The Encyclopedia of Modern Jewish Culture is an extensively updated revision of the very successful Companion to Jewish Culture published in 1989 and has now been updated throughout. Experts from all over the world contribute entries ranging from 200 to 1000 words broadly, covering the humanities, arts, social sciences, sport and popular culture, and 5000-word essays contextualize the shorter entries, and provide overviews to aspects of culture in the Jewish world. Ideal for student and general readers, the articles and biographies have been written by scholars and academics, musicians, artists and writers, and the book now contains up-to-date bibliographies, suggestions for further reading, comprehensive cross referencing, and a full index. This is a resource, no student of Jewish history will want to go without.

The Encyclopedia of Modern Jewish Culture is an extensively updated revision of the very successful Companion to Jewish Culture published in 1989 and has now been updated throughout.

Experts from all over the world contribute entries ranging from 200 to 1000 words broadly, covering the humanities, arts, social sciences, sport and popular culture, and 5000-word essays contextualize the shorter entries, and provide overviews to aspects of culture in the Jewish world.

Ideal for student and general readers, the articles and biographies have been written by scholars and academics, musicians, artists and writers, and the book now contains up-to-date bibliographies, suggestions for further reading, comprehensive cross referencing, and a full index.

This is a resource, no student of Jewish history will want to go without.

Yehuda Amichai is Israel's foremost poet as well as a significant novelist and dramatist. He has received every major Israeli prize for literature, and his poetry has been translated into over twenty languages. Amichai has served as poet-in-residence at major universities across the United States and has been a Sequent visitor to the University of Oxford. In this volume, the world's leading authorities on Amichai explore all the major genres and themes of his work. The result is an important book that is a unique and comprehensive scholarly overview of a major twentieth-century literary figure. It will prove especially valuable to those teaching modern Hebrew literature at English-language universities.

First published in 1994. This volume, dedicated to Dr David Patterson, founding President of the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies, takes as its theme Jewish education and learning throughout the ages. But it is the 'Academy' - interpreted here to mean an institution of Judaic scholarship - which dominates this collection of essays. For almost three thousand years centres of Jewish learning have flourished in many parts of the world. This volume discusses these institutions from biblical times to the present. From the time of the Mishnaic Academy at Yavneh, established in the first century CE, the academies were more than schools of higher religious education. They incorporated rational analysis of the scriptures, the natural sciences and other secular studies. Some of the most celebrated academies, such as those in Cairo and Tunisia, and later in the Iberian Peninsula were of a very high intellectual order, sometimes superior to the great Christian universities. It was at these institutions that the great Jewish legal and literary works were written and completed. This collection of essays has been written by outstanding scholars who have been associated with David Patterson and the Oxford Centre. The essays explore the nature and function of the 'Jewish Academies' in the broadest sense, the leading personalities associated with them and their social, cultural and moral effect on the Jewish communities of their day.

This collection brings together discussions of the way in which Muslim and Jewish beliefs and practices are represented in modern literary texts of poetry, fiction and drama. The chapters collected here consider elements of the expression of Judaism and Islam in modern literature. Key topics such as religious ideas and teachings, aspects of mysticism, the tenets of religion, uses made of sacred texts, religion and popular culture and reflections of religious controversies are covered. While there is an embodied comparative element to the chapters, the essays are not confined by comparisons and cover a wide range of the literary expression of religious issues.

First published in 1994. This volume, dedicated to Dr David Patterson, founding President of the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies, takes as its theme Jewish education and learning throughout the ages. But it is the 'Academy' - interpreted here to mean an institution of Judaic scholarship - which dominates this collection of essays. For almost three thousand years centres of Jewish learning have flourished in many parts of the world. This volume discusses these institutions from biblical times to the present. From the time of the Mishnaic Academy at Yavneh, established in the first century CE, the academies were more than schools of higher religious education. They incorporated rational analysis of the scriptures, the natural sciences and other secular studies. Some of the most celebrated academies, such as those in Cairo and Tunisia, and later in the Iberian Peninsula were of a very high intellectual order, sometimes superior to the great Christian universities. It was at these institutions that the great Jewish legal and literary works were written and completed. This collection of essays has been written by outstanding scholars who have been associated with David Patterson and the Oxford Centre. The essays explore the nature and function of the 'Jewish Academies' in the broadest sense, the leading personalities associated with them and their social, cultural and moral effect on the Jewish communities of their day.

This book brings together a collection of 16 essays that explore Jewish communities in North Africa, Turkey and Iraq. The discussions are located primarily in the 20th century but essays also examine the Jewish community in 16th-century Istanbul, and in early modern Morocco. Topics include traumatic departures of communities from countries of centuries-old Jewish residence, and relocations; pilgrimages to holy sites by Mizrahi Jews in Israel; resonances of Shabbetai Zevi in Turkey and Morocco; "otherness" and the nature of homeland; the Sephardi culinary heritage as realised in the cookbooks of Claudia Roden; sites of memory, such as Kuzguncuk in Turkey; and a controversial view of the exclusions and erasures that Arabized Jews have undergone. In this unique collection a major, but not exclusive, theme is that of the instability of memory, and the attempt to understand the interactions between memory and history as Jews recount their experiences of living in, and often leaving, their past homelands. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies.

This book brings together a collection of 16 essays that explore Jewish communities in North Africa, Turkey and Iraq. The discussions are located primarily in the 20th century but essays also examine the Jewish community in 16th-century Istanbul, and in early modern Morocco. Topics include traumatic departures of communities from countries of centuries-old Jewish residence, and relocations; pilgrimages to holy sites by Mizrahi Jews in Israel; resonances of Shabbetai Zevi in Turkey and Morocco; "otherness" and the nature of homeland; the Sephardi culinary heritage as realised in the cookbooks of Claudia Roden; sites of memory, such as Kuzguncuk in Turkey; and a controversial view of the exclusions and erasures that Arabized Jews have undergone. In this unique collection a major, but not exclusive, theme is that of the instability of memory, and the attempt to understand the interactions between memory and history as Jews recount their experiences of living in, and often leaving, their past homelands. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies.

Yehuda Amichai is Israel's foremost poet as well as a significant novelist and dramatist. He has received every major Israeli prize for literature, and his poetry has been translated into over twenty languages. Amichai has served as poet-in-residence at major universities across the United States and has been a Sequent visitor to the University of Oxford. In this volume, the world's leading authorities on Amichai explore all the major genres and themes of his work. The result is an important book that is a unique and comprehensive scholarly overview of a major twentieth-century literary figure. It will prove especially valuable to those teaching modern Hebrew literature at English-language universities.

A large number of political plays have been written in Israel over the past fifty years, and they are perceived, by audiences and critics alike, as major interventions in the country's ongoing political debates; the result is that Israeli drama is at the centre of many public controversies. In this first full-length study of Israeli political drama Glenda Abramson shows that during the early years of the State of Israel most of its intellectuals were identified with the 'official' state interpretation of Zionism. After the Six-Day War in 1967 an influential group of playwrights, concerned with the evolution of Zionist ideology in the modern nation state, began to question the ethical basis of Zionism. Hanokh Levin, Yehoshua Sobol, Yosef Mundi, Miriam Kainy, Amos Kenan and others have gone on to examine Zionism as it affects contemporary Israeli society.

A large number of political plays have been written in Israel over the past fifty years, and they are perceived, by audiences and critics alike, as major interventions in the country's ongoing political debates; the result is that Israeli drama is at the centre of many public controversies. In this first full-length study of Israeli political drama Glenda Abramson shows that during the early years of the State of Israel most of its intellectuals were identified with the 'official' state interpretation of Zionism. After the Six-Day War in 1967 an influential group of playwrights, concerned with the evolution of Zionist ideology in the modern nation state, began to question the ethical basis of Zionism. Hanokh Levin, Yehoshua Sobol, Yosef Mundi, Miriam Kainy, Amos Kenan and others have gone on to examine Zionism as it affects contemporary Israeli society.

