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My article examines various artworks from Europe and Israel that portray and are inspired by the Book of Ruth. While in Jewish sources such as the Talmud (Yevamot 47b) Ruth is seen as an immigrant and a convert to Judaism, European artists since the seventeenth century highlighted different episodes and aspects of the biblical story that suited their social, political, and religious worldviews. Notably, the expansion of colonialism during the nineteenth century transformed the depictions of Ruth. While in the canvases of painters such as Pieter Lastman and Jan Victors Ruth is depicted as a model of religious identification, in the paintings of Joseph Anton Koch and Francesco Hayez she epitomises “oriental” otherness. Furthermore, while early European painters underscore the immigration of Ruth, Hayez represents Ruth as a dweller of the “East.” Zionist artists were influenced by European traditions of depicting the Book of Ruth but developed a unique fusion between strategies of identification and differentiation. Artists such as Ze’ev Raban (1890–1970) portrayed the story of Ruth as both ancient and contemporary, while imitating and appropriating Palestinian tropes in order to imagine the Zionist narrative of homecoming. The contemporary Israeli artist Leor Grady (b. 1966), on the other hand, addresses questions of immigration and homecoming while exploring the Book of Ruth in his solo exhibition Bethlehem (2019, Tel Aviv). While Raban’s illustrations ignore the Jewish experience of exile, Grady’s oeuvre epitomises what the Israeli historian Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin sees as “exile within sovereignty.” Instead of recounting a linear historical narrative that begins with exile and culminates with the return to the Promised Land, Grady underscores that every return is also a departure and every departure a return. In this manner, Grady foregrounds the voices silenced by Zionist historiography and challenges the exclusion of the Palestinian narrative.

This paper seeks to argue that the Zionist idea offers an effective lens through which we can understand the X-Men comics. Through the metaphor of mutants as Jews, Marvel has presented readers with...

The policies of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) towards Zionism and Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine have already been considered in the scholarly literature. The other side...

This article examines the Depo-Provera Affair—where Israeli doctors administered the contraceptive Depo-Provera to newly immigrated Ethiopian Jewish women—to argue that the Israeli settler colonial project depends on these forms of gendered anti-Black violence, through the management of Black African bodies. In 2013, then Israeli Deputy Health Minister Yaakov Litzman admitted that they had administered Depo-Provera to Ethiopian immigrant women without their consent, after reproductive and civil rights activists in Israel called for an investigation after a drop in the birthrate among Ethiopian women: close to 50 per cent within the previous decade. The demarcation of Blackness as a political tool necessary to advance Israeli modernity and the situating of Black bodies as antithetical to the state of Israel are not contradictory but rather illuminate Israel’s deployment of anti-Blackness through the racial and reproductive violence necessary to become part of the superior, European West.

Since the late 1950s, Third World nationalism in Algeria, Vietnam, and the Middle East had fascinated radical Quebec nationalists. Quebec nationalism’s militant arm, the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), styled itself as a national-liberation movement fighting against Anglo-Canadian exploitation and oppression. After the Six-Day-War, the PLO became a significant source of inspiration for these elements. Quebec was their Palestine, as one prominent Quebec Nationalist asserted. This militant Quebec nationalism coincided and often overlapped with the rise of the New Left at Quebec’s universities and in its unions. Like its European and American counterparts, the Quebec New Left adopted the ideologies of anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism, and in 1972, the Quebec-Palestine Association was established in this milieu. Anti-imperialism combined the Marxist analysis of class struggle with a nationalistic worldview, which saw the world divided between oppressor and oppressed nations. For the New Left, Israel became the epitome of an oppressor nation. It was associated with all the supposed vices of the West: Racism, capitalism, inauthenticity, and militarism. This paper sheds light on the founding years of the Quebec anti-Zionist movement in the early 1970 and discusses the themes and images it used to describe Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Furthermore, the paper investigates whether these articulations a genuine critique of Zionism and Israeli policies or whether they were, instead, a reflection of antisemitic stereotypes. Moreover, the paper compares Quebec anti-Zionism to parallel manifestations of New Left anti-Zionism in Germany, asking whether the cultural context in Quebec affected the message of anti-Zionism.

