Enemies near and far: The image of the Jews in Islamist discourse in egypt

This paper is a study of the image of the Jews in Islamist discourse in modern Egypt. The rise of Zionism and the founding of the state of Israel created a confluence of political and religious interests whereby the Qur'anic view of the Jews was wedded with European anti‐Semitic ideas to create a trans‐historical symbol of evil. Islamist groups used the resulting image of the Jews as a vehicle of Islamic reform. The radicalization of some Islamists, however, changed the way that image functioned in Islamist discourse, making it more central to understanding both the crisis of modern Islam and Egyptian identity.     

Religious Queer People Beyond Identity Conflict: Lessons from Orthodox LGBT Jews in Israel

A key thread of research on how lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) persons of faith navigate and make sense of gender and sexual identities and desires that defy their religious traditions’ teachings focuses on identity conflict, management, negotiation, and reconciliation. Drawing on interviews with 64 Orthodox Jewish same-sex attracted persons in Israel, supplemented by physical and digital ethnographic data, I argue that the conflict frame is empirically imprecise and conceptually flawed. I demonstrate fluidity and ambivalence vis-à-vis religiosity and sexual identity and argue that ambivalence is generative: In the process of making sense of their sexual and religious selves, my respondents challenge what it means to be Orthodox and what it means to be same-sex attracted, thereby challenging the conflict frame's categorical schema. I then make the case for a more contextualized and dynamic framework for theorizing LGBT negotiations of religious and sexual identities. I also observe that the limitations of the conflict lens are symptomatic of broader tendencies in the sociology of religion to rely on U.S. and Christian cases and a pattern of limited engagement with work in other disciplines and subdisciplines.     

Essentialism and attribution of monstrosity in racist discourse: Right‐wing internet postings about Africans and Jews

We investigated a total of 4997 postings on an extreme right‐wing Internet discussion board with regard to the groups and themes mentioned. The most frequently mentioned target groups were Africans, Jews, Muslims, Poles, and Turks; the most prominent themes and contexts were conspiracy, criminality, exploitation, threats to German identity, infiltration, mind control and harassment, procreation, rape, and sex. We analysed in detail postings about Africans/Blacks and Jews, that is target groups that were the most clearly connected to particular themes. The analysis reveals that extreme right‐wing discourse essentializes the target groups of Jews and Africans/Blacks and ascribes them immutable group‐specific attributes that effectively make them ‘natural kinds’. The group of Jews appears as a kind of their own with super‐human powers and influence. Africans and Blacks are despised, firstly because their essential characteristics prohibit them to be categorically mixed with Germans (i.e. to become German by nationality) due to their incompatible essence, and secondly when they procreate with Whites. Such procreation produces ‘bastards’ that are met with disgust. We argue that essentialist thinking about social and ethnic groups explains a good part of their rejection by right‐wing followers. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sensitivity to lateral information on a perceptual word identification task in French third and fifth graders

This study aimed at examining sensitivity to lateral linguistic and nonlinguistic information in third and fifth grade readers. A word identification task with a threshold was used, and targets were displayed foveally with or without distractors. Sensitivity to lateral information was inferred from the deterioration of the rate of correct word identification when displayed with distractors. Results show that the two reader groups were sensitive to both right and left lateral information. The area of sensitivity to this information was more extended for the identification of easy words than difficult words. Examination of the detrimental effect of distractors suggests that in both third and fifth graders, the impact of lateral information on foveal processing is the result of a general distraction effect, but also of linguistic processing whose nature remains to be clarified.     

Beyond the east-west divide: rethinking the narrative of the Jews’ political status in Europe, 1600–1750

The enduring cliché of the east-west divide obscures the nature of the Jews’ changing political status in Europe: the period 1600–1750 cannot be described using the binary of a progressive “West” and a backward “east.” Rather, Jews in Western Europe developed a new political status of “civic parity” (Holland, England) or “corporate parity” (southern France), while Jews in Eastern Europe, especially in the private towns of magnate estates, similarly acquired a new status of “corporate parity” with Christian burghers. It was in Central Europe that Jews in this period lagged behind: while they gained a form of juridical standing in the Holy Roman Empire, their privileges were largely gained as individuals or collections of individuals. In terms of political status, the period is marked by a tripartite division of progressive west and a progressive east contrasted with a backward Central Europe.     

