Introduction

With the death of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in December 2009, the world of Jewish studies lost one of its most distinguished practitioners. Yerushalmi undertook pathbreaking research in a number of different fields of Jewish history that reflected the breadth of his erudition. This issue of Jewish History explores several key branches of Yerushalmi’s scholarly labor including his study of conversos and his ongoing interest in the “royal alliances” of the Jews. It also explores Yerushalmi’s reputation beyond the United States, focusing in particular on France and Germany, where he achieved wide renown in the 1980s and 1990s.     

Psychosocial predictors of natural killer cell mobilization during marital conflict.

This study examined how specific emotions relate to autonomic nervous and immune system parameters and whether cynical hostility moderates this relationship. Forty-one married couples participated in a 15-min discussion about a marital problem. Observers recorded spouses' emotional expressions during the discussion, and cardiovascular, neuroendocrine, and immunologic parameters were assessed throughout the laboratory session. Among men high in cynical hostility, anger displayed during the conflict was associated with greater elevations in systolic and diastolic blood pressure, cortisol, and increases in natural killer cell numbers and cytotoxicity. Among men low in cynical hostility, anger was associated with smaller increases in heart rate and natural killer cell cytotoxicity. These findings suggest that models describing the impact of stress on physiology should be refined to reflect the joint contribution of situational and dispositional variables.     

Memory for pictograms, pictures, and words separately and all mixed up

Pictograms were created in which the outline of a work denoting an object was shaped to be the same as the object itself. A number of objects were presented, some drawn as pictograms, some as outline shapes, and some as normally printed words. The experiment was designed to test if recognition memory was superior for the pictograms as compared to outline pictures or words, and if this would be true whether the subjects were asked to attend to the form or only the content of the stimuli. One group of subjects was trained to respond OLD only if the test item was the same object in the same form, and NEW only to objects never before shown in any form. Recognition accuracy (a signal detection analysis) was greatest for the pictograms, and poorest for the words in both groups. Though the subjects could disregard form, they were most accurate when probed with the same form as presented. But in all comparisons subjects were most accurate when forced to recall both the form and the content. These and other results were taken to be mildly supportive of a dual coding hypothesis, and of the utility of these new stimuli.