In June 2020, Black Lives Matter UK (BLM-UK) posted a series of tweets in which they endorsed the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Calling for ‘targeted sanctions in line with international law against Israel’s colonial, apartheid regime,’ one tweet claimed that ‘mainstream British politics is gagged of the right to critique Zionism’. The tweets were seen by some to be antisemitic and resulted in the English Premier League, the BBC and Sky Sports, which had hitherto been supportive of the Black Lives Matter protests, distance themselves from the Black Lives Matter movement. One month later, during the BLM protests in the USA, Black NFL player DeSean Jackson posted material to his Instagram story that was also viewed as antisemitic. This article unpacks, via these two sports-based incidents, the relationship between anti-racism, antisemitism, and anti-Zionism. I discuss how these tensions are not new, but a clear echo of the tensions that existed in the 1960s and 1970s during the height of the Civil Rights Movement; these tensions continue because the foundational issues remain unchanged. These two incidents raise important questions about how sports organisations operate in a world where sport is seen as ‘apolitical’ and strive for ‘neutrality’ but fail to recognise sport is political and that a position of neutrality cannot be successfully achieved. The article assesses the challenges that arise when sports organisations, and their athletes, choose to engage in a certain kind of sport politics.

Promoting patriotism and national cohesion in history classes is a well-known practice in modern countries, and especially evident in countries embroiled in ongoing conflicts. Patriotism in middle school history education of Israel bear the task to inherit the essence of Jewish traditional culture, promote awakening civic consciousness and teach the history of nation building. The courses contains main lines of national image creation, complaints for diaspora history, reflection on the holocaust, the current situation of the stalemate with rivalry countries and the outlook for the trend towards integration. It aims at shaping the minds of nation residents with different ethnic, religious, cultural and political background, and turn them into social members with a strong sense of responsibility, characteristics of multicultural and harmonious coexistence. In the comprehensive educational system, Israeli patriotism education is conducive to national unity, social integration and modernisation, but at the same time smacks of Zionism.

In the early 1920s, the Viennese writer and journalist Eugen Hoeflich promoted a unique vision of Zionism that aligned Jewish nationalism with a set of anticolonial ideologies collectively known as Pan-Asianism. This article explores the poetic and political strategies Hoeflich employed in order to affiliate Zionism with the Pan-Asian idea in general, and the Indian anticolonial struggle in particular. I read Hoeflich's turn to Pan-Asianism as an attempt to work through a conceptual problem that theorist Partha Chatterjee calls the “postcolonial predicament.” That is, how might the Jews assert their collective identity without reproducing the Eurocentric discourses that presuppose their inferiority? Hoeflich's vision of Indian-Jewish solidarity constitutes an imaginative effort to de-Europeanize Jewish nationalism and disentangle Zionism from British imperial designs. On a broader level, this study sheds light on the transnational solidarities that informed central European Zionists in the interwar era, and points to the discursive continuities that linked Jewish nationalists in Europe to anticolonial thinkers in Asia.

During the interwar years, competitive sport become a global phenomenon, in which competitive games were organized by international bodies and professional athletes performed as (inter)national ico...

Ha-Balkan Ha-Bo‘er (The Balkans in Flames), the memoirs of Yitzhak Halperin, are at the center of this article. Born in Palestine in 1890, Halperin was part of the so-called “first generation” – meaning Jews, natives of the newly established colonies in Palestine, who conversed in the Hebrew language and whose life and social productivity embodied the Zionist vision of the nation. Halperin volunteered to serve in the Ottoman Army in November 1911. Later, during the first weeks of the First Balkan War (October 1912-May 1913), he served on the Macedonian front before fleeing to Salonica, where he deserted. Published in Hebrew in 1932, Halperin’s memoirs can be read against both Zionist and Ottoman contexts. They shed light on various personal experiences and perceptions that can enrich our understanding of his particular ideological and ethnic group. In addition, his memoirs are unique as they describe the daily experiences of an Ottoman rank-and-file soldier who served in the Balkan Wars. As such, it offers different insights into the broader Ottoman context. Halperin’s memoirs expose two main topics: the related issues of identity, sociability, and friendship as they developed among the conscripts during his military service; and his clear disappointment with the poor performance and low morale of the Ottoman army before and during the Balkan Wars.

Various movements through history have appealed to Scripture for authority. These have been called supersessionist, messianist, and/or zionist, but they continue to appeal to Scripture even after they attain power and thus repress others. Power corrupts, and when this happened in ancient Israel Prophets arose to critique and denounce it. In addition Scripture as canon, both Jewish and Christian, included Wisdom thinking, making it a thoroughly dialogical compendium that questioned abuse of power. The teachings of Jesus are themselves largely prophetic critique of abuses of power. Beyond Scripture prophetic critique can be effected by empathy for the position of “the other” and loving the enemy, thus engaging in the monotheizing process by refusing to demonize those who differ but learning from them.

This essay surveys themes of Jewishness and masculinity in James Joyce's Ulysses. It argues that Joyce positions Leopold Bloom at the nexus of visual cultural forces each vying for representation of the Jewish male body post-Dreyfus Affair. The study traces how physical culture and bodybuilding, degeneration, and Zionism each grew increasingly reliant on art and emergent technologies of image production and circulation. In doing so, the essay shows the extent to which Edwardian consumer culture and iconography shape Bloom's relationship to political Zionism, his perceived degeneracy, and his own ethnic identity as an Irish Jew. Because similar cultural forces beset Joyce himself, who suffered from illness throughout his life, the essay further reflects upon how Joyce uses Bloom's Judaism and perceived degeneracy as a way of thinking through his own Irishness and ill health.

The Longing to Belong: Santo Semo the Language Convert The paper focuses on Santo Semo’s journey of linguistic migration, from his native language ( Judezmo ) to his adopted language (French), and his desire for another linguistic identity. He focused his energies on saving the world, bringing peace to the planet, and he was convinced of his mission until the dark end of his life, and subordinated everything to it. Dązenie do przynalezności. Santo Semo – jezykowy konwertyta Artykul opisuje jezykową migracje Santy Semo – od jego jezyka ojczystego ( judezmo ) do adoptowanego jezyka francuskiego, oraz jego dązenie ku nowej jezykowej tozsamości. Cale zycie poświecil misji, w ktorą wierzyl; poświecil wiele energii na ratowanie świata, walki o pokoj dla świata i planety.

A seminar entitled “Psychoanalysis and Palestine-Israel: Further Thoughts” was recently presented at the British Psychoanalytical Society. The seminar and an earlier article by the presenting psychoanalyst emerged from a forum in which encounters took place giving expression to enmity between Israelis and Palestinians. The forum was originally established to enable German and Israeli psychoanalysts to work through difficult issues in the long shadow of the Holocaust. This article offers a critique of the presenting psychoanalyst’s seminar and article, and of the project of eliciting enmity between Israelis and Palestinians. It argues that the underlying assumptions rendered the project, presentation, and article incapable of comprehending the complex reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which partly explains why the project did not succeed. The vacuum left by the absence of nuance, evidence, context, and history was filled by a spurious chain of equivalence, purporting to identify Jewish Israelis with Germans during the Nazi era and white South Africans under apartheid, and Palestinians with Jewish and black victims, and then, on this basis, to parcel out righteous hatred and deserved guilt to Palestinians and Israelis respectively. The presenting psychoanalyst had previously falsely accused Golda Meir of maintaining a genocidal fantasy of obliterating the Palestinians, a claim repeated without qualification during the seminar itself. The project, described as deepening enmity, seemed to have no obvious plausible purpose. A “wild psychoanalysis” of the Jewish Israeli psyche followed during discussion, which ignored the real threats Jewish Israelis face; an untenable analogy with South Africa was assumed without reasoned argument; and “settler colonialism” was invoked as a slogan to describe the Zionist project. This article argues that none of these elements withstand scrutiny.

