This volume presents The Dybbuk, S. Ansky's well-known drama of mystical passion and demonic possession, along with little-known works of his autobiographical and fantastical prose fiction and an excerpt from his four-volume chronicle of the Eastern Front in the First World War, The Destruction of Galacia.

A long ago "accident." An isolated girl named Aviva. A community that wants to help, but doesn't know how. And a ghostly dybbuk, that no one but Aviva can see, causing mayhem and mischief that everyone blames on her. That is the setting for this suspenseful novel of a girl who seems to have lost everything, including her best friend Kayla, and a mother who was once vibrant and popular, but who now can’t always get out of bed in the morning. As tensions escalate in the Jewish community of Beacon with incidents of vandalism and a swastika carved into new concrete poured near the synagogue...so does the tension grow between Aviva and Kayla and the girls at their school, and so do the actions of the dybbuk grow worse. Could real harm be coming Aviva's way? And is it somehow related to the "accident" that took her father years ago? Aviva vs. the Dybbuk is a compelling, tender story about friendship and community, grief and healing, and one indomitable girl who somehow manages to connect them all.

Considered by many to be the greatest Yiddish drama, 'A dybbuk' recounts the tale of a wealthy man's daughter who is possessed by the spirit of her dead beloved.

How and why a person comes to be possessed by a dybbuk—the possession of a living body by the soul of a deceased person—and what consequences ensue from such possession, form the subject of this book. Though possession by a dybbuk has traditionally been understood as punishment for a terrible sin, it can also be seen as a mechanism used by desperate individuals—often women—who had no other means of escape from the demands and expectations of an all-encompassing patriarchal social order. Dybbuks and Jewish Women examines these and other aspects of dybbuk possession from historical and phenomenological perspectives, with particular attention to the gender significance of the subject.

In this compelling retelling of one of the best-known stories of the Kabbalah, a promise broken comes back to haunt the richest man in town. From the moment Sender's daughter, Leah, meets Konin, a poor scholar, the two fall madly in love. Though he only wants the best for his daughter, Sender turns his back on a sacred pact made long before and promises Leah to a wealthy suitor. Konin soon dies of a broken heart but vows revenge for the injustice. When Konin's ghost returns on Leah's wedding day, he possesses the body of his destined bride and refuses to leave,no matter the cost. In Barbara Rogasky's impassioned version of this Jewish legend, featuring dramatic and evocative illustrations by Leonard Everett Fisher, love truly does conquer all.

After a nearly two-thousand-year interlude, and just as Christian Europe was in the throes of the great Witch Hunt and what historians have referred to as "The Age of the Demoniac," accounts of spirit possession began to proliferate in the Jewish world. Concentrated at first in the Near East but spreading rapidly westward, spirit possession, both benevolent and malevolent, emerged as perhaps the most characteristic form of religiosity in early modern Jewish society. Adopting a comparative historical approach, J. H. Chajes uncovers this strain of Jewish belief to which scant attention has been paid. Informed by recent research in historical anthropology, Between Worlds provides fascinating descriptions of the cases of possession as well as analysis of the magical techniques deployed by rabbinic exorcists to expel the ghostly intruders. Seeking to understand the phenomenon of spirit possession in its full complexity, Chajes delves into its ideational framework—chiefly the doctrine of reincarnation—while exploring its relation to contemporary Christian and Islamic analogues. Regarding spirit possession as a form of religious expression open to—and even dominated by—women, Chajes initiates a major reassessment of women in the history of Jewish mysticism. In a concluding section he examines the reception history of the great Hebrew accounts of spirit possession, focusing on the deployment of these "ghost stories" in the battle against incipient skepticism in the turbulent Jewish community of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Exploring a phenomenon that bridged learned and ignorant, rich and poor, men and women, Jews and Gentiles, Between Worlds maps for the first time a prominent feature of the early modern Jewish religious landscape, as quotidian as it was portentous: the nexus of the living and the dead.