Without Bounds illuminates the life of the mysterious Rabbi Ya'aqov Wazana. Without Bounds illuminates the life of the mysterious Rabbi Ya'aqov Wazana, a Jewish healer who worked in the Western High Atlas region in southern Morocco and died there in the early 1950s. Impressed by his healing powers and shamanic virtuosity, Moroccan Jews are intrigued by his lifestyle and contacts with the Muslim and the demonic worlds that dangerously blurred his Jewish identity. Based on interviews with Moroccan Jews conducted in the late 1980s, Without Bounds proposes multiple readings of Wazana's life. Yoram Bilu re-creates the influences and important moments in Wazana's life and evaluates his character from psychological and anthropological perspectives. Human- and demon-bound, holy and impure, Jew and Muslim, old and young, Rabbi Ya'aqov Wazana dissolved the boundaries of the major social categories in Morocco and integrated them into his identity.
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson was the charismatic leader of the Chabad Hasidic movement and its designated Messiah. Yet when he died in 1994, the messianic fervor he inspired did not subside. Through traditional means and digital technologies, a group of radical Hasidim, the Meshichistim, still keep the Rebbe palpably close—engaging in ongoing dialogue, participating in specific rituals, and developing an ever-expanding visual culture of portraits and videos. With Us More Than Ever focuses on this group to explore how religious practice can sustain the belief that a messianic figure is both present and accessible. Yoram Bilu documents a unique religious experience that is distinctly modern. The rallying point of the Meshichistim—that the Rebbe is "with us more than ever"—is sustained through an elaborate system that creates the sense of his constant and pervasive presence in the lives of his followers. The virtual Rebbe that emerges is multiple, visible, accessible, and highly decentralized, the epicenter of a truly messianic movement in the twenty-first century. Combining ethnographic fieldwork and cognitive science with nuanced analysis, Bilu documents the birth and development of a new religious faith, describing the emergence of new spiritual horizons, a process common to various religious movements old and new.
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson was the charismatic leader of the Chabad Hasidic movement and its designated Messiah. Yet when he died in 1994, the messianic fervor he inspired did not subside. Through traditional means and digital technologies, a group of radical Hasidim, the Meshichistim, still keep the Rebbe palpably close—engaging in ongoing dialogue, participating in specific rituals, and developing an ever-expanding visual culture of portraits and videos. With Us More Than Ever focuses on this group to explore how religious practice can sustain the belief that a messianic figure is both present and accessible. Yoram Bilu documents a unique religious experience that is distinctly modern. The rallying point of the Meshichistim—that the Rebbe is "with us more than ever"—is sustained through an elaborate system that creates the sense of his constant and pervasive presence in the lives of his followers. The virtual Rebbe that emerges is multiple, visible, accessible, and highly decentralized, the epicenter of a truly messianic movement in the twenty-first century. Combining ethnographic fieldwork and cognitive science with nuanced analysis, Bilu documents the birth and development of a new religious faith, describing the emergence of new spiritual horizons, a process common to various religious movements old and new.
Without Bounds illuminates the life of the mysterious Rabbi Ya'aqov Wazana. Without Bounds illuminates the life of the mysterious Rabbi Ya'aqov Wazana, a Jewish healer who worked in the Western High Atlas region in southern Morocco and died there in the early 1950s. Impressed by his healing powers and shamanic virtuosity, Moroccan Jews are intrigued by his lifestyle and contacts with the Muslim and the demonic worlds that dangerously blurred his Jewish identity. Based on interviews with Moroccan Jews conducted in the late 1980s, Without Bounds proposes multiple readings of Wazana's life. Yoram Bilu re-creates the influences and important moments in Wazana's life and evaluates his character from psychological and anthropological perspectives. Human- and demon-bound, holy and impure, Jew and Muslim, old and young, Rabbi Ya'aqov Wazana dissolved the boundaries of the major social categories in Morocco and integrated them into his identity.
The final literary testament of “one of the most innovative, brilliant novelists in the Western World” (New York Times), Between Life and Death is a startling, brave, funny, and poetic autobiographical novel about the four months Yoram Kaniuk spent in a coma near the end of his life. In Between Life and Death, celebrated Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk relives the four months during which he lay unconscious in a Tel Aviv hospital, hovering between the worlds of the living and of the dead. With an arresting, dreamlike style that blends playfulness with fearless honesty, Kaniuk attempts to penetrate his own lost consciousness. Shifting between memory and illusion, imagination and testimony, Kaniuk explores the place of death in society, his own lust for life, and the encompassing struggles of the twentieth century. He writes about the colorful characters of his childhood neighborhood, battles in the 1948 War of Independence, and his defiant voyages across the Mediterranean on ships packed with Jewish refugees from war-torn Europe. With renewed vitality at the age of seventy-four, Kaniuk announced his rebirth with Between Life and Death, and left us a treasure of world literature that is destined for immortality. “How can one even review the final work of a writer as rewarding, innovative, and rebellious as Kaniuk?... Kaniuk’s achievement is inconceivable and awe-inspiring: at the age of seventy-seven, with a broken body, after his soul almost parted from this life, he managed to pull himself together for a short while, get back to his writing desk, and recount his near-death experience.… The writing is skilful and you cannot stop turning the pages.” —Time Out “Kaniuk’s best novel to date…The author captures a rare voice, a tone which is elegiac, full of rhythm, paratactic, and irresistible in its pull.… It achieves excellence and transparent wonder.” —Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
A history of the Jewish National Fund and the ways it encouraged Jews around the world to buy land in Palestine in the years 1924-1947. The Jewish National Fund [JNF] is the executive body established by the Zionist movement in 1902 to buy land in Palestine for the Jewish people. Very quickly, however, it became an international organization and soon had branchesin many countries throughout the world. One of the tasks of these branches was to mediate between the central office in Jerusalem and the millions of Jews who donated money to buy land. The organization, which is still active throughout the Jewish world, concerned itself with "the marketing of ideology" the dissemination of symbols, knowledge and ideas to the masses of the Jewish people, and converted them into money and real estate property. In thememories of much of World Jewry the JNF is linked with memories of their childhoods and the forming of their identities. The memory was, in fact, fashioned by the Propaganda Department of the JNF which worked through the mass communications media in the Jewish world and made its presence massively felt in the Jewish education networks in many countries. Among the most remembered items are "the Blue Box", the flagship of the organization, and the stamps distributed to schools, which were miniature posters making political declarations. Up until today there has been virtually no research carried out on these aspects of Zionist propaganda which helped to fashion this collective memoryand left its mark upon Jewish culture in Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. Yoram Bar-Gal is Professor of Geography at Haifa University in Israel.
A whirlwind of art, music, and lust, Life on Sandpaper is Yoram Kaniuk's overwhelming autobiographical novel detailing his years as a young painter in the New York of the '50s. Wounded and alienated, a war veteran at the age of nineteen, Kaniuk arrives in Greenwich Village at its peak period of artistic creativity, and finds his way among such giants as Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Willem de Kooning, and Frank Sinatra. In terse prose, inspired by the associative and breathless drive of bebop, Kaniuk's memories race between the ecstatic devotion of his beloved Harlem jazz clubs, through the ideological spats of the dying Yiddish world of the Lower East Side, to the volcanic gush of passion, pain, art, dance, alcohol, and drugs that was Greenwich Village. Kaniuk's stories roll and tumble here with hypnotic urgency, as if this were his last opportunity to remember, and tell, before all is obliterated.
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