The World Of Israel Weissbrem

Translation is an art as taxing as any of the fine arts practiced by humankind. The translator is caught between the need to render the original in a readable and polished version of the target language and the obligation not to depart too far from the original, which might have fine nuances not easily transferred from one language to another. The problem is so well known that generations of students have given their years to studying languages so as not to lose those drops of the original distillation that are inevitably spilled in the process of transfer. The translator cannot retreat from the confrontation and must do the best he can. In translating Israel W eissbrem's work one is faced with a complicating factor: The author was writing in a language that was in the process of revivification after a long era during which it had been able to cope with the demands made upon its resources. The literary demands up until then were largely of the philosophical and theological order with which the extant lexicographical inventory could cope. Then, in the nineteenth century, belles lettres, poetry, the novel, and the essay made demands that necessitated updating the Hebrew language into a vernacular that could muster an inventory of phrases for every life setting.

This bibliography includes all traceable self-contained books, monographs, pamphlets and chapters from books which in some way pertain to Jews in Australia and New Zealand between 1788 and 2008 Born in Russia in 1942, Serge Liberman came to Australia in 1951, where he now works as a medical practitioner. As author of several short-story collections including On Firmer Shores, A Universe of Clowns, The Life That I Have Led, and The Battered and the Redeemed, he has three times received the Alan Marshall Award and has also been a recipient of the NSW Premier's Literary Award. In addition, he is compiler of two previous editions of A Bibliography of Australian Judaica. Several of his titles have been set as study texts in Australian and British high schools and universities. His literary work has been widely published; he has been Editor and Literary Editor of several respected journals and has contributed to many other publications.

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 10 volumes in this set, originally published between 1965 and 1994, draw together research by leading academics in the area of religious education and provides a rigorous examination of related key issues. The volumes examine the teaching of world faiths in schools, religious education in both primary and secondary schools, and the teaching of morality. This set will be of particular interest to students of Education and Religious Studies.

Yehuda Amichai is Israel's foremost poet as well as a significant novelist and dramatist. He has received every major Israeli prize for literature, and his poetry has been translated into over twenty languages. Amichai has served as poet-in-residence at major universities across the United States and has been a Sequent visitor to the University of Oxford. In this volume, the world's leading authorities on Amichai explore all the major genres and themes of his work. The result is an important book that is a unique and comprehensive scholarly overview of a major twentieth-century literary figure. It will prove especially valuable to those teaching modern Hebrew literature at English-language universities.

The dawning of the nineteenth century found the Jews of Eastern Europe torn between the forces of progress and reaction as they took their first tentative steps toward the modern world. In a war of words and of books, Haskaia–the Jewish Enlightenment–did battle with the religious revival movement known as Hasidism. Perl, an ardent advocate of Enlightenment, unleashed the opening salvo with the publication in 1819 of Revealer of Secrets. The novel tried to pass itself off as a hasidic holy book when it was, in fact, a broadside against Hasidism–a parody of its teachings and of the language of its holy books. The outraged hasidim responded by buying up and burning as many copies as they could. Dov Taylor's careful translation and commentary make this classic of Hebrew literature available and accessible to the contemporary English-speaking reader while preserving the integrity and bite of Perl's original. With Hasidism presently enjoying a remarkable rebirth, the issues in Revealer of Secrets are all the more relevant to those seeking to balance reason and faith. As the first Hebrew novel, the work will also be of great interest to students of modern Hebrew literature and modern Jewish history.

By the time Joseph Chaim Brenner arrived in London (where Out of the Depths was written) in 1904, his literary reputation was already established by a volume of short stories and a previous novel, In Winter. Born in Russia in 1881, Brenner at the age of twenty-four had fled the disorders of the Russian Empire for the mean peace of London's East End. Out of the Depths is concerned with a group of Russian immigrants in London who work for a Jewish daily newspaper. They are caught up in a conflict with the owner when he seeks to introduce a typesetting machine into the newspaper shop. Following an unsuccessful strike, the impoverished workers decline into a general collective misery that is relieved only by the strength and honesty of the central character. The language of Out of the Depths has a remarkably modern energy. Brenner anticipates literary techniques that came into wide use only later. The employment of stream of consciousness, shifting perspectives, and emotive presentation and the use of vocabulary from the Yiddish, Russian, German, and English languages have a startling impact, a texture that Dr. Patterson faithfully captures while conforming to the demands of English idiom. Employing an ancient language in a modern idiomatic style, this little-known work by a writer of remarkable honesty gives intense expression to the social upheavals of the time and to the profound moral questioning that for some was almost a consequence of living in the first years of this century. David Patterson's translation of Out of the Depths received the Webber Prize for translation in 1989.