Antisemitism on university and college campuses in the United States has been rising significantly in recent years. On many campuses, Jewish students are facing verbal and online harassment on account of their perceived support for Israel or because of their Zionist identities. Many Jewish students have reported feeling the need to shed or disavow the Zionist component of their Jewishness in order to participate in campus life, particularly in progressive spaces and causes. In this article I focus on Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the self-identified “Jewish wing” of the US-based Palestinian solidarity movement, and the role that it plays in minimizing these concerns and even contributing to a hostile campus climate. JVP’s campus chapters typically discredit concerns about antisemitism by casting them as deceitful efforts to censor discourse and debate about Israel. But JVP activists on campus are also increasingly becoming purveyors of antisemitism themselves, for example by promoting the “Deadly Exchange” campaign which holds Israel and mainstay American-Jewish organizations complicit in harming minority communities in the United States. Specific cases of JVP’s activism on American universities and colleges, including instances where JVP has managed to serve as an alibi and a support for campus antisemitism, are presented.

Intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin saw a totalitarian and dogmatic tendency within the Enlightenment tradition which he called “optimistic monism,” that is, the idea that personal freedom and cul...

This text looks at the fluid intersection in the emergence and development of Zionism and the later Zionist-promoted emigration of Moroccan Jews to Israel from what was the Spanish Protectorate zone in Morocco and the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in the north of Sherifian state. This process has received less attention from scholars than similar events in the French zone. However, it has some particularities that merit specific attention. From the early years of contact between North Moroccan Jews and European Zionism, the strong cultural identity of the Sephardim in the region and the mobilization of a Spanish approach informed by philo-Sephardism marked an important difference with regard to the French zone in the reception of Zionism and the organization of emigration to Israel. Paradoxically, in the Spanish protectorate, such process resulted in the disappearance of important historic Sephardic centers like Tetouan, Larache, and Ksar-el-Kebir.

The period between the publication of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and League of Nations mandates official assignment to Great Britain in 1922 was not lengthy, but highly eventful. All this time England was maneuvring between the Jewish and the Arab national movements, which also gradually formed their own demands and objectives. The problem was, pursuing British interests was possible through maneuvring only, as support of just one local force was not quite strategically advantageous. Britains official commitment to the Balfour Declaration remained at the core of its policy, however it could not completely ignore the demands of the Arab polutaion of Palestine. Although there were quite a number of British administrators and imperial politicians, who were sympathetic towards the Zionist cause and thus were ready to meet their requests to a certain extent, adherence to the British Middle East interests remained crucial to them. The idea of a Jewish national home (not a state, though) in Palestine did not come into contradiction with the general policy of Great Britain in the Middle East: it was rather its integral part. At the same time implementing the Zionist project had to be in line with it: any relatively radical (from the British administrators point of view) proposals were rejected or postponed indefinitely. Towards the Arabs of Palestine Great Britain was conducting mainly declarative policy without any serious consideration of their problems and grievances, although trying to appease their demands to a certain extent. Even the Arab riots of 1920 and 1921 did not cause a serious change in the British political course in Palestine, although they did contribute to the emergence of Churchills White Paper in 1922, declaring certain concessions to the Arab national movement, which never accepted the document. At the same time British policy in general was neither pro-Zionist, nor pro-Arab: England was pursuing its long-term strategic goals in the Middle East, skillfully utilizing Zionist and Arab national movements to achieve them.

The journal Der Yid was the first Yiddish periodical officially tied to a Zionist body. This article follows the shared genealogy of early Zionism and diasporic nationalism as expressed in Der Yid,...

This article charts the broad and transforming effects of the European Enlightenment and the Jewish Haskalah on Zionism and on modern Israel’s government, judiciary, and political discourse. It tra...

This close reading of the Romantic Zionist poem “In the Field”, written by the National Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik, exposes the rhetorical inability to divide Palestine between the Palestinian...