Old French and new money: Jews and the aesthetics of the Old Regime in transnational perspective,c.1860–1910

ABSTRACT

At the dawn of the twentieth century, styles synonymous with the French Old Regime were hailed as the epitome of good taste. French fashions from the reigns of Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Louis XVI were an international luxury brand, the proliferation of which seemed to announce the rise of “new money” and transatlantic alliances. This was a defiantly cosmopolitan and opulent mode of building and decorating, which was often dissonant with its immediate surroundings. Taking the example of Oldway Mansion in Devon – created by the American entrepreneur Isaac Merritt Singer in the 1870s and transformed by his son Paris Eugène Singer in the 1890s into a the “Versailles of the West Country” – this article reflects on the elusive but pervasive contribution of Jews to the popularity of French revivalism in the fin-de-siècle. It argues for the entanglement of Jewishness with other national and class identities and insists on considering not just the identity of the patron or the architect, but the wider network of artists, decorators and art dealers who specialized in recreating the elegance of the Old Regime. It explores what role Jewish patrons and art professionals played in disseminating French historicist styles among a dynamic, global elite.     

Yerushalmi in a French Key: (French) History and (French) Memory

This article explores the reception of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in France in light of the many and diverse reactions his books and lectures engendered at major conferences and meetings. It describes how the American scholar became one of the leading figures among French intellectuals after the first translation of his book Zakhor in 1984 and his first lecture at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1987, which resulted in a series of annual lectures over the next ten years. Following the readings of Jacques Derrida, Paul Ric?ur, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and François Furet, among other intellectuals, the eminent standing achieved by Yerushalmi coincided with a special “moment.” At a time when doubt was cast on the testimonies of living witnesses and when the words of Holocaust deniers and of members of the French Resistance were treated on equal terms, the politics of memory challenged the status of history and historians. This paper aims to recover the atmosphere of these past decades and to elucidate how Yerushalmi’s name has become inseparable from the issues linked with the debates about history and memory.     

Beyond need satisfaction: Empowering and accepting messages from third parties ineffectively restore trust and consequent reconciliation

According to the Needs‐Based Model, reconciliation requires the restoration of victims' sense of power and perpetrators' moral image, which can be achieved through the exchange of empowering and accepting messages. In two role‐playing experiments, we extended the model by examining the role of message source, the other conflict party versus a neutral third party, in facilitating reconciliation. Focusing on transgressions between apartment roommates, Study 1 found that regardless of message source, empowering messages restored victims' sense of power, and accepting messages restored perpetrators' moral image. Yet, messages from the other conflict party restored victims' and perpetrators' trust in each other more effectively than messages from third parties. Multiple mediation analyses revealed that both need satisfaction (restoring victims' sense of power and perpetrators' moral image) and trust building were critical for reconciliation. Replicating these findings in a context of transgressions between workplace colleagues, Study 2 further revealed that messages from third parties restored perpetrators' moral image only in the eyes of the third party (but not in the eyes of the victim), leading to a negative indirect effect on perpetrators' reconciliation tendencies. Theoretical implications for the modification of the Needs‐Based Model and practical implications for the limits of third parties' interventions to promote interpersonal reconciliation are discussed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The discourse on faith and medicine: a tale of two literatures

Research and writing at the intersection of faith and medicine by now include thousands of published studies, review articles, books, chapters, and essays. Yet this emerging field has been described, from within, as disheveled on account of imprecision and lack of careful attention to conceptual and theoretical concerns. An important source of confusion is the fact that scholarship in this field constitutes two distinct literatures, or rather meta-literatures, which can be termed (a) faith as a problematic for medicine and (b) medicine as a problematic for faith. These categories represent distinct theoretical lenses for viewing the intersection of faith and medicine. Observations about these two approaches are offered, along with insights about why the discourse on faith and medicine should become better integrated into discussions of religion and science.     

Seeing the language: a diagrammatic approach to natural discourse

The key idea behind the diagrammatic approach presented in the paper is that the sophisticated mechanisms of human visual construction also play an important role in natural languages. We propose a diagrammatic representation of English, giving examples, translation rules, and semantics. Special attention will be paid to anaphoric phenomena, in particular, the possibility of a uniform treatment of anaphoric pronouns.