The Essential Child. Susan Gelman. New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. 392 pages, $49.95 (US), cloth or paper.

To evaluate the claim that correct performance on unexpected transfer false-belief tasks specifically involves mental-state understanding, two experiments were carried out with children with autism, intellectual disabilities, and typical development. In both experiments, children were given a standard unexpected transfer false-belief task and a mental-state-free, mechanical analogue task in which participants had to predict the destination of a train based on true or false signal information. In both experiments, performance on the mechanical task was found to correlate with that on the false-belief task for all groups of children. Logistic regression showed that performance on the mechanical analogue significantly predicted performance on the false-belief task even after accounting for the effects of verbal mental age. The findings are discussed in relation to possible common mechanisms underlying correct performance on the two tasks.     

From Belsen to Gaza: The Promise (2011), British and British-Jewish identity

This article discusses Peter Kosminsky’s miniseries The Promise (2011) and investigates the intense public responses it engendered in Britain. The first part of the article explores how the miniseries takes the lead from the liberation of Belsen to engage with issues of British national self-perception. Drawing on the notion of ‘postimperial melancholia’, the article argues that The Promise explores important issues related to Britain’s past and present, in particular the lasting heritage of Empire. The second part engages with the intense reception of the miniseries among opinion makers and the general public, with many critics seeing The Promise as aimed at delegitimising the State of Israel. In thus doing, the article situates the debate within broader discussions on the supposed relationship between anti-Zionism and “new anti-Semitism”, and more specifically discussion of the role of anti-Zionist Jews. The debate around The Promise is a case study for the exploration of two related controversies. The first one pertains to Jewish/non-Jewish relations, in particular regarding the international role of Israel in the twenty-first century. The second one is more specifically infra-Jewish and revolves around the issue of which subjects are legitimate to speak out as Jews and in the name of which values.