Bücher der Reihe Israel: Society, Culture, and History

In Two Steps Forward, One Step Back, Dahlia Moore explores the social and cultural forces at play in Israeli society and their effects on the changing status of women. While delving into some of Israel's unique and influential forces, such as the army, religious sects, and recent immigration, Moore also broadens her perspective, juxtaposing the status of Israeli women with that of women in other Western societies. An excellent resource for scholars of gender and gender attitudes looking beyond North America and Europe.

This biography of Meir Yaari, the leader of Hashomer Hatza'ir and its Kibbutz movement, discusses pivotal issues in the history of the Jewish people and the State of Israel, such as the friction between Zionism and socialism, the Arab question, Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, the absorption of new immigrants, and generation gaps.

This volume of original essays, by some of Israel's most remarkable public and academic voices, offers a series of state-of-the art, accessible analyses of Israel's ever-evolving theatre of statecraft, public debates, and legal and cultural dramas, its deep divisions and more surprisingly, perhaps its internal affinities and common denominators.

Offers a series of state-of-the art, accessible analyses of Israel's ever-evolving theatre of statecraft, public debates, and legal and cultural dramas, its deep divisions and - more surprisingly, perhaps - its internal affinities and common denominators.

Explores the resurgence of interest in Talmudic stories in Israel and presents some of the most popular Talmudic stories in contemporary Israeli culture, as well as creative interpretations of those stories by Israeli writers, thereby providing readers with an opportunity to consider how these stories may be relevant to their own lives.

Explores the history of the Akko Festival for Other Israeli Theatre in the years 1980-2012 as a site of a celebration as well as a confrontation. The Akko Festival is a borderland bringing together established directors and producers from the centre of the field with young and alternative artists outside of it, as well as bringing together the centre's cultural hegemony and Akko's residents.

Tel-Aviv's annual Purim celebrations were the largest public events in British Palestine, and they played a key role in the development of the urban Jewish experience in the Promised Land. Carnival in Tel-Aviv presents a historical-anthropological analysis of this mass public event in order to explore the ethnographic dimension of Zionism.

Combining eventful sociology, path dependency and institutional political economy, this book argues that historical political events have been shaped not only by political and economic forces but also by resistance struggles of marginal and weaker social groups: organised workers, Palestinians and Mizrachi Jews.

Focuses on the changes undergone by Mapai, Israel's first ruling party, during Israel's first years of Independence, and then analyses the effects of these changes in relation to Israeli political culture.

Why do Israelis dislike fantasy? Put so bluntly, the question appears frivolous. But in fact, it goes to the deepest sources of Israeli historical identity and literary tradition. Uniquely among developed nations, Israel's origin is in a utopian novel, Theodor Herzl's Altneuland (1902), which predicted the future Jewish state. Jewish writing in the Diaspora has always tended toward the fantastic, the mystical, and the magical. And yet, from its very inception, Israeli literature has been stubbornly realistic. The present volume challenges this stance. Originally published in Hebrew in 2009, it is the first serious, wide-ranging, and theoretically sophisticated exploration of fantasy in Israeli literature and culture. Its contributors jointly attempt to contest the question posed at the beginning: why do Israelis, living in a country whose very existence is predicated on the fulfillment of a utopian dream, distrust fantasy?

This book explores the macro and micro social contexts in which alternative and bio-medicine co-exist in Israel. It includes a history of alternative health care in Israel and analysis of current policies and dilemmas regarding different forms of health care, and provides an in-depth analysis of medical professionals who have added alternative health care to their repertoire of professional skills in their practice settings in hospitals and community clinics. The heterogeneity of patient populations in Israel makes it possible to explore attitudes of different cultural groups toward alternative health care. These include Jewish immigrants from different countries as well as Bedouin and other Arab groups. Since alternative medicine is a growing part of the overall health care system in many countries, the book provides insights gained from the Israeli experience regarding its co-existence along with conventional medicine-to a broad spectrum of health professionals, policy makers and laypersons.

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.