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Bible Legends explores the rich crop of legends that occur in the Old Testament, many of which are the key to the richest literary and artistic traditions of the western world. Real people emerge from these familiar (and not so familiar) stories: Adam's ascent into Heaven in a chariot; Abraham's trial by fire; Jonah's adventure in the whale; Solomon as a beggar; the wooing of Rebekah; the life of Moses; David and Goliath; Cain and Abel. In this fascinating book, Louis Ginzberg presents the Bible's spiritual values in new colours and dimensions. This is storytelling with a grain of salt and a lot of wit. These tales sprang from the ancient oral tradition and changed the daily thoughts and deeds of a hundred generations; here, their power and truth is examined

Scholars of Jewish folklore as well as of Talmudic-Midrashic literature will find this volume to be invaluable reading.

Tales from the Sephardic Dispersion begins the most important collection of Jewish folktales ever published. It is the first volume in Folktales of the Jews, the five-volume series to be released over the next several years, in the tradition of Louis Ginzberg's classic, Legends of the Jews. The 71 tales here and the others in this series have been selected from the Israel Folktale Archives, Named in Honor of Dov Noy, The University of Haifa (IFA), a treasure house of Jewish lore that has remained largely unavailable to the entire world until now. Since the creation of the State of Israel, the IFA has collected more than 20,000 tales from newly arrived immigrants, long-lost stories shared by their families from around the world. The tales come from the major ethno-linguistic communities of the Jewish world and are representative of a wide variety of subjects and motifs, especially rich in Jewish content and context. Each of the tales is accompanied by in-depth commentary that explains the tale's cultural, historical, and literary background and its similarity to other tales in the IFA collection, and extensive scholarly notes. There is also an introduction that describes the Sephardic culture and its folk narrative tradition, a world map of the areas covered, illustrations, biographies of the collectors and narrators, tale type and motif indexes, a subject index, and a comprehensive bibliography. Until the establishment of the IFA, we had had only limited access to the wide range of Jewish folk narratives. Even in Israel, the gathering place of the most wide-ranging cross-section of world Jewry, these folktales have remained largely unknown. Many of the communities no longer exist as cohesive societies in their representative lands; the Holocaust, migration, and changes in living styles have made the continuation of these tales impossible. This volume and the others to come will be monuments to a rich but vanishing oral tradition.

A study of the Iraqi Jewish community of Zakho that investigates the community's attachment to the Land of Israel, the effects of Zionist activity, and immigration to Palestine and Israel. Unwitting Zionists examines the Jewish community in the northern Kurdistan town of Zakho from the end of the Ottoman period until the disappearance of the community through aliyah by 1951. Because of its remote location, Zakho was far removed from the influence of the Jewish religious leadership in Iraq and preserved many of its religious traditions independently, becoming the most important Jewish community in the region and known as "Jerusalem of Kurdistan." Author Haya Gavish argues, therefore, that when the community was exposed to Zionism, it began to open up to external influences and activity. Originally published in Hebrew, Unwitting Zionists uses personal memoirs, historical records, and interviews to investigate the duality between Jewish tradition and Zionism among Zakho's Jews. Gavish consults a variety of sources to examine the changes undergone by the Jewish community as a result of its religious affiliation with Eretz-Israel, its exposure to Zionist efforts, and its eventual immigration to Israel. Because relatively little written documentation about Zakho exists, Gavish relies heavily on folkloristic sources like personal recollections and traditional stories, including extensive material from her own fieldwork with an economically and demographically diverse group of men and women from Zakho. She analyzes this firsthand information within a historical framework to reconstruct a communal reality and lifestyle that was virtually unknown to anyone outside of the community. Appendixes contain biographical details of the interviewees for additional background. Gavish also addresses the relative merits of personal memoirs, optimal interviewer-interviewee relationships, and the problem of relying on the interviewees' memories in her study. Folklore, oral history, anthropology, and Israeli studies scholars, as well as anyone wanting to learn more about religion, commuity, and nationality in the Middle East will appreciate Unwitting Zionists.