A society can be judged by its attitude to those who are outside or disadvantaged by reason of class, sex, race, language, background, disability, and so on. This volume seeks to address the models of otherness that exist in Israeli literature.

Now available in paperback for the first time, Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century is both a comprehensive reference resource and a springboard for further study. This volume: examines canonical Jewish writers, less well-known authors of Yiddish and Hebrew, and emerging Israeli writers includes entries on figures as diverse as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, and Woody Allen contains introductory essays on Jewish-American writing, Holocaust literature and memoirs, Yiddish writing, and Anglo-Jewish literature provides a chronology of twentieth-century Jewish writers. Compiled by expert contributors, this book contains over 330 entries on individual authors, each consisting of a biography, a list of selected publications, a scholarly essay on their work and suggestions for further reading.

Once referred to by the New York Times as the “Israeli Faulkner,” A. B. Yehoshua’s fiction invites an assessment of Israel’s Jewish inheritance and the moral and political options that the country currently faces in the Middle East. The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua is an insightful overview of the fiction, nonfiction, and hundreds of critical responses to the work of Israel’s leading novelist. Instead of an exhaustive chronological-biographical account of Yehoshua’s artistic growth, Yael Halevi-Wise calls for a systematic appreciation of the author’s major themes and compositional patterns. Specifically, she argues for reading Yehoshua’s novels as reflections on the “condition of Israel,” constructed multifocally to engage four intersecting levels of signification: psychological, sociological, historical, and historiosophic. Each of the book’s seven chapters employs a different interpretive method to showcase how Yehoshua’s constructions of character psychology, social relations, national history, and historiosophic allusions to traditional Jewish symbols manifest themselves across his novels. The book ends with a playful dialogue in the style of Yehoshua’s masterpiece, Mr. Mani, that interrogates his definition of Jewish identity. Masterfully written, with full control of all the relevant materials, Halevi-Wise’s assessment of Yehoshua will appeal to students and scholars of modern Jewish literature and Jewish studies.

In Facing the Fires, Bernard Horn introduces A. B. Yehoshua, Israel’s greatest living novelist, to an English-speaking audience. Yehoshua is also his country’s most audacious thinker about politics, culture, history, and Jewish identity. Yehoshua’s achievement has been recognized throughout the world, and he has been awarded literary prizes in both Israel and the United States. A lively, controversial, and prophetic voice in his homeland, Yehoshua rigorously tests his community’s deepest pieties: religion, Zionism, and the agony of the Holocaust. A Jew who does not believe in God, he is a committed Zionist and member of the “peace camp” in Israel that welcomed the Palestinian uprising of 1987. In the tradition of the Paris Review interviews, Horn’s conversations with Yehoshua reveal the intricate play of literary, psychological, mythological, and political motifs in the novelist’s work. Stimulated by a warm friendship between the two scholars, the intellectual energy of Facing the Fires offers readers a pleasure they might expect only from fiction.

A major new history of the century-long debate over what a Jewish state should be Many Zionists who advocated for the creation of a Jewish state envisioned a nation like any other. Yet for Israel's founders, the nation that emerged against all odds in 1948 was anything but ordinary. Born from the ashes of genocide and a long history of suffering, Israel was conceived to be unique, a model society and the heart of a prosperous new Middle East. It is this paradox, says historian Michael Brenner—the Jewish people's wish for a homeland both normal and exceptional—that shapes Israel's ongoing struggle to define itself and secure a place among nations. In Search of Israel is a major new history of this struggle from the late nineteenth century to our time.

First published in 1994. This volume, dedicated to Dr David Patterson, founding President of the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies, takes as its theme Jewish education and learning throughout the ages. But it is the ‘Academy’ - interpreted here to mean an institution of Judaic scholarship - which dominates this collection of essays. For almost three thousand years centres of Jewish learning have flourished in many parts of the world. This volume discusses these institutions from biblical times to the present. From the time of the Mishnaic Academy at Yavneh, established in the first century CE, the academies were more than schools of higher religious education. They incorporated rational analysis of the scriptures, the natural sciences and other secular studies. Some of the most celebrated academies, such as those in Cairo and Tunisia, and later in the Iberian Peninsula were of a very high intellectual order, sometimes superior to the great Christian universities. It was at these institutions that the great Jewish legal and literary works were written and completed. This collection of essays has been written by outstanding scholars who have been associated with David Patterson and the Oxford Centre. 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.

The Hebrew novelist and political essayist, Amoz Oz (1939-2018), arguably Israel’s leading intellectual, was fond of describing himself as using two different pens - the first used to write works of prose and fiction, and the other to criticize the government and advocate for a political change. This volume revisits the two pens parable. It brings together scholars from various disciplines who assess Amos Oz's dual role in Israeli culture and society as an immensely popular novelist and a leading public intellectual. Next to offering an intellectual portrait, the chapters in this book highlight some of Oz's seminal works, examine their reception, evaluate key political and literary debates he was involved in, as well as trace some of the connections between the two realms of his activity. This book is a fascinating read for students, researchers, and academics of Israeli politics, history, literature, and culture. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Israeli History and are accompanied by a new afterword by the Israeli novelist Lilah Nethanel.