Is there an intimate connection between nationalism and war? Does the right to national self-determination invariably lead to bellicose relations with others? These have been central concerns in the literature on nationalism and war. They have also been concerns of political thinkers/activists who have worried about these connections and have sought to fashion a conception of national identity free of its warlike proclivities. This essay explores the link of war, nationalism, and national self-determination with reference to the founding of the state of Israel. And it reflects on the views of Martin Buber whose writings on Zionism constantly engaged these questions in searching for a peace-oriented nationalism.

This Article offers a defense of egalitarian Zionism that, unlike Chaim Gans’s argument for this view, does not appeal to the Jewish problem in justifying the Zionist requirement for a state with a dominant Jewish community. The argument extracts from the egalitarian principles that underlie John Rawls’s political liberalism, a conception of global justice according to which members of a scattered nation are entitled to a fair opportunity to establish a new state within which they enjoy the advantage of demographic dominance

Since the early days of Zionism, the role of law, its practice and how it generated many of the fundamental dilemmas that challenged the struggling nascent community have been intriguing. Although ...

The year was 1973 when I read the story Late Love by Amos Oz, and underlined the following passage: […] something must, absolutely must, reveal itself, a formula, a dazzling system, a purpose, sure...

The success of Hitler’s National Socialism was the success of a religious faith, the ‘false’ belief that National Socialism was the fulfillment of Christianity. This article wants to show how the l...

Rosa Sonneschein (1847–1932) was an important figure in late nineteenth-century American journalism, activism, and fiction. While a few brief studies were dedicated to her biography and to her role as a Jewish social activist, editor, and contributor to The American Jewess, no critical work has been devoted as yet to her literary production. The aim of this essay is to rectify this critical neglect by examining Sonneschein’s wide literary opus and by investigating its connection, if any, to the views she expressed as a journalist and a public speaker. This essay will explore Sonneschein’s threefold literary oeuvre, consisting of the following genres: Jewish fiction, non-Jewish fiction, and literary sketches. It will also try to explicate Rosa’s often conflicting stance with regard to Judaism, feminism, and Zionism, a standpoint which should be examined in the context of the fin-the-siècle’s turbulent changes American society had to cope with, especially pertaining to massive immigration, religious and social reforms, suffrage and temperance movements, etc.

Volume 3 contains a series of short articles on Enlightenment and the Jewish question, the hidden tradition of the Jewish Pariahs, Zionism, Imperialism, the guilt question in Germany, but also Existentialism as well as essays on Franz Kafka and Stefan Zweig. A decisive issue in Arendt’s thought refers to the collapse of the Western tradition of political theory in the age of Totalitarianism. It is already in the essay on Imperialism that she emphasizes the genius of Hobbes, anticipating the nihilistic ideology of the bourgeoisie. Volume 6 is dedicated to Arendt’s reading of Karl Marx.

This article discusses the European Kulturkampf in the nineteenth century from the points of view of the Russian Hebrew writer Judah Leib Gordon and the founding father of the Zionist movement Theo...

In 1923, within the framework of the Zionist Organization in Poland (the party was active in former Russian partition and the Pomeranian and Poznań voivodeship) were formed factions, radical Al Hamiszmar and moderate Et Liwnot. The second faction postulated the emigration of Jews from Poland to Palestine based mostly on private funds. Its gathered Zionists belonging the middle and high social classes, well-educated, mostly assimilated culturally pro-Polish. Due to the deterioration of the material situation of Jews and the great economic crisis, its social influence was rapidly decreasing. In 1934, the activists factions formed new party – Organization of General Zionists in Poland. Her leader until 1939 was an attorney Leon Lewite. The party did not have much social influence. It concentrated its efforts on attempts to unite general Zionist party in Poland and in the world. It also tried to define the interests of Jews in city councils and the parliament. W 1923 r. w ramach Organizacji Syjonistycznej w Polsce (partia działała w byłym zaborze rosyjskim oraz województwach pomorskim i poznańskim) powstały dwie frakcje: radykalna Al Hamiszmar i umiarkowana Et Liwnot. Druga frakcja postulowała emigrację Żydów z Polski do Palestyny finansowaną z funduszy prywatnych. Skupiała ona syjonistów należących do warstw średnich i wyższych, dobrze wykształconych, w znacznej części zasymilowanych kulturowo propolsko. Wobec pogarszania się położenia materialnego i wielkiego kryzysu gospodarczego jej wpływy społeczne szybko malały. W 1934 r. działacze Et Liwnot utworzyli nową partię – Organizację Ogólnych Syjonistów w Polsce. Jej przywódcą do 1939 r. był adwokat Leon Lewite. Partia nie miała większych wpływów społecznych. Koncentrowała swe wysiłki na próbach zjednoczenia partii ogólnosyjonistycznych w Polsce i na świecie. Próbowała bronić interesów Żydów w radach miejskich i sejmie.

This article examines current manifestations of Zionist political-economy by analyzing discourses that frame Israel as a “Start-Up Nation”—that is, a unique economic achievement that offers a successful business model for the world. By focusing on the 2009 book from the Council of Foreign Relations, Start-Up Nation, this article theorizes “neoliberal Zionism” as a manifestation of Zionism that valorizes specific kinds of neoliberal rationalities in order to garner support for the State of Israel. In particular, neoliberal Zionism produces an entrepreneurial Israeli citizen-subject whose unique cultural attributes derive from compulsory military service and a Zionist past sanitized of conflict with Palestinians. Further, these discourses position this neoliberal Zionist subject as economically out-competing Arabs and Palestinians. At stake is how neoliberalism and exclusionary nationalism potentially mobilize each other and operate as “management” models for other states to adopt.

This article analyzes female conversion from Judaism to Catholicism in the Russian Empire and its increasing popularity in the late Imperial period. Research presented here focuses on the so-called Lithuanian guberniyas and the upsurge of female conversions to Catholicism in 1870–1915. It seeks to embed this phenomenon within broader and multifaceted changes and ruptures in the Jewish community, conditioned by the ongoing social, economic, and cultural shifts in the region. Drawing on scarce, but nonetheless fascinating, conversional documentation, the article suggests that religious conversion to Catholicism at the turn of the twentieth century had become one of the pathways taken by Jewish women who were confronting modernity and were, like many Jews at the time regardless of their gender, seeking a way out of the increasingly intolerable situation in the empire. As other Jews, and men especially, took alternative paths of advancement, such as reimagining Jewish existence within the country or outside it (Socialism, Zionism, emigration), Jewish women in Lithuanian guberniyas added conversion to Catholicism to the spectrum of means to redefine their existence as young Jews in the Russian Empire.

During the final years of Ottoman rule and the three decades of British rule, Palestine witnessed the emergence of a community of professionally trained Palestinian Arab doctors. This study traces the evolution of the medical profession in Palestine against the background of the shifting cultural and symbolic capital of an expanding urban middle class and the educational possibilities that enabled this development. Palestinian Arab doctors are examined through a number of interconnected prisms: their activity in social, political, and professional regional networks, their modus operandi under British colonial rule, their response to Zionism and its accompanying influx of immigrant Jewish doctors, and their ability to mobilize collectively under a shared national vision.

During Israel’s War for Independence, the Bedouin tribes did not have a united attitude: Some tribes, who built good relations with the Jewish population, supported the Jewish side and foug...

This article reconceptualises ‘Semite’ as a contested chronotope in which Western scientific categories served Palestinian and Zionist educators’ claims to cultural self-determination and national ...

