bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Human Rights Agenda for the New Administration
Authors: Nossel Suzanne
Published: February 2012

For all their differences, the two leading presidential candidates have both spotlighted the promotion of human rights internationally as a cornerstone of a rebuilt American foreign policy. John McCain, breaking from Republican orthodoxy, has said that "promoting human rights abroad can serve our national interests in profound ways." Barack Obama, resisting a trend among Democrats toward hard-bitten realism, has promised that "in every region of the globe, our foreign policy should promote traditional American ideals: democracy and human rights." Both candidates, rightly, see human rights as a necessary foundation for restoring American credibility and legitimacy around the world. But neither candidate has yet fleshed out how he would restore American global leadership on human rights. Whichever party wins the White House, the next administration needs a clear blueprint that not only reverses the worst damage done by the Bush administration but will make the United States once again a vital force in strengthening respect for human rights globally.
C'mon, Everybody: Will Music Bring Us Together?
Authors: Gewen Barry
Published: February 2012

Music was an essential—probably the essential—art form of the 1960s. In a way that's hard for anyone who didn't live through the decade to grasp, music once reached deep into every facet of existence, from politics to fashion. It seemed destined to maintain a central role in people's lives forever. Rock 'n' roll was here to stay. Was its promise of eternal revolution one more false utopia? Today, music has retreated to life's interstices, as a form of theater, iPod solipsism, an occasion for nostalgia, or an arena for the uninhibited celebration of personal freedom (usually expressed in portrayals of some sexual act or other). What happened?
Defending the Enlightenment
Authors: Wolin Richard
Published: February 2012

Richard Wolin reviews Susan Neiman's Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists and Rob Riemen's Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal .
Refusing to Save Darfur
Authors: Reeves Eric
Published: February 2012

Darfur's ongoing agony continues to be attended by an obscene chorus of international mendacity, hypocrisy, and expediency. Not content simply to allow Khartoum's génocidaires to accomplish their ghastly task, the African Union, the Arab League, the Non-Aligned Movement, key Security Council members China and Russia, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference have all offered the National Islamic Front regime essential diplomatic and political support—now in the face of formal charges of genocide by the International Criminal Court (July 14, 2008). Indeed, China continues to provide military equipment that facilitates ethnically targeted destruction, as well as the critical commercial and capital investment that underwrites a booming economy in Khartoum and a small surrounding portion of the Nile River valley. Shamed by an international "genocide Olympics" campaign, Beijing has made various gestures designed to show support for Darfur over the past year and a half; some have been significant. But the leverage provided by China's hosting of the Games ended in August, and there can be little doubt that Beijing will resume business as usual with Khartoum.
Criminalizing Kids: The Overlooked Reason for Failing Schools
Authors: Thompson Heather Ann
Published: February 2012

The nation's dropout rate reached crisis levels in 2009, and test scores posted by its poorest public schools were also grim. Only 70 percent of first-year students entering America's high schools were graduating, with a full 1.2 million students dropping out each school year. In 2009, the Detroit public school system reported math scores that were the worst in forty years of participation in the National Assessment of Educational Progress test. So great was the problem of "low performing" schools by 2010 that the U.S. Department of Education set up ten regional advisory committees "to collect information on the educational needs across the country" and President Barack Obama committed $3.5 billion to fund schools that were doing particularly poorly.
Neither Revolution Nor Reform: A New Strategy for the Left
Authors: Alperovitz Gar
Published: February 2012

For over a century, liberals and radicals have seen the possibility of change in capitalist systems from one of two perspectives: the reform tradition assumes that corporate institutions remain central to the system but believes that regulatory policies can contain, modify, and control corporations and their political allies. The revolutionary tradition assumes that change can come about only if corporate institutions are eliminated or transcended during an acute crisis, usually but not always by violence. But what happens if a system neither reforms nor collapses in crisis?
Into the Ether
Authors: Leonard Sarah
Published: February 2012

