MIREILLE HADAS-LEBEL - Professor of History of Religions in Sorbonne and President of the National Centre of the Hebrew, has just signed an entitled book " Hillel - A Wise person in the time of Jesus ".
This work been a part of the Collection " Presence of the Judaism - pocket - edit Albin Michel, in partnership with " Ménorah ". This book allows us to rediscover in a synthetic and pleasant way, Hillel's symbolic figure. The one that everybody knows for its aphotismes or for the overviews which set him against her colleague Shamaï is, here , restored in her time, its education and its descent.
A work which is read as a novel and which puts of the order in knowledge.

LÉON ASKÉNAZI

Léon Askénazi, rabbi and philosopher, is with Emmanuel Lévinas and André Neher one of the main artisans of the flourish of the Jewish thought in France after Second World war.
Man of his time, Léon Askénazi knew how to, following Jacob Gordin, express and pass on in a modern language the most former educations of the Jewish tradition. He knew how to also find their forgotten sense and make accessible their problem.
Renowned for the oral education which he stopped distributing in front of vast publics, Léon Askénazi is, on the other hand , less known for the multiple papers of which he is the author and which he confided in his lifetime to the most different publications.
For the first time, this work gathers these texts. Beyond the variety of the subjects which they approach, they highlight the surprising modernity of the Jewish tradition.
Been born in Algeria in 1922, Léon Askénazi lived in France until 1967, year on the installation in Jerusalem where, Jew become again Hebrew, he will live until his death in 1996.

Essenians and Qumran's manuscripts

The recent visit of Jean-Paul II realized the alteration of Judeo - Christian relations during the last years. " Alteration " is exactly title and subject of a Paul Giniewski's new book telling the gradual transformation of the former " education of the contempt " in a new " education of the respect ". This book covers two thousand years of history and a present charged with promise. We publish an extract of it. (According to THE LIEN)

Jewish Humor in the Literature

What is there of common between Job and Woody Allen? They are both " shlemiels ", these swamped of misfortune, " these collectors of injustices " for whom there is anything else to make that to complain. If the first complains without the least spark of humor, the complaints of this last one are of an irresistible joke. Among the two, the animated history of the Jewish people of whom one of original inventions and not the least is the specific answer which she knew how to create in front of the setbacks: humor. Past and present, religious fervour and dilemne of the assimilation, the family - prison and family - refuge, love and hatred, life and death take funny accents under the feather of the Jewish writers, that they express themselves in Yiddish, in Russian, in English or in other languages, short invisible thread between lines, one your regular visitor resounds in the variety of works. Jewish humor, imperceptible phenomenon, is quite complete in these texts weaved of time. To seize the imperceptible, here is a task deserving of the object. This book is there usual.
Judith Stora-Sandor, doctor es Letters, is master- assistant in the Paris VIII. university

Never forget who we are

In the borders of India and Burma, at feet of Himalaya, some hundred people and of women say themselves the last heirs of a lost tribe. They crossed three thousand years of History by keeping intact their faith in God and their hope in Israel. They are Manasses, legendary Jews.
Of Samarie's grip by Salmanassar the Assyrian in that of Jerusalem by Nabuchonodosor. Of their exile babylonien in their odyssey behind Cyrus and the other Persian kings. Of their epic with Alexandre the Great who will lead them in the heart of India and of China to their wanderings along the Silk road. Realms which they based at the Kirghiz's, Khazars and in the Peninsula arabic, and which belong only to winds, to their meeting with Gengis Khan then Tamerlan. Crusades in the Inquisition, discovery of the New World in that of the high trays thibetains. Of the Islam in the Buddhism, the Hinduism in the Anglican Christianity, they are past everywhere there where world made and came undone, they trembled, paid of their blood, cried out their thirst of freedom till the end of XX-th century.
The legend of all these exodus where get involved happiness the biggest as most teribles dramae, courtship the most heavenly as the most forbidden, is told us today by these people whom one considered disappeared. Such an immense palpitation, she is lived through the only hero, the named eternal Jew Saul. Generation after generation, it will carry out sacred mission ordered by the first of Manasses being dying under Samarie's ramparts, more than seven hundred years before the Christian era: " never forget who we are ". Saul, transformed in the infinity, became for the eternity the arm and the spirit which avenges Israel of its past misfortunes. In the worst tragedies as the most beautiful victories. And until the edge of the nothingness.