תרבות המזרח והמורשת שלו השפיעה ישירות על היצירה הספרותית שפורסמו בשנים האחרונות של המאה הקודמת על ידי יהודי המזרח בארץ ומחוצה לה ... סופרים רבים מהמזרח ובמיוחד איראן כתבו את יצירותיהם הספרותיות שהושפעו מן המנהגים, והמסורת של החברה האיראנית שבה נולדו וחיו, או מי שנולד באיראן ועלו ארצה והתגוררו שם בגלל הציונות העולמית והבטחותיה הנוראות לאסוף את התפוצות היהודיות מזוויות העולם במולדת לאומית על חשבון ארץ פלסטין. המטרה האולטימטיבית היא ליצור זהות לאומית עבור קבוצה מגוונת של אנשים, שמקורם במנהגים, במסורות, בדרכי ביטוי ובשפות שונות, והם נועדו להיות עם, אין דבר שרק דת, ציונות וקבוצת מנהגים דתיים קשורים בטקסים של פולחן. על סונה של הנביאים ושל החכמים הם ביטויים של מהלך פתגמים, אשר חוקרים רבים ספק, הם רואים את היהודים לקחו אותם מן המורשת של עמים אחרים ( د. احمد علي مرسي ، الفلكلور والاسرائيليات ، ص 62 ) . כאן היינו צריכים לחשוף את התרבות הזאת עם מסורותיה, מנהגיה ואמונותיה העממיות, במיוחד בהשאלה מאיראן, מקום הולדתם של הוריה של הסופרת הישראלית דורית רביניאן, עם הדת היהודית, המוצא האיראני והקיום הישראלי ברומנה " סמטת השקידיות בעומריג'אן " שנשא בתוכו את המסורות, האמונות, הרעיונות הפולקלוריים והתרבות העממית שהשפיעו על היהודים, על רעיונותיהם ועל מעשיהם, אשר עדיין קיימים בחברה הישראלית כיום: ידוע כי התרבות הפופולרית היא המדע הקולט את אמונותיו ומנהגיו של עם, כל עוד האמונות והמנהגים הללו נובעים מהתנהגות קולקטיבית( جيمس فريزر ، الفلكلور في العهد القديم ، ص 21 ) . על אף שהכותבת נולדה וגדלה בישראל, הרומן שלה, כפי שמבחינת המבקרים, מלא ברעיונות, פולקלור, מיתולוגיה ואמונות עממיות ששלטו בקהילה היהודית באיראן ( ישראל יעל , בכרך קטן וציורי , עמ' 12 ) מה שהיא הכירה ממשפחותיה ומהקהילה היהודית האיראנית בישראל וניסתה לשקף מה היא תרבות פופולרית שירשה בקהילה היהודית האיראנית התרכזה ברומן שלה על מונומנטים פופולריים. The orient culture and heritage has directly influenced ,in a way or another , the literary works which recently have been noted by the oriental Jews inside and outside of Israel. Several Jewish writers, who came from the orient (especially from Iran ), have written their works while influenced by traditions and customs of the Iranian society, in which they were born , lived , and raised, and by the writers who were born in that society and then moved to Israel and lived there as a result of the Zionism and its notorious promises to gather Jewish people from all over the world to establish their national home at the expense of the Palestinian land and people. That final goal was to find a nationality for a dispersed group of people who came from different traditions and customs , ways of expressions and languages, to form a nation. They do not have but religion and Zionism , a set of religious traditions related to worship rituals, and stories about religious heroes and stories voiced by prophets and wisemen which have become proverbs . The latter is looked upon with doubt by many researchers as they think that Jewish people have taken from other nations (Mursi , Folklore and Israelites , p 62 ). Accordingly , it is a necessity to explore this culture with its traditions, customs, and popular beliefs adopted ,in particular from Iran the birthplace of the parents of the Israeli writer and author Dorrit Rabinyan , who is of Judaism religion ,Iranian origin ,and Israeli existence through her novel (Persian Brides). This novel carried customs , traditions, folklore thoughts , and popular culture that influenced the Jews , their thoughts and behavior which still exist in the Israeli society nowadays . It is well known that popular culture is the science that includes beliefs and customs of any nation as long as those beliefs and customs related to the Collective behavior (James Fries, Folklore in the Old Testament p 21). Despite that the author was born and raised in Israel but her novels , as critics see, packed with folkloric and legendry concepts and thoughts as well as popular beliefs which prevailed in the Iranian Jewish society that she knew from her family and Iranian Jews in Israel ; she tried to reflect in her novel focusing on the popular landmarks.

