The Universal Jew analyzes literary images of the Jewish nation and the Jewish national subject at Zionism’s formative moment. In a series of original readings of late nineteenth-century texts—from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda to Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland to the bildungsromane of Russian Hebrew and Yiddish writers—Mikhal Dekel demonstrates the aesthetic and political function of literary works in the making of early Zionist consciousness. More than half a century before the foundation of the State of Israel and prior to the establishment of the Zionist political movement, Zionism emerges as an imaginary concept in literary texts that create, facilitate, and naturalize the transition from Jewish-minority to Jewish-majority culture. The transition occurs, Dekel argues, mainly through the invention of male literary characters and narrators who come to represent "exemplary" persons or "man in general" for the emergent, still unformed national community. Such prototypical characters transform the symbol of the Jew from a racially or religiously defined minority subject to a "post-Jewish," particularuniversal, and fundamentally liberal majority subject. The Universal Jew situates the "Zionist moment" horizontally, within the various intellectual currents that make up the turn of the twentieth century: the discourse on modernity, the crisis in liberalism, Nietzsche’s critique of the Enlightenment, psychoanalysis, early feminism, and fin de siècle interrogation of sexual identities. The book examines the symbolic roles that Jews are assigned within these discourses and traces the ways in which Jewish literary citizens are shaped, both out of and in response to them. Beginning with an analysis of George Eliot’s construction of the character Deronda and its reception in Zionist circles, the Universal Jew ends with the self-fashioning of male citizens in fin de siècle and post-statehood Hebrew works, through the aesthetics oftragedy. Throughout her readings, Dekel analyzes the political meaning of these nascent images of citizens, uncovering in particular the gendered arrangements out of which they are born.

In this book, Dvir Abramovich brings together a batch of timeless classical Hebrew novels, short stories, and poems, and furnishes readers with commentaries and critical readings of each landmark work. The selection of seminal texts include masterpieces from Yehuda Amichai, Haim Gouri, Amos Oz, Dvorah Baron, Shaul Tchernichovsky, Chaim Nachman Bialik, Hanoch Bartov, Shulamit Hareven, and Aharon Megged. Each interpretative essay includes a bio-graphical overview of the author whose opus is explored. This collection will prove exceptionally useful for teachers who wish to introduce their students to the treasures of contemporary Israeli fiction and are searching for reflective analyses and searching insights. Guaranteed to ignite discussion and debate, this informative and entertaining volume, written in an accessible and lively style, will appeal to a general and academic audience and will tempt readers to read or re-read these great works.

First published in 1994. This volume takes as its theme Jewish education and learning throughout the ages. 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.

A collection of essays, most of them published previously. Ch. 5 (pp. 133-172), "The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania", appeared as the introduction to Herman Kruk's book of the same name, published in 2002. Describes the fate of Herman Kruk (1897-1944), a Jewish Yiddishist intellectual, a librarian, a chronicler of the Vilnius ghetto, and author of a diary, who perished in a Nazi labor camp in Estonia a day before its liberation by the Soviets. Describes also the history of Jewish Vilnius, especially of the wartime ghetto. Reflects on two Holocausts: the killing of six million Jews and the annihilation of secular Jewish culture in Europe.