In 1983, Lewis Hyde published The Gift, a meditation on gift economies where art and ideas escaped the indignity of a market value. As a poet, he wanted to show that "the commerce of the creative spirit" could not flourish as pure commodity exchange. His advice on how an artist might feed herself under capitalism was thin, but as historian Jackson Lears noted, "[I]t is unfair to upbraid him for the unavoidable banality of his advice. What he has done is to freshen stale thinking about consumer culture by reminding us that the focus for criticism should not be material goods but the attitudes people bring to their exchange." Our public life in enriched, Hyde argued, by the gift relationships inherent in producing art, sharing research, or giving blood. Some kinds of value are lost on the auction block.
Lost in the Melting Pot
Authors: Phillips Maxine
Published: February 2012

I'm in the receiving line with my mother at my aunt's wake. The stifling funeral parlor is crowded with mourners, and I recognize former neighbors from my aunt's all-Italian neighborhood. My mother tenses as an elderly man approaches, murmurs his condolences, and moves on. She hisses under her breath, and sixty years drop away: "He wouldn't speak Italian to me on the playground." I've heard the story many times: the eight-year-old immigrant humiliated by being put with fiveyear-olds until she could learn English; frozen out by her peers who didn't want to be seen talking to anyone fresh off the boat; having to translate for her parents, who never learned the new tongue. "Why didn't they learn?" I'd always ask. "They didn't need to," she'd explain, "and they were working all the time. It's the second generation that learns." As new waves from other countries crossed our borders, she had no patience for bilingual classes and dual-language signs. She had suffered, she had assimilated. They could, too.
¡Ya Basta! : Challenging Restrictions on English Language Learners
Authors: Garcia Eugene E.
Published: February 2012

During the last decade, the population of children entering U.S. schools unable to speak English grew by 40 percent. One in ten pre-K-12 students, a total of 5.3 million, are categorized as English Language Learners (ELLs). This large number of students is directly a result of the large wave of immigration over the last fifteen years. Those new immigrants gave birth to "new-Americans," children born in the United States with full citizenship rights but born into non-English-speaking families. Therefore, the number of ELLs is not expected to diminish and is projected to increase by some 20 percent in the next decade. The achievement gap between them and their English-speaking peers has not contracted, with ELL students underperforming by 30 percent to 50 percent compared to their English-speaking white peers at almost every grade on national and state assessments. In almost all instances, this is the case even if you control for median family income and other indicators of social class. The education of ELL students in the United States need not remain a story of underachievement. Research points to effective methods for turning around their educational trajectory. Unfortunately, however, ELL policy remains mired in political ideology that restricts its potential and blocks its supposed intentions.
Would You Like an Ankle Bracelet With That?: Winners and Losers in Electronic Monitoring
Authors: Kilgore James
Published: February 2012

I spent a year on an ankle bracelet as a condition of my parole. For me and for most of the 150,000 to 200,000 people who go through each day with this technology strapped to their ankles, claims that electronic monitoring as a sort of panacea for the problems in our prison system—a low-cost, technologically smart way to ameliorate state budget crises, ensure public safety, and give “criminals” a chance to put their life back together.

I’m at least in agreement with half of that win-win scenario. An increase in the use of EM will produce some winners. Let’s take, for example, BI Incorporated, the largest provider of ankle bracelets and monitoring programs in the United States. In 2009, BI signed a five-year contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for $372 million to provide ankle bracelets for 27,000 people awaiting immigration hearings. Clearly, a winner in this game.

What I’m not so sure about is the other side of the equation, those who actually walk around with that black box on their leg, apart from the aforementioned stars. For Paris and Lindsay, GPS jewelry provides a get-out-of-jail-free ticket, not counting the lawyers’ fees, of course. But those are the rich and famous. They’re different from the rest of us—they have more money.
Gregory the Great's "Prisons": Monastic Confinement in Early Byzantine Italy
Authors: Hillner Julia
Published: February 2012

In the sixth century, emperors, kings, and bishops discovered the monastery as a tool of government. In particular, this century saw the transition of confinement in a monastery from a voluntary form of penance to a legal penalty. Recent scholarship has very much concentrated on the role of civic rulers in this development. This article investigates a bishop's view on and practice of monastic confinement. Some of the most detailed evidence for the employment of both clerical and lay monastic confinement in the sixth century comes from the letters of Gregory the Great (590-604). They provide a unique case study of episcopal engagement with Roman criminal law at a time when bishops in general, and the Roman bishop in particular, increasingly assumed a role in civil judicial administration. They also show that Gregory's interest in the monastery lay mostly in its ability to provide a (sometimes temporary) space for the correction of everyone—clergy, ascetics, and lay people alike. The article demonstrates that Gregory employed the sentence of monastic confinement as an extraordinary form of structured penitential routine for stubborn offenders within his larger program of pastoral flexibility.
Firm-Level Determinants of Exporting Behaviour: Evidence from Kenyan Manufacturing Firms
Authors: Muluvi Augustus S.
Published: February 2012

This paper uses firm-level panel data to investigate the exporting behaviour of the Kenyan manufacturing firms. Using probit and tobit regression models, the results obtained show that factors determining the decision to export are different from those affecting the share exported. Likewise, factors determining exporting behaviour to the African market are different from those affecting exporting to the non-African countries. The paper therefore suggests that to improve on the exporting behaviour of manufacturing firms in Kenya, it is important to distinguish between policies meant for domestic and regional markets from those meant for the markets outside Africa.
Extent and Determinants of Household Poverty in Rural Ethiopia: A Study of Six Villages
Authors: Alemu Dawit , Bewket Woldeamlak , Zeleke Gete , Assefa Yemisrach , Trutmann Peter
Published: February 2012

The objective of this study was to examine extent and determinants of income poverty in selected rural villages located in different parts of the country. Data were collected through a detailed structured household survey, and descriptive statistics and econometric modelling were employed to analyze the data. Results confirm that there was abject rural poverty in the study areas; annual average per capita income was estimated at Birr 1092.30 (1.0 USD ~9.6 Birr). Some 66 per cent of the sample households (n = 240) were found to be below a poverty line, defined in official documents and adjusted for inflation in this study. The analysis of determinants of household poverty showed family size, land and livestock holdings, diversification in crop production, engagement in non-farm activities and utilization of microfinance services to be important correlates. Increased livelihood asset holdings, in terms of land and livestock, crop diversification, and engagement in non-farm activities were positively related to improved household welfare. Differences in community level natural resource endowments in terms of quality of land resources and microclimatic conditions appeared to have significant influence on the probability of households to be non-poor, through its impacts on crop productivity, as annual incomes were higher in villages where crop production constituted the primary source of household income. These results underline the importance of enhancing the poor's livelihood asset endowments, agricultural intensification, livelihood diversification and pursuing of geographically differentiated strategies in poverty reduction efforts. The need for promoting family planning was also shown by the inverse relationship between household sizes and poverty status of households.
The Impact and Effectiveness of the Child Support Grant in Gugulethu, South Africa
Authors: Liziwe J. , Kongolo M.
Published: February 2012

For the first time in South Africa's history, the Constitution compels the state to ensure the progressive realisation of a social security grant. The country's constitution commits the state to developing a comprehensive social security system for all South Africans. This study investigates the impact and effectiveness of the Child Support Grant in Gugulethu, Western Cape Province, South Africa. Data used was collected using direct interview schedules with the respondents. The findings suggest that the Child Support Grant is more effective if it is incorporated into the household income, that recipients of the grant mainly spend it on food and in paying school fees for their children. Although the recipients share the same sentiment with regards to the amount of the grant (small), they all agree that it has a positive impact on children's lives, especially when it is combined with the household income.
Financially Fragile Households: Evidence and Implications
Authors: Lusardi Annamaria , Schneider Daniel , Tufano Peter
Published: February 2012

