Self-definition and self-defense: Jewish racial identity in nineteenth-century France

This article examines how and why French Jews began to speak of themselves as a race. Though we often assume that Jewish racial identity was an invention of anti-Semites in the 1880s, Jewish publicists had in fact adopted this language as early as the 1820s. Far from unwittingly appropriating the language of their detractors, Jews borrowed the language of race from scholars neutral or sympathetic to their cause in ways that made sense in light of their larger strategies of self-defense. The scholars who pioneered modern race theory were not the late nineteenth-century Social Darwinists; they were romantic historians like the Thierrys and Michelet, who saw France as a nation composed of a plurality of peoples who had come together over time to form a unified nation. Race thus provided a framework for understanding difference as legitimate, useful and dignified at a moment when anti-Jewish publicists attacked Jews as anti-social and immoral people who brought only harm to France. Looking at what French Jews borrowed from these early historians allows us to see the interconnections between Jewish self-defense and Jewish self-definition. In seeking to guarantee their rights and social status, French Jews appropriated new terms of understanding who they were.     

About the Contributors

Biography

About the Contributors     

Pastor,are You a Religious Illiterate?

Abstract : The growing religious diversity of the United States forces pastors into the role of spokesperson for the Christian faith along with becoming chief educator about other religious traditions for the congregation. Pastors, now more than ever, have the responsibility to become educated about the world's religions and to share this knowledge with their parishioners. To prepare clergy for these new responsibilities, three Lutheran pastors speak from their own experiences of deliberately engaging and studying diverse religious communities. With special focus on Islam and Hinduism, the pastors provide resources for further reading and study. This collaborative effort aims to encourage and empower pastors to embrace these new components of their calling by openly and regularly interacting with their religious neighbors.     

Effectiveness of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Anxiety and Depression Among Orthodox Jews

Several clinical papers have provided clinical recommendations for how to provide cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for obsessive-compulsive symptoms among Orthodox Jewish individuals. However, no published studies have described culturally adapted CBT for anxiety or depression in this population or quantified the effectiveness of such approaches. We evaluated the effectiveness of CBT for symptoms of generalized anxiety and depression in a sample of Orthodox Jews (n = 65) and a comparison sample (n = 42) presenting to the Center for Anxiety, a private outpatient clinic with three offices in the New York area (www.centerforanxiety.org). A chart review revealed that all patients received CBT-based interventions with appropriate religious-cultural adaptations of treatment, which we present in two case studies. We observed statistically and clinically significant treatment gains from pretreatment to midtreatment (anxiety: t = 8.56, p < .001; depression: t = 8.01, p < .001), and again from midtreatment through termination (anxiety: t = 3.68, p < .001; depression: t = 3.62, p < .001). No significant differences in anxiety or depression were observed between Orthodox Jewish patients and controls at any time point or for treatment effects (anxiety: Wilks’ Lambda = .950, F = 2.65, p = .076, η_p² = .050; depression: Wilks’ Lambda = .99, F = 2.00,p = .49, η_p² = .014). This paper offers clinical insight into delivery of CBT to Orthodox Jewish patients, as well as preliminary support for the effectiveness of CBT in treating symptoms of generalized anxiety and depression within this population.     

Traditional and proposed tests of slope homogeneity for non-normal and heteroscedastic data

The purpose of this study was to develop and compare tests of independent groups' slopes for non-normal distributions and heteroscedastic variances, including slope tests based on least squares, Theil-Sen, and trimmed estimation approaches. A slope test based on jackknife standard error estimates is proposed that can utilize each of the traditional estimation methods while also addressing problematic aspects of methods' standard error estimates. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed jackknife-based slope tests can improve standard error estimation, Type I error, and power relative to the traditional slope tests.