The article was performed a comparative analysis of the historical views of M. Laitman and P. Polonsky on Jewish history. The main purpose of the article is to reveal the characteristic features of the modern religious-mystical view of history. The common features of the biographies of thinkers and the general ideological doctrine their historical views are the basis for the comparative analysis. The Laitman’s and Polonsky’s approaches to Kabbalah determine the originality of historical views of thinkers. The Kabbalah of Rabbi Ashlag is the basis of approach of Laitman. The central concept of Ashlag’s Kabbalah is antithesis “giving/influencing — receiving”. It is “altruism — egoism” in Kabbalah of Laitman (or “the path of the Light” and “the path of suffering” in his historical concept). World history is described as the development of mankind determined by the growth of egoism. The history of ancient Jews (history of Kabbalistic development) is an alternative way of development of mankind. The Kabbalah of Rabbi Kook is the basis of approach of Polonsky. The central idea of Kook’s Kabbalah is dialog. In views of Polonsky Jewish history is presented as a dialog between God and the people. For example, the idea of the dialogue is manifested in views of Polonsky on the history of Zionism and on the history the emergence of State of Israel. The views of thinkers on Jewish chosenness and on the role of religion and tradition in the fate of the Jews are compared.The authors conclude that historical views of Polonsky are closer to the scientific approach to Jewish history and the Jewish tradition that the historical views of Laitman. Polonsky forms the image of history, in which there is a connection between the Jewish tradition and modernity. Laitman forms an alternative history. The main idea of Laitman’s historical concept are to argue the historical role of Kabbalah and to induce Jews and mankind to develop on the basis of the Kabbalah of Laitman.

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link. This article places Longfellow’s much-anthologised elegy in context, highlighting its engagement with contemporary debates about slavery, racial difference, and the restoration of the Jews to their ancestral homeland. The poem’s complex textual history, reconstructed here for the first time, helps to explain its profoundly ambivalent attitude towards the vanished Jewish community of Newport, Rhode Island; their cemetery is both a monument to the shameful history of ‘Christian hate’ which drove them from Europe, and an emblem of the eventual fate of a people obsessed with the impossible dream of reviving the past and entangled in the ongoing horrors of slavery.

Istorikai jau yra parodę, kad žydų mažuma prisidėjo prie Lietuvos valstybės atkūrimo 1918 m. Tačiau eksperimento integruoti žydų mažumą į atsikuriančią Lietuvos valstybę pradžia dažnai nušviečiama kaip nesėkmė. Straipsnyje šiam požiūriui metamas iššūkis aprašant, kaip sionizmas, žydų tautinis judėjimas, rėmė Lietuvos valstybės atsiradimą. Autorė nagrinėja, kaip žydai parėmė naujai suformuotą Lietuvos vyriausybę, nuspręsdami pasiųsti į ją savo atstovus ir sukurdami dokumentą, kuris pagerino lietuvių delegacijos Paryžiaus taikos konferencijoje tarptautines pozicijas ir šitaip padėjo pasiekti jaunai valstybei tarptautinį pripažinimą. Historians have already shown how the Jewish minority contributed to the rebirth of the Lithuanian state in 1918. The beginning of the experiment to integrate the Jewish minority into the reemergent Lithuanian state, however, has often been told from the perspective of failure only. The article challenges this view, by describing how Zionism, the Jewish national movement, supported the emergence of the Lithuanian state. The author analyses how the Jews supported the newly created Lithuanian government by voting to send representatives to it, and by producing a document that improved the international position of the Lithuanian delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, and which was helpful for the international recognition of the young state.

The Nation State of the Jewish People's basic law, passed in July 2018, constitutes a landmark in the evolution of Israel's settler-colonial nationalism and self-presentation. The law underscores the shift Israel has made from aligning itself with the Western liberal order to embracing, even spearheading, a radical right-wing populist worldview. The Jewish exclusivity and racism that the law embodies, I argue, did not result from changes in Israel's political and demographic landscape in the last two decades. Rather their genesis could be traced back to the debates which took place soon after Israel's establishment. Since then the desire for Jewish exclusivity has not dwindled but had been masqueraded through ideas of Israel's inimitability. The article discusses the mutations of these debates and their legal and policy effects.