We examine households’ financial fragility by looking at their capacity to come up with $2,000 in 30 days. Using data from the 2009 TNS Global Economic Crisis Study, we document that approximately one-quarter of U.S. respondents are certain they could not come up with that sum. If we include respondents who report being probably unable to do so, nearly half of respondents are financially fragile. Although financial fragility is more severe among low-income households, a sizable fraction of seemingly middle-class Americans are also at risk. Respondents with low educational attainment and no financial education, families with children, those who have suffered large wealth losses, and the unemployed are also more likely than others to report being unable to cope with a financial shock. Households’ own savings are the resource used most often to deal with shocks, but resources of family and friends, formal and alternative credit, increased work hours, and sale of possessions are also used frequently, especially among some subgroups. These results indicate the need to look beyond precautionary savings to understand how families cope. We also find evidence suggestive of a “pecking order” of coping methods, with savings first in line. Comparing financial fragility and methods of coping among the United States and seven other industrialized countries, we find differences in coping ability but also general evidence of a consistent ordering of methods.
Convict Transportation and Penitence in Moll Flanders
Authors: Cervantes Gabriel
Published: February 2012

Drawing on legal and economic history and transatlantic debates about the behavior of transported convicts, this essay reads Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders as a key to the eighteenth-century colonial turn in criminal sentencing. This shift, wherein vestigial ecclesiastical privileges and reports of spiritual conversion legitimated the commutation of death sentences to servitude abroad, renders the narrative's concern with penitence newly legible. Not merely in Moll's spiritual condition, the text's religious language and narrative structures consolidate the terms of a penal system whose Atlantic reach was enabled by legal fictions and demonstrations of belief.
British Romantic Homer: Oral Tradition, "Primitive Poetry" and the Emergence of Comparative Poetics in Britain, 1760-1830
Authors: McLane Maureen N. , Slatkin Laura M.
Published: February 2012

This essay explores how Homer was newly good to think with in Britain, c. 1760-1830, and hopes to offer an account of the first oralization of Homer. In eighteenth-century Britain, as the very notions of culture and society were themselves undergoing transformation, "Homer" emerged as a significant figure in many modes of cultural enquiry—offering a ground-note for discourses on early society, primitive poetry, oral tradition, and the culture of the heroic. Topics discussed include Ossian, Robert Wood, stadial history, and media theory. We hope to suggest how the subtleties and agons of eighteenth-century poetics might help us refine our own.
James Baldwin’s Life on the Left: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young New York Intellectual
Authors: Field Douglas
Published: February 2012

Towards the end of his life James Baldwin stated that his “Life on the Left is of absolutely no interest.” Despite--and indeed because of Baldwin’s claims--critics have largely overlooked his early associations with the New York Intellectuals and his membership of the Young People’s Socialist League. I trace Baldwin’s early--and for the most part uncollected--reviews in magazines including Commentary and New Leader in order to explore how his work of the late 1940s reflects his interest in Trotsky and the ways in which his work feeds into wider post-war concerns (Black-Jewish relations, debates about social realism and modernism and the ways in which race took precedence over class in his later work).
Cooper and Scott in the Anglophone Literary Field: The Pioneers, The Heart of Mid-Lothian , and the Effects of Provinciality
Authors: Rezek Joseph
Published: February 2012

This essay historicizes the emergence of the Romantic-era ideology of the aesthetic through an analysis of American and Scottish literary strategies for recognition in England. The effects of provinciality in a London-centered literary field, I argue, led James Fenimore Cooper and Walter Scott to project cross-cultural exchange as independent from a divisive and nationalized political world. Attending to this powerful fantasy locates a new genealogy of bourgeois aesthetic theory in the uneven distribution of cultural capital, transatlantic publishing practices, and literary form.
The Remainder: Social Collage and the Four Discourses in (some of) the Kootenay School of Writing: Part II
Authors: Burnham Clint
Published: February 2012

Note: This essay is from a larger work on the poetics and poetry of the Kootenay School of Writing, the body of work primarily being that published in the 1980s, the approach being a Lacanian one. I divide the poetry into three camps or tendencies: the Red Tory neopastoralism of Lisa Robertson, Christine Stewart, Peter Culley, and Catriona Strang, the concerns of procedural constraints and Blanchotesque absence in Susan Clark, Kathryn MacLeod, Dan Farrell, and Melissa Wolsak, and, here, the social collage/disjunctive form to be found in the work of Colin Smith/Dorothy Lusk (discussed in the first half of this essay) and Deanna Ferguson/Jeff Derksen/Gerald Creede (discussed in this, the second half). Thanks to Donato Mancini, whose research in 2008 greatly helped to kick-start this writing.
Pioneers of U.S. Ecofeminism and Environmental Justice
Authors: Mann Susan A.
Published: February 2012

From the late-nineteenth through the early decades of the twentieth century, women in the United States played important roles in the conservation and preservation of wildlife, as well as in environmental activism that fostered clean air, water, and food in our nation's urban centers. This article examines the contributions of women of different classes and races to these environmental struggles. It not only synthesizes the findings of previous environmental histories, but also focuses more attention on the ways environmental contamination affected the lives of women of color and their struggles against environmental racism. In this way, an environmental justice lens is used to excavate and reclaim the history of our ecofeminist predecessors to better ensure that the visions and voices of marginalized peoples do not remain hidden from history.
Changing Families, Changing Workplaces
Authors: Bianchi Suzanne M.
Published: February 2012

American families and workplaces have both changed dramatically over the past half-century. Paid work by women has increased sharply, as has family instability. Education-related inequality in work hours and income has grown. These changes, says Suzanne Bianchi, pose differing work-life issues for parents at different points along the income distribution.

Between 1975 and 2009, the labor force rate of mothers with children under age eighteen increased from 47.4 percent to 71.6 percent. Mothers today also return to work much sooner after the birth of a child than did mothers half a century ago. High divorce rates and a sharp rise in the share of births to unmarried mothers mean that more children are being raised by a single parent, usually their mother.

Workplaces too have changed, observes Bianchi. Today’s employees increasingly work nonstandard hours. The well-being of highly skilled workers and less-skilled workers has been diverging. For the former, work hours may be long, but income has soared. For lower-skill workers, the lack of “good jobs” disconnects fathers from family obligations. Men who cannot find work or have low earnings potential are much less likely to marry. For low-income women, many of whom are single parents, the work-family dilemma is how to care adequately for children and work enough hours to support them financially.

Jobs for working-class and lower middle-class workers are relatively stable, except in economic downturns, but pay is low, and both parents must work full time to make ends meet. Family income is too high to qualify for government subsidized child care, but too low to afford high-quality care in the private market. These families struggle to have a reasonable family life and provide for their family’s economic well-being.

Bianchi concludes that the “work and family” problem has no one solution because it is not one problem. Some workers need more work and more money. Some need to take time off around the birth of a child without permanently derailing a fulfilling career. Others need short-term support to attend to a family health crisis. How best to meet this multiplicity of needs is the challenge of the coming decade.
Policies to Assist Parents with Young Children
Authors: Ruhm Christopher J.
Published: February 2012

The struggle to balance work responsibilities with family obligations may be most difficult for working parents of the youngest children, those five and under. Any policy changes designed to ease the difficulties for these families are likely to be controversial, requiring a careful effort to weigh both the costs and benefits of possible interventions while respecting diverse and at times conflicting American values. In this article, Christopher Ruhm looks at two potential interventions—parental leave and early childhood education and care (ECEC)—comparing differences in policies in the United States, Canada, and several European nations and assessing their consequences for important parent and child outcomes.

By and large, Canadian and European policies are more generous than those in the United States, with most women eligible for paid maternity leave, which in a few countries can last for three years or more. Many of these countries also provide for paid leave that can be used by either the mother or the father. And in many European countries ECEC programs are nearly universal after the child reaches a certain age. In the United States, parental leave, if it is available, is usually short and unpaid, and ECEC is generally regarded as a private responsibility of parents, although some federal programs help defray costs of care and preschool education.

Ruhm notes that research on the effects of differences in policies is not completely conclusive, in part because of the difficulty of isolating consequences of leave and ECEC policies from other influences on employment and children’s outcomes. But, he says, the comparative evidence does suggest desirable directions for future policy in the United States. Policies establishing rights to short parental leaves increase time at home with infants and slightly improve the job continuity of mothers, with small, but positive, long-run consequences for mothers and children. Therefore, Ruhm indicates that moderate extensions of existing U.S. leave entitlements (up to several months in duration) make sense. He also suggests that some form of paid leave would facilitate its use, particularly among less advantaged parents, and that efforts to improve the quality of ECEC, while maintaining or enhancing affordability, are desirable.
Families and Elder Care in the Twenty-First Century
Authors: Bookman Ann , Kimbrel Delia
Published: February 2012

Although most Americans know that the U.S. population is aging, they are far less informed about the reality of providing elders with personal care, health care, and social support. Families—particularly women—have always been critical in providing elder care, but the entry of so many women into the paid labor force has made elder care increasingly difficult.

Ann Bookman and Delia Kimbrel show how changes in both work and family life are complicating families’ efforts to care for elderly relatives. Because almost 60 percent of elder caregivers today are employed, many forms of caregiving must now be “outsourced” to nonfamily members. And because elders are widely diverse by race and socioeconomic status, their families attach differing cultural meanings to care and have widely different resources with which to accomplish their care goals. Although the poorest elders have access to some subsidized services, and the wealthiest can pay for services, many middle-class families cannot afford services that allow elders to age in their homes and avoid even more costly institutional care.

Six key groups—health care providers, nongovernmental community-based service providers, employers, government, families, and elders themselves—are engaged in elder care, but their efforts are often fragmented and uncoordinated. All six groups must be able to work in concert and to receive the resources they need. Both employer and government policies must be improved. Although large businesses have taken up the elder care challenge, most small and mid-sized firms still do not offer flexible work arrangements. Social Security and Medicare have provided critical support to families caring for elders, yet both face significant financial shortfalls. The Older American Act and the National Family Caregiver Support Program have broadened access to elder services, but need updating to address the needs of today’s employed caregivers and elders who want to “age in place.” And just over half of the nation’s workforce is eligible for the unpaid leave benefits provided by the Family and Medical Leave Act.

The authors close by reflecting on the need for a coordinated, cross-sector movement to create an “aging-friendly” society in the United States—a society that values well-being across the life span and supports citizens from diverse cultures and income levels as they age.
The Scrolls, the Apocrypha, and the Pseudepigrapha
Authors: VanderKam James C.
Published: February 2012

One of the many significant contributions that the Dead Sea Scrolls have made is to provide original-language copies of several books previously known only through translations or translations of translations. Among these are several works which belong in the categories of Apocrypha (in the Protestant sense of the word) and Pseudepigrapha. The books of the Apocrypha, fragments of which have surfaced at Qumran, are Tobit, Sirach, the Epistle of Jeremiah (=Baruch 6), and Psalm 151. Copies of two of the Pseudepigrapha have been identified—1 Enoch and the Book of Jubilees—and sources for the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs have also been found. The essay surveys the data about these new texts and discusses their implications
Paradise Betrayed Or the Betrayal of Paradise: Vilna as Memory in Abba Kovner's Poetry
Authors: Ginor Zvia Ben-Yoseph
Published: February 2012

Abba Kovner's life and poetry are deeply identified with the city of Vilna, yet the city is never mentioned in his works. This paper sets out to interpret this absence as a case study of memory and history and about Kovner's particular place within, or without, the literature of the Holocaust. The dichotomy which characterizes the poet's attitude towards the city is partially resolved in his last book, where Kovner confronts his childhood and the memory of his mother. The symbolic act of naming, with its multiplicity of meaning, serves as a key to the interpretation of Kovner's poetry in both the personal and collective contexts.
The Particles הנה and והנה in Biblical Hebrew
Authors: Zewi Tamar
Published: February 2012

