SPME Network Participant Diana Muir recommends new journals and books for academic libraries. An important new journal is Hebraic Political Studies. This journal, begun two years ago, aims to evaluate the place of the Jewish textual tradition, alongside the traditions of Greece and Rome, in political history and the history of political thought. According to Muir, the work published on the influence of Biblical and Talmudic ideas of government on the development of the Dutch and Anglo-American political traditions is particularly significant, and the journal is an important effort to write Jewish political thought back in to the development of political theory in the west.

Contact the press at hpsubscribe@shalempress.org.il for a complimentary copy and discounted subscription form for library acquisition specialists. The journal can also be viewed at http://hpstudies.org/20/Issue.aspx.

Hebraic Political Studies is an international, peer-reviewed journal published in Jerusalem by Shalem Press and edited by Professors Gordon Schochet of Rutgers University and Arthur Eyffinger of the Huygens Institute in the Netherlands.

Another journal important to everyone writing on the contemporary Middle East is Azure. Since its debut in 1996, Azure has emerged as the premier forum for scholarship and opinion on issues of concern to the Jewish public in Israel and abroad. Published quarterly in both English and Hebrew editions, Azure (or Techelet in the Hebrew edition) brings together a wide range of writers on Judaism, Zionism, philosophy, and public policy, and is today the most widely read journal of public affairs in Israel.

http://www.shalemcenter.org.il/publications/?did=23

The Shalem Center, publisher of Hebraic Political Studies, is also bringing out modern editions and English translations of early modern works of political theory that drew on Jewish sources. The first book in this series is The Hebrew Republic, by Petrus Cunaeus; Six Books of the Commonwealth, by Jean Bodin, is forthcoming.

Diana Muir’s article, “A Land Without a People for a People Without a Land,” about a slogan that was neither written nor widely propagated by Zionists, nor intended to imply that Palestine was empty, appears in the spring 2008 issue of Middle East Quarterly ( Volume 15: Number 2). It can be read online here