Following more than forty years of photographic storytelling of Jewish life around the world, Frederic Brenner spent three years exploring Berlin -- a stage for a vast spectrum of expressions and performances of Judaism. In his new photographic essay he portrays individuals -- newcomers, old timers, converts, immigrants and others - who have made Berlin their home or are just passing through. Via a series of fragmentary insights into this incubator of paradox and dissonance, he reflects on conflicting narratives of redemption and gives light to an ever so present absence. Like a shattered mirror, these images offer a polyphonic, sometimes bizarre and disturbing reflection of and on a topography of displacement and estrangement in contemporary human condition, far beyond the story of Berlin or of Jews.

A captivating journey through the hidden libraries of Jerusalem, where some of the world’s most enduring ideas were put into words

In this enthralling book, Merav Mack and Benjamin Balint explore Jerusalem’s libraries to tell the story of this city as a place where some of the world’s most enduring ideas were put into words. The writers of Jerusalem, although renowned the world over, are not usually thought of as a distinct school; their stories as Jerusalemites have never before been woven into a single narrative. Nor have the stories of the custodians, past and present, who safeguard Jerusalem’s literary legacies.

By showing how Jerusalem has been imagined by its writers and shelved by its librarians, Mack and Balint tell the untold history of how the peoples of the book have populated the city with texts. In their hands, Jerusalem itself—perched between East and West, antiquity and modernity, violence and piety—comes alive as a kind of labyrinthine library.