Basically an account of a trip to Naples and Sicily, this book weaves in information, memories, and personal reflections. The author and his wife are Americans who moved to Israel in 1973. They traveled with another couple, an American born woman and an Israeli man, people they have known for about forty years. The author's wife is a classical archaeologist, and much of the knowledge she brought with her is present in "Between Veuvius and Etna." This book should interest people who have been to Naples and Sicily, people who are thinking about going there, and even people who have never...

The Sin of Writing and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literaturecontends that the processes of enlightenment, modernization, and secularization in nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish society were marked not by a reading revolution but rather by a writing revolution, that is, by a revolutionary change in this society's attitude toward writing. Combining socio-cultural history and literary studies and drawing on a large corpus of autobiographies, memoirs, and literary works of the period, the book sets out to explain the curious absence of writing skills and Hebrew grammar from the curriculum...