The paper contributes to the understanding of the meaning of the biblical Hebrew particles הנה and והנה, the contextual restrictions in which they serve, and their syntactical status. The particles הנה and והנה share one meaning, that of a presentative, as indicated in the majority of biblical Hebrew dictionaries and other relevant works. However, these particles do not share the contexts in which they appear. The particle הנה is found to appear with the verb אמר only, introducing direct speech. The particle והנה is found to occur with verbs of sight and related contexts only, introducing content clauses which include a circumstantial nuance. It is also suggested that there is a resemblance between the dichotomy in the usage of biblical Hebrew הנה and והנה and that of Arabic إڼ and ٱڧ The syntactical status of both particles is mostly that of an introductory particle. Both can introduce nominal clauses, verbal clauses, clauses including a participle, or one-member clauses, but they do not play any syntactical role within the clause which follows. Only הנה may occasionally serve as a predicate within a clause. This occurs whenever the other sentence part is definite, which may indicate that it is the subject of a one-member clause, leaving the predicate role for הנה.
Language Matters
Authors: Cutter William
Published: February 2012

M. Y. Berditschewski occupies an awkward place in the history of Hebrew letters. He was a powerful influence on many early Zionist thinkers, but he lived (during his last 20 years) far away from the centers of Zionist activity, and while in Berlin, far from Jewish life there. His range of scholarship, belletristic writing, and essays was disproportionate to the world's awareness of his work, and even the people he inspired (Katznelson, for example) probably were affected by only a small part of his erudition. He described himself as isolated, but had lengthy correspondence with people like Buber, Brenner, Horodetzky, David Neumark, and many others who shaped the twentieth century. This essay looks at Berditschewski's perspective on the Hebrew language in terms of his better known ideological position as one of the young "Nietzscheans." As with regard to so many other issues of modern Jewish intellectual history, his essays convey a considerable inconsistency and ambivalence. Yeshurun Keshet called his positions " zugot shel hafachim ." My article is based on thirteen essays, largely from a unit called " Inyenei Lashon ," which I have translated and which await editing and publication in English. The specifically English speaking audience addressed in this essay is asked to reflect on the perplexities of the future of Hebrew in light of the way that future was viewed nearly a century ago, by a thinker from another important diaspora center who feared the diaspora but was comforted by its cultural textures.
Exegetical Implications of the Masoretic Cantillation Marks in Ecclesiastes
Authors: Carasik Michael
Published: February 2012

A rabbinic tradition preserved in b. Yoma 52a-b suggests that five biblical verses are "undecidable"—that is, it is not clear how they ought to be punctuated. This makes evident a fact that is not often noticed: the Masoretic punctuation of the Bible is sometimes exegetical in character. Simcha Kogut, in his recent book Correlations between Biblical Accentuation and Traditional Jewish Exegesis , has shown that the biblical text is sometimes punctuated "against" the peshat , the meaning which a "reasonable" reader would assume to have been intended by the author. Such punctuation is a silent commentary. The reason for it is not explained; but it would seem to be prompted by a desire to shape the meaning of the text, often to match it to an interpretation found in rabbinic literature. Choon-Leong Seow's recent Anchor Bible commentary on Ecclesiastes notes over a dozen probable or possible places in that book where biblical scholars have suggested that the Masoretic punctuation does not match the intended meaning of the text. The purpose of this paper is to analyze these cases to determine whether any of these examples were indeed prompted by exegetical concerns. In several cases, the Targum to Ecclesiastes translates the same word twice—that is, they translated simultaneously in accordance with two different decisions about how the verse should be punctuated. I suggest that, in many cases, the Masoretic decision to place a pause in a location that seems to contradict the peshat was similarly made not to contradict it, but to add a second possibility. Despite the restrictive quality of the vowels and punctuation marks which the Masoretes added to the traditional consonants, they may, paradoxically, have been actuated by a desire to preserve the indeterminability of the text.
Itzik Manger, Foigelman and the Problem of the Antihero
Authors: Nash Stanley
Published: February 2012

