Yaacov Shavit is a professor in the department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University, specializing in the cultural history of modern Jews. In the 1970s, he founded and edited Katedra, a periodical dedicated to the history of settlement in the land of Israel. He is the author of prose works, poetry, and children’s books.
The perceived role of the national culture in the Zionist Eretz-Israeli context was to shape the new Jewish society created in the land of Israel and to give it overall content. It aimed to shape the…
And life on deck grows quiet. Silence spreads
And people, wrapped in coats, look out to sea.
And, here and there, a gleam, a glittering.
The ship moves quietly. Some fall asleep.
The night is…
A medieval rabbi barely escapes from a blood libel accusation at his own Seder table in this prescient nineteenth-century story by the famous German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine.