Through the stories of trauma experts, Israel Defense Forces officers, local therapists, and residents, Keren Friedman-Peleg reveals how Israel’s psychological aid system in communities bordering Gaza became a battleground of competing interests and contested ideas about how communities should endure, recover, and rebuild.

Domestic Diaspora tells the story of how Jews, across centuries and continents, have built homes that were both deeply rooted and constantly at risk. The volume offers fresh insight into Jewish life by focusing not on politics or elites, but on the intimate, everyday spaces where identity and community were forged.

Based on extensive fieldwork, this intimate ethnography explores how orthodox Jewish Israelis devoted to settling the occupied West Bank adopt Buddhist-derived meditation to encounter God within and promote redemption. Settling the Mind, Settling the Land reveals how self-reflection can reinforce rather than challenge nationalist commitments.

Proclaim Liberty chronicles the Jubilee’s interpretation in the ancient texts of early Judaism and Christianity. By analyzing the practice and the idea in conversation with Utopian Studies, Jonathan Kaplan demonstrates how the Jubilee was employed to shape visions for renewing Jewish economic practices and to frame new ways of thinking about time.

Unsettled Cameras explores how photography shaped Jewish debates about nationalism and the Jewish presence in Mandate Palestine. It reveals photography’s role in political communication, visual diplomacy, and identity formation and offers a visual history of Zionism, empire, and media in a contested colonial landscape.

Historian Yoram Meital interprets Cairo’s synagogues as exquisite storytellers. Meital contends that studying the congregations and the social services provided in synagogues sheds new light on the transformation Egyptian society and its Jewish community underwent from 1875 to the present.

Naftali S. Cohn argues that the earliest rabbinic text, the Mishnah, manifests an implicit theory of what doing rituals accomplishes. Correctly performed rituals, according to the Mishnah, orchestrate bodily interaction with the environment, activate cultural values, and instill feelings, thereby shaping individual and collective Jewish bodies.

This book traces rabbinic thought on the phenomenon of legal circumventions—finding licit ways to achieve otherwise illegal outcomes. Elana Stein Hain shows how rabbinic literature does not fully reject or accept loopholes, but instead determines their acceptability based on whether their outcomes and processes maintain the integrity of the law.