The beginning of modern Jewish historiography: Prague – A center on the periphery

This paper questions the well-established view that modern Jewish historical writing began in Germany about 1820, with the Wissenschaft des Judentums. Following a summary of various scholarly discussions of this issue, attention shifts to Prague. Prague was a center of Jewish historical writing before the birth of Wissenschaft, and the historical narratives of three distinct Bohemian maskilim, Peter Beer (1758–1838), Salomo Löwisohn (1789–1821), and Marcus Fischer (1788–1858) are shown to illustrate the options available to Jewish historians before institutionalized German historicism came to dominate the field. No less important, it becomes clear that scholars should treat Prague as a center of Jewish historical production, which they have not done in the past.     

PERCEPTIONS OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT

Two hundred eight faculty members and 314 graduate students located at a West Coast university were presented with 24 brief situations describing five types of sexual harassment in a university setting: gender harassment, seductive behavior, sexual bribery, sexual coercion, and sexual imposition or assault. The participants were randomly assigned to rate the situations under one of four instructional conditions that described combinations of the level of the student and authority of the faculty portrayed in the brief vignettes. Women were more likely than neither the target student's level (i.e., graduate or undergraduate) nor the degree of the faculty member's power over her affected the participants' ratings of the situations. The results indicated that, with the exception of the more coercive and intrusive behaviors, considerable uncertainty may still exist about what constitutes sexual harassment within the university setting.     

The Hall index of mystical spirituality: an exploration in constructing a short scale of mystical spirituality

ABSTRACT

The aim of this study was to propose a new nine-item measure of mystical spirituality which would be [as easy as possible] for “ordinary” people (those with little or no theological education) to complete. The measure was developed and tested on data provided by 602 participants within an on-line survey. The Hall Index of Mystical Spirituality displayed excellent properties of internal consistency reliability (reporting an alpha coefficient of .93) and good construct validity, in terms of its location within the four components of psychological space, defined by psychological type theory (reporting a correlation of .30 within the measure of intuition). As a new measure of mystical spirituality further research is needed to test the usefulness of this short scale.