The present volume is the first collection of studies by Charles Mopsik to be published in English. It contains the contents of two separate volumes published in French, with an additional study which was published elsewhere. These seven studies focus on the function and character of sex and gender in Jewish Mysticism: (1) The Primeval Couple and the Primordial One in the Religions of the World; (2) The Masculine Woman; (3) Creation and Procreation: Beyond the Bounds of the Body - From the Hebrew Bible to Medieval Jewish Mysticism; (4) Genesis 1: 26-27: The Image of God, Man and Wife, and the Status of Women in the writings of the Early Kabbalists; (5) Genesis 2:24: 'They Become One Flesh': Several Interpretations by Medieval Jewish Mystics; (6) Union and Unity in the Kabbalah: The Proclamation of the Divine Unity and the Male/Female Couple; (7) The Secret of the Marriage of David and Batsheva.

At the age of five, Zoltan Zinn-Collis was torn from his home in Slovakia and cast into the deepest horrors of a Nazi concentration camp. In Bergen-Belsen concentration camp he survived the inhuman brutality of the Ss guards, the ravages of near starvation, disease, and squalor. All but one of his family died there, his mother losing her life on the very day the British finally marched into the camp. Discovered by a Red Cross nurse who described him as 'an enchanting scrap of humanity', Zoltan was brought to Ireland and adopted by one of the liberators, Dr Bob Collis, who raised him as his own son on Ireland's east coast. Now aged 65, Zoltan is ready to speak. His story is one of deepest pain and greatest joy. Zoltan tells how he lost one family and found another; of how, escaping from the ruins of a broken Europe, he was able to build himself a life – a life he may never have had.

Newsweek' s Jerusalem bureau chief Joshua Hammer arrived in the West Bank in October 2000 -- just after Ariel Sharon made his inflammatory visit to the Haram al-Sharif, otherwise known as the Temple Mount. Sharon's trip ignited the worst violence the Middle East had seen in decades. Overnight, the peace process gave way to an ever-worsening cycle of attack, revenge, and retaliation, destabilizing the entire region, killing thousands, and culminating in Israel's reoccupation of Palestinian towns in 2002. A Season in Bethlehem is the story of one West Bank town's two-year disintegration, as witnessed by a reporter who was there from the beginning. Woven together from Hammer's own firsthand reportage plus hundreds of interviews, it follows a dozen characters whose lives collided on the streets of this biblical city. They include a Bedouin tribesman who rose to become the commander of Bethlehem's most feared and brutal gang of gunmen; the beleaguered governor, an opponent of the al-Aqsa intifada, who believed he had a mandate to stop the violence, only to discover that Yasser Arafat was undermining him; a Christian businesman who watched helplessly as his community was squeezed between Muslim militants and the Israeli army; an eighteen-year-old female honors student turned suicide bomber; and an Israeli reservist, son of a leader of the Peace Now movement, who wrestled with his left-wing convictions as he rode to battle through the predawn streets. The narrative reaches a climax with a moment-by-moment recreation of the epochal drama that drew many of these characters together: the thirty-nine-day siege of the Church of the Nativity. A clear-eyed chronicle of deepening chaos and violence, in which Hammer lets the opposing sides speak for themselves, A Season in Bethlehem is both a timely and timeless look at how longstanding religious and political tensions finally boiled over in a place of profound resonance: the birthplace of Jesus.

Here for the first time is a stirring collection of 110 rare songs from the Holocaust in sixteen languages with singable English translations, songs of resistance, despair, rage, hope, and even humor, written in the face of utter evil. The very existence of these songs raises haunting questions. Who composed them? Who sang them? Who listened? The lyrics, along with extensive historical notes and insightful survivor testimony in this groundbreaking volume, provide moving answers. Musicologist Jerry Silverman has compiled an expansive collection of Holocaustera songs-in Yiddish, German, Hebrew, Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian, Ladino, Serbo-Croatian, Greek, Norwegian, Czech, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, and Englishwhich he situates within a vivid historical framework. This volume comprises then work of concentration camp prisoners and inhabitants of the ghettos of Eastern Europe as well as subversive European cabaret music, anti-Fascist anthems inspired by the Spanish Civil War, Red Army songs, and songs of Resistance fighters. Silverman conducted exhaustive research that included interviews with survivors and visits to international archives. In some cases, where the original music has been lost, he has set the words to music usingmtraditional melodies or his original compositions. Included are songs of prewar Germany, of ghettos and camps during the height of the murderous "Final Solution;' and of postwar reflection by such balladeers as Pete Seeger, Janis Ian, Si Kahn, and Tom Paxton.

Text: English (translation) Original Language: Polish

Germany's changing historical memory of World War II and its aftermath, as reflected in the official and public remembrance of the German war dead, exposes an unresolved tension between a discourse of guilt and a discourse of national suffering and victimization. In Germany, under the auspices of the Allied occupation, remembrance honored the victims of the Nazis and those who had fought against the regime. After the partition of Germany, a new culture emerged, memorializing the civilian dead and fallen German soldiers. Despite the fierce ideological rivalry between East and West Germany, however, certain similarities existed. The political leaderships who shaped these cultures ceased to confront their citizens with the question of guilt and instead depicted the German people as victims. In Guilt, Suffering, and Memory —whose Israeli edition was awarded the Jacob Bahat Prize for best original book—Gilad Margalit discusses the official remembrance ceremonies for the German war dead, the memorials erected to commemorate them, the public discussions of these disparate cultures, and their treatment in postwar German literature and film.

The fullest account to date of German Jews' struggle for economic survival under the Third Reich.

Sent by his father to observe and evaluate his uncle's South Carolina rice plantation, New York Jew Nathaniel Pereira is horrified by his first brush with the brutal realities of slavery, especially the irony of how a people who themselves lived in bondage for so long could now own slaves. His moral dilemma becomes even more complex after he becomes captivated by Liza, a beautiful slave who harbors a shattering secret.

In the wake of the Hamas attack of October 7 and the Israeli response, historian and current affairs commentator Yakov Rabkin brings together his writings that shed light on the violence in Palestine since the creation of the State of Israel. For decades, Yakov Rabkin has drawn attention to the danger Israel has posed to both Palestinians and Jews, both in Israel and in other countries. Far from protecting Jews, the State of Israel has contributed to creating and aggravating a situation that over time has become increasingly intractable. The author describes Palestine as it was on the eve of Zionist colonisation, recalling how Jews initially reacted to the Zionist movement and its goals. He highlights how Zionism, disdaining Jewish tradition, created a "new Hebrew man" steeped in a powerful mix of victimhood and exclusive nationalism and therefore oblivious to the fate of the Palestinians. He reminds us that Jewish identity is traditionally based on a spiritual commitment open to all races, the concept of Israel denoting not so much a geographical region but a community of believers. A return to the Land of Israel achieved by political and military means is antithetic to the Jewish tradition. In fact, Zionism has well-documented Protestant and Anglo-Saxon roots, which explains the massive support Israel enjoys among millions of Evangelical Christians around the world, and, on the other hand, why Jews have played such a prominent role in the pro-Palestinian protests sparked by violence against Gaza. At the same time, it shows how since 1967, there emerged a new national Judaism to provide religious legitimacy to the Zionist state. Avoiding polemics and sensationalism, this book allows the reader to reconsider the nature of the Israel/Palestine tragedy that has spilled over beyond Israel/Palestine. The book is rather short and targets the general reader. It requires no previous expertise in the subject, yet shows deeper and less known aspects of the conflict and, thus, opens perspectives on novel approaches to peace. This book has also been published in French, Japanese and Spanish language editions

Berlin--"East" and "West," day and of course night--throughout the 80s before the Wall came down. In the eyes of an American philosophy student. And Jewish, which makes for moments at once awkward, poignant, resonant, unspoken, crass, funny, and always lurking. Most of all, Susan Neiman can write, as borne out again by her books to follow this debut. Here, we live the Reagan years with her--when a city was divided, America the occupier, and the cigarettes not named "Salem" because it sounds too Jewish. Peter Becker folded an easel in the corner to make a table. He brought cold cuts and bread and asked me what I thought of his paintings. Later I would learn that people here always ask you what you think of their paintings, and that it's wrong just to say you find them interesting, but perfectly alright to say you find them awful. . . . You come from a Jewish family, don't you?" asked Becker. "Yes," I said. "It doesn't matter," said the other painter. Doesn't matter? To whom?