Zohar is especially known as a comment esoteric Jewish on Pentateuque u maybe the comment esoteric Jewish by excellence. Nevertheless, it contains also three parts completely dedicated to some of five rollers: Ruth's book, Lamentations and Song of Songs. Less known and so less often commented, quoted or evoked, these three different parts constitute nevertheless important details of the literature zoharic, as much for their appropriate doctrinal contents as for their literary quality. (Consult extracts)

In February, 1955, a 25 year old young man lands of Israel on the quays of New York, after a shaken crossing: Israel Zamir is upset, because it is going to find his father, the writer Isaac Bashévis Singer, whom it did not see again for exactly twenty years. " Still had we anything in common after all this time? " The son, the just man before reunion worries. These are strange: the writer does not show a lot of emotion and does not know how to soon that make of a cumbersome son. Nothing, he says, has to put itself between his books and he. This " badly engaged " relation is going nevertheless to become in the course of the years " a friendship solid and full of maturity ", on which the son will decide to tell in writing, " in a quite personal way ", after the death of his father in 1991.

Moving, the testimony of Israel Zamir is also without concession. First of all, he raises in hollow a surprising portrait of the Nobel prize of literature 1978. Everything sets the two people, even though the son does not want to intervene a posteriori in the conflict which separated his parents: his mother was communist, and wanted to leave in Soviet Union; his father, very hostile to Stalin, preferred to emigrate in the United States, where his elder brother Josuah had invited him to join him. Believing in God and in spirits, little attracted by the Zionism, the father distrusts the political commitment of the son, layman, rationalist and member of a kibbutz. Contemplative writer of a disappeared world (the yiddishland of pre-war years) in a language in escheat, the father does not well understand the generation of his son, modern, hyperactive and speaking about Hebrew. Finally, jealous person of the freedom, rather selfish, having refused every child to his second wife (" my children, they are my histories ", explain to his son), the father has trouble facing the demand of the son, in search of filiation and of explanations. A child, he will write in an autobiographical exactly entitled short story " the Son ", " has not his place either to me, or outside. I have neither room, nor bed, nor money, nor time for him ".

Nevertheless, in spite of clashes and incomprehensions, the two people are going to find bit by bit well-balanced reports: in the American stays of the son, succeed soon the Israeli journeys of the father. The two people learn to know, to fill the initial abyss. In front of the interest of his son for the Suvre, the writer confides him the translation of his books in Hebrew, what is going to strengthen their intellectual complicity. Isaac Bashévis Singer explains so how come to him histories: " When I embark on a history, he says, I must be convinced that I am the only one to be able to tell it finally, I have at least to believe him. " He tells also how he kept intact all the memory of his Polish childhood, how he believes in the ghosts, how it is ready to cross all New York to meet a person outside the common and how he works: " A writer is as a horse: he must be constantly whipped. He needs also short periods(delays) to oblige him to return his text in time. "

As many of his close relations, Israel Zamir tried to understand success with the women of his father, this " Jewish Casanova ". Explaining to his son that he " had ever courted a woman ", but that he did not know how to resist to them, the writer says to him that the women were " an excellent public " and that after all, the bed " was a continuation of the conversation, but in the horizontal ".

Updated every year, the Guide of the Backpacker proposes a brief historic of the country and a global vision of traditions, geography, of the Atmosphere. The characteristic is to advance the different places to be visited according to the type of journey which you envisage : relaxation, excursion through all the country or curious but quiet visit. Rich in anecdotes, it offers a wide choice of restaurants, Hotels or of shelters, classified according to prices. Whatever is the size of your purse, you will find there your happiness and especially will take advantage of the experiment lived by one other before you. 

These news presented for the first time in French translation, are extracted from two collections where the author regrouped texts written between 1916 and 1924. The voice which is allowed listen through them is only, whether it is to evoke the universe of the Jews of campaigns, the city and the alienations, or still the civil war in Russia. The most former are written by a young writer hardly taken out of the traditional sphere where his father is a rabbi, the following ones collect the experiment of a vaster world, opened to the political turn upside down of this restless time. All cross a temporal and individual thickness, since the mysterious and intimate evocation of the childhood until the cynical vision of the modern individual and the shaping of always problematic one Jewish "identity".