Based on the Mason Lectures delivered at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in the winter of 1995, the ten essays in this volume demonstrate the function and dynamic effect Jewish mythologies in social, political, and psychological life.
Eli Yassif's introduction illustrates the complex relationship between myth and ritual in modern Jewish culture. In a separate essay, he focuses on the ancient Jewish tale of the Golem, a myth that presents an exemplary test case for the exploration of cultural continuity. Using the testimonies of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe to Britain and the battle on the plain of Latrun in the Israeli War of Independence, David Cesarani and Anita Shapira demonstrate that the process of creating myth is related in one way or another to attempts by specific social and ethnic groups to shape their collective memory. Along these lines, Milton Shain and Sally Frankental interrogate the view that during the apartheid period in South African history, South African Jewry operated on a higher moral plane than most other white South Africans. And while Nurith Gertz examines the male superhero that dominated the early national Zionist cinema and reflected the center of gravity in the Zionist myth, Dan Urian analyzes two Israeli plays produced in the 1990s that examine the myth of the biblical Sarah, rewritten from a feminist perspective.
Other essays examine widely held cultural beliefs of contemporary Western Jewry. Jonathan Webber questions whether memory is an essentially Jewish value and remembrance a Jewish moral duty. Tudor Parfitt explores Western and Israeli perceptions of the Yemenite Jews, and Sylvie Anne Goldberg, in examining the evolving role of the "chevrah kaddisha" in Prague, discusses changes in perceptions of communal institutions and traditional and modern Jewish attitudes with regard to death. Finally, Matthew Olshan offers an analysis of Kafka's animal fables as parables for the Jewish response to tradition.

Almost one and a quarter million Jewish soldiers took part in the First World War, spread through the armies on both sides of the conflict. Their numbers were more or less in proportion to the Jewish populations in the countries involved, and sometimes even greater. There is comparatively little writing about this experience in Hebrew. Those who did write novels, poetry, stories, memoirs and diaries in Hebrew were either serving soldiers on the Eastern Front and in Palestine, or civilians who were caught up in the war in one way or another. Their work reflected not only the tribulations of the trenches, but also the hardship suffered by civilians. Most of the Hebrew writers in Europe, including Saul Tchernichowsky, U.Z. Greenberg and Yehuda Ya'ari, confront the Russian pogroms in their work. Starvation, illness and banishment were the lot of the Jews in Jerusalem and the Lower Galilee, and the appalling situation of the Jewish refugees was represented by memoirists, journalists and fiction writers such as Aharon Reuveni, L.A. Orloff and Y.H. Brenner, all caught up in the trials of the wartime yishuv. Woven into their views of the war is a portrait of the major transition taking place in Jewish political culture at the time, and their growing identification with Zionism. Interesting aspects emerge from these texts: Jewish nationalism became a crucial theme in view of what the Jews considered to be the permanent setting of Europe's sun. The texts raise the question of genre: fiction in relation to autobiography. Also the trauma of the war led to an abandonment of the prevailing literary styles and structures, and the Hebrew writers adopted some of the new modernist trends, Expressionism in particular.

Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures is a unique comparative study of related literatures. It cuts across traditions, ages and cultures. Jewish literature goes back over two thousand years and the first text of Muslim literature, the Qur'an, took form in the early 7th century. The editors of this book focus on the last two hundred years of the historical spectrum of Muslim and Jewish literature, bringing together high-quality contributions with regard to the time frame and subject matter concerned. Religion and religiosity in the two forms of literature are reflected upon - with topics including religious ideas and actions, religion's teachings, mysticism, religious identity, uses made of sacred texts, controversies and religious polemics, the relationship of religion and history. Genres considered are poetry, prose and drama. This is the first book-length study to contrast and analyse the two literary traditions in detail.