state-of-the art, accessible analyses of Israel's ever-evolving theatre of statecraft, public debates, and legal and cultural dramas, its deep divisions and - more surprisingly, perhaps - its internal affinities and common denominators.

This volume of original essays, by some of Israel's most remarkable public and academic voices, offers a series of state-of-the art, accessible analyses of Israel's ever-evolving theater of statecraft, public debates, and legal and cultural dramas, its deep divisions and--more surprisingly, perhaps--its internal affinities and common denominators. Contributors: Fania Oz-Salzberger, Yedidia Z. Stern, Ayman K. Agbaria, Aviad Bakshi, Ariel L. Bendor, Ruth Gavison, Michael M. Karayanni, David Passig, Avi Sagi, Gideon Sapir, Anita Shapira, Daniel Statman, Gadi Taub, Shira Wolosky, Alexander Yakobson, Yaffa Zilbershats.

Compiled by a group of distinguished international scholars including John Pocock, Diana Pinto, Gordon Schochet, and co-editors Thomas Maissen and Fania Oz-Salzberger, this volume offers a threefold intellectual juncture. Its contributors analyze the liberal-republican tension field in a novel way, juxtaposing early modern political thought with twenty-first century political concerns. The volume conjoins Israeli political scholarship with its European and American counterparts, mapping differentials and commonalities. Topics include Israeli-Palestinian relations, law and justice, commerce and citizenship, and post-holocaust historical memory - all within the pioneering context of early modern political concepts and their contemporary significance. Of interest to researchers and advanced students of intellectual history, political philosophy, political science, international relations, European Studies, and Jewish and Israel studies.

A celebrated novelist and an acclaimed historian of ideas, father and daughter, unravel the chain of words at the core of Jewish life, history, and culture Why are words so important to so many Jews? Novelist Amos Oz and historian Fania Oz-Salzberger roam the gamut of Jewish history to explain the integral relationship of Jews and words. Through a blend of storytelling and scholarship, conversation and argument, father and daughter tell the tales behind Judaism's most enduring names, adages, disputes, texts, and quips. These words, they argue, compose the chain connecting Abraham with the Jews of every subsequent generation. Framing the discussion within such topics as continuity, women, timelessness, and individualism, Oz and Oz-Salzberger deftly engage Jewish personalities across the ages, from the unnamed, possibly female author of the Song of Songs through obscure Talmudists to contemporary writers. They suggest that Jewish continuity, even Jewish uniqueness, depends not on central places, monuments, heroic personalities, or rituals but rather on written words and an ongoing debate between the generations. Full of learning, lyricism, and humor, Jews and Words offers an extraordinary tour of the words at the heart of Jewish culture and extends a hand to the reader, any reader, to join the conversation.

Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) was one of the central figures in the Scottish Enlightenment. His Essay on the History of Civil Society (first published in 1767) is a bold and novel attempt to reclaim the tradition of active citizenship and apply it to the modern state. Drawing on such diverse sources as classical authors and contemporary travel literature, Ferguson offers a complex model of historical advance which challenges both Hume's and Smith's embrace of modernity and the primitivism of Rousseau. Ferguson combines a subtle analysis of the emergence of modern commercial society with a critique of its abandonment of civic and communal virtues. Central to Ferguson's theory of citizenship are the themes of conflict, play, political participation and military valour. His fascination with the theory of unintended consequences as a model of historical causality does not deter him from insisting on the irreplaceable value of individual, public-minded members of political society.

This is a study of the transmission of political ideas across languages and cultures, and in particular of a notably fruitful encounter between two distinct branches of eighteenth-century political discourse: the reception of Scottish civic ideas, developed most powerfully in the works of the Edinburgh historian-philosopher Adam Ferguson, by Geman intellectuals of the Enlightenment and Romantic eras. Fania Oz-Salzberger's detailed and challenging analysis places Ferguson in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment, and explores the impact of his theories on German Enlightenment thinkers. She traces the passage of Ferguson's civic humanism across linguistic and cultural borders, and highlights the linguistic stumbling-blocks and conceptual tensions that resulted. Dr Oz-Salzberger argues that there resulted a complex and largely unintentional shift of Scottish civic concepts into a German vocabulary of spiritual perfection and inner life, and that the misreading of Ferguson and other Scottish thinkers contributed much to the richness of German intellectual life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (first published in 1767) is a classic of the Scottish--and European--Enlightenment. Drawing on such diverse sources as classical authors and contemporary travel literature, Ferguson combines a subtle analysis of modern commercial society with a critique of its abandonment of civic and communal virtues. Central themes in Ferguson's theory of citizenship are conflict, play, political participation and military valor. The Essay is a bold and novel attempt to reclaim the tradition of active citizenship in the modern state.