Brandeis Library


The Brandeis library is renowned for its Judaica collection.

The Schusterman Center supports Brandeis library acquisitions in the field of Israel Studies, both fiction and non-fiction. Following are some featured acquisitions for 2017-2018:

Israel: Law for the Regulation of Settlement in Judea and Samaria, 5777-2017
by Ruth Levush
[The Law Library of Congress, Global Legal Research Center, 2017]

Golda Meir: A Political Biography
by Meron Medzini
[De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2017]

Space and Mobility in Palestine
by Julie Marie Peteet
[Indiana University Press, 2017]

Previously Featured

Book cover of Yaron Peleg, Directed by God: Jewishness in Contemporary Israeli Film and Television
Directed by God: Jewishness in Contemporary Israeli Film and Television

by Yaron Peleg

The first study of its kind, Directed by God analyzes several representations of Jewish religiosity in Israeli film and television that challenge secular Zionism in contemporary Israeli society. [University of Texas Press, 2016]

Book cover of Life after Ruin: The Struggles over Israel's Depopulated Arab Spaces by Noam Leshem
Life after Ruin: The Struggles over Israel's Depopulated Arab Spaces

by Noam Leshem

This book examines the radical transformation of Arab landscapes taken by Israel in the 1948 war. By looking at the spatial history of Arab villages, Leshem highlights the intricate and often intimate engagements between Jews and Arabs in the present day. [Cambridge University Middle East Studies, 2016]

Book cover of Contemporary Israel: New Insights and Scholarship
Contemporary Israel: New Insights and Scholarship

ed. Frederick Greenspan

The contradictions and competing views of modern Israel are the subject of this book. Over the past generation, a substantial body of scholarship has explored numerous aspects of the country, including its approaches to citizenship and immigration, the arts, the women’s movement, religious fundamentalism, and language; but much of that work has to date been confined within the walls of the academy. This book does not seek not to resolve either the country’s internal debates or its struggle with the Arab world, but to present a sample of contemporary scholars’ discoveries and discussions about modern Israel in an accessible way. [NYU Press, 2016]

Book cover of Acco Festival: Between Celebration and Confrontation by Naphtaly Shem-Tov
Acco Festival: Between Celebration and Confrontation

by Naphtaly Shem-Tov

This research follows the history of the Acco Festival for Other Israeli Theatre from 1980-2012, chronicling it as a site of celebration as well as confrontation. The Acco Festival is presented as a borderland that brings together established mainstream directors and actors, alternative artists from the fringes, and Acco’s Jewish and Arab residents. [Academic Studies Press, 2016]

Book cover of The International Diplomacy of Israel's Founders: Deception at the UN in the Quest for Palestine by John Quigley
The International Diplomacy of Israel's Founders: Deception at the UN in the Quest for Palestine

by John Quigley

During the early to mid-twentieth century, the Zionist Organization secured a series of political victories on the international stage, leading to the foundation of a Jewish state and to its ability to expand its territorial control within Palestine. By comparing diplomatic statements at the United Nations and elsewhere against the historical record, this book sheds new light on the legacies of such leaders as Chaim Weizmann, David Ben Gurion, Abba Eban, and Shabtai Rosenne. [Cambridge University Press, 2014]

Book cover of Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948 by Liora Halperin
Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948

by Liora Halperin

Halperin questions the accepted scholarly narrative of a Zionist move away from multilingualism during the years following World War I, demonstrating how Jews in Palestine remained connected linguistically by both preference and necessity to a world outside the boundaries of the pro-Hebrew community even as it promoted Hebrew and achieved that language’s dominance. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014]

Book cover of Imaging the Kibbutz: Visions of Utopia in Literature and Film by Ranen Omer-Sherman
Imaging the Kibbutz: Visions of Utopia in Literature and Film

by Ranen Omer-Sherman

Numerous sociological and economic studies have appeared, but no book-length study has ever addressed the tremendous range of critically imaginative portrayals of the kibbutz. This diachronic study addresses novels, short fiction, memoirs, and cinematic portrayals of the kibbutz by both kibbutz “insiders” (including those born and raised there, as well as those who joined the kibbutz as immigrants or migrants from the city) and “outsiders.” [Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015]

Book cover of Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947 by Bruce Hoffman
Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947

by Bruce Hoffman

Drawing on previously untapped archival resources in London, Washington, D.C., and Jerusalem, Bruce Hoffman has written one of the most detailed and sustained accounts of a terrorist and counterterrorist campaign that may ever have been seen. [New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2015]