In drama and in musical comedy, in popular song and in symphonic music, in movies and in literature, Jews have contributed to American culture in the 20th century to a degree out of all proportion to their numbers. But does this vast creative output coalesce into something identifiable as an American Jewish culture? Stephen J. Whitfield answers this question with a resounding "yes!" Whitfield focuses on areas where the specifically Jewish contribution has been little explored. He surveys such fields as popular music, musical theater, and drama, focusing on key figures from Jerome Kern and the Gershwins to Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins; Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland to Irving Berlin and Bob Dylan; Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman to David Mamet and Wendy Wasserstein. At the same time, Whitfield tackles the complex issue of race and American Jewish culture, tracing the extensive interpenetrations of Jewish and African American music. He also offers a stunning examination of Jewish American representations of the Holocaust, focusing on stage and film adaptations of Anne Frank's Diary and on Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. In a poignant, final chapter, Whitfield ponders the future of American Jewish culture after a century of assimilationist pressure and mainstream success. The distinctive culture that he has traced through the 20th century, Whitfield concludes, may finally become submerged and lost. Only a renewed emphasis on Judaism itself, he believes, offers the hope for American Jews to maintain the dual cultural identities that they have so long succeeded in nurturing --

Beginning with the development of the language itself, the author traces the literature from the Middle Ages to the present throughout the Jewish world.

Theodor Herzl was born in 1860 in Budapest. He developed a successful career in journalism. As the Paris correspondent for Neue Freie Presse, Herzl followed the Dreyfus Affair, a notorious anti-Semitic incident in France in which a French Jewish army captain was falsely convicted of spying for Germany. Herzl came to reject his early ideas regarding Jewish emancipation and assimilation, and to believe that the Jews must remove themselves from Europe and create their own state. In 1896, he published 'Der Judenstaat' to immediate acclaim, attracting international attention. As a result, he met Kaiser Wilhelm II on several occasions, once in Jerusalem, attempted and failed to obtain support for a Jewish homeland from Pope Pius X, secured an offer from the British government to facilitate a large Jewish settlement in East Africa, and visited St Petersburg to confront the Russian threat to the Zionist movement. Herzl died suddenly in 1904, over 40 years before the creation of a Jewish state in Israel.

Exile, Statelessness, and Migration explores the intertwined lives, careers, and writings of a group of prominent Jewish intellectuals during the mid-twentieth century―in particular, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Hirschman, and Judith Shklar, as well as Hans Kelsen, Emmanuel Levinas, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Strauss. Informed by their Jewish identity and experiences of being outsiders, these thinkers produced one of the most brilliant and effervescent intellectual movements of modernity. Political philosopher Seyla Benhabib's starting point is that these thinkers faced migration, statelessness, and exile because of their Jewish origins, even if they did not take positions on specifically Jewish issues personally. The sense of belonging and not belonging, of being ?eternally half-other,? led them to confront essential questions: What does it mean for the individual to be an equal citizen and to wish to retain one's ethnic, cultural, and religious differences, or perhaps even to rid oneself of these differences altogether in modernity? Benhabib isolates four themes in their works: dilemmas of belonging and difference; exile, political voice, and loyalty; legality and legitimacy; and pluralism and the problem of judgment. Surveying the work of influential intellectuals, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration recovers the valuable plurality of their Jewish voices and develops their universal insights in the face of the crises of this new century.

This fierce memoir is both elegiac and indicting. Marcel Liebman's account of his childhood in Brussels under the Nazi occupation explores the emergence of his class-consciousness against a background of resistance and collaboration. He documents the internal class war that has long been hidden from historyhow the Nazi persecution exploited class distinctions within the Jewish community, and how certain Jewish notables collaborated in a systematic program of denunciation and deportation against immigrant Jews who lacked the privileges of wealth and citizenship. An eminent anti-Zionist and Marxist, Liebman tells the story of his family's struggle to survive in the face of persecution, terror and constant evasion, an existence observed with acuity, humor and lyricism.