In this paper we focus on aspects of Aharon Megged's ambivalence in his depiction of the "bird-man," Shmuel "Foigelman" (literally: "birdman"), a Yiddish poet in Israel of the 1980s, and Foigelman's relationship with the sabra historian, Tsvi Arbel. We first take up a comparison of bird symbolism in the work of a Yiddish poet admired by Megged, Itzik Manger, a poet for whom bird symbolism was extremely important, with the bird symbolism in Megged's parodic novel. The comparison provides corroborative internal evidence for the intuitive assessment by critics that Megged has unwittingly produced a caricature of what Yiddish poetry was in its heyday. It is further posited that Megged's penchant for focusing on the antihero was bound to yield this kind of portrayal. The history of Megged's treatment of Yiddish themes in his fiction and publicistics shows this interest to be part and parcel of Megged's obsessive dealing with and guilt about problems related to the Shoah. We discuss specific examples of Megged's hypothesis—in both his earlier publicistics and in Foigelman—that the loss of Yiddish represents the loss of elements of Jewish "soul." The last section of the paper details the manner in which the theatrical adaptation of Foigelman by Zeʾev Falk in 1991 amplified to good effect features of the novel that were grotesque, macabre, and Kafkaesque. We suggest that Megged's realistic writing; his unwitting reduction to parody of "bird hermeneutics"; his vacillation between idealizing antiheroic and traditional native Israeli "positive hero" models; and his entire absorption in a unique kind of socio-linguistic musing about Yiddish versus Hebrew, with its substratum of guilt surrounding the Shoah, produced the complex fictional product that is Foigelman , and militated against its being fully understood and acclaimed.
Hebrew Philological Notes (III)
Authors: Rendsburg Gary A.
Published: February 2012

Four separate studies are presented, along with an addendum to a previous article in this series. 1) The unique word מַהְלְכִים in Zech 3:7 means "sacrifices," cognate to Phoenician מלן 2) Contrary to three recent proposals, the final words in Psalm 22:17 כּאֲרִי יָדַי וְרַגְלָי "like a lion, my hands and my feet" are not to be emended. Instead, the absence of a verb in this stich is indicative of the suddenness of the evildoers' attack against the psalmist. 3) The numeral "75" was expressed in a unique fashion in ancient Hebrew: it appears always as חַמִשָה ושבעים or חמש ושבעים, and never in the expected reverse order שבעים וחמש or שבעים וחמשה 4) The numeral מאתים שנים ושלשים "two hundred two and thirty" in 1 Kgs 20:15 is an exceptional formulation, expressed as hundreds + units + tens, contrary to either the usual descending order of hundreds + tens + units or the occasional ascending order of units + tens + hundreds. Apparently this formulation was used to distinguish this numeral from the form שלשי ושנים "thirty and two" which occurs in the same chapter (1 Kgs 20:1, 16). 5) E. A. Knauf suggested that the personal name רוּת "Ruth" is related to the Moabite word רית "offering" in Mesha Stele line 12. I responded to this proposal in HS 40 (1999): 27-28. Here I note further that the reading רית has been superceded by Andre Lemaire's reading הית from the verb "to be," thus greatly weakening Knauf's argument.
Murder as an Instance of Local Rhetoric in the Performance of Israeli Drama: A Phenomenological
Strategy
Authors: Kaynar Gad
Published: February 2012

The article reads the performance of Murder from a phenomenological perspective, which caters for the interactive relationships between the theatrical text and the image of the spectator implied in and by it, based on the local experiential and libidinal, rather than cerebral, reality-convention of this indigenous addressee. This kind of rhetoric, which informs the theatrical text of most Israeli plays inasmuch as it affects the generation of the implied spectator's collective identity, is paradigmatically concretized in Murder through one of the central integrative images in the performance: the image of the sand that covers the stage and drops from above—the sand in which the train of atrocities is performed—conceived of not as a mere iconic image, but as the thing itself in its material-conceptual reality. The article goes on to show how the metamorphosed sensory effect of the sand is supported on the visual level by the optic rhetoric of Murder's stage design.
Some Recent Trends in Biblical Hebrew Linguistics: A Few Pointers Towards a More Comprehensive Model of Language Use
Authors: van der Merwe C. H. J.
Published: February 2012

Despite a slow start, one of the major trends in current Biblical Hebrew research is the use of structuralist-oriented approaches to identify and describe linguistic phenomena in terms of their distributional patterns. Designing more effective tools to carry out this type of research electronically leads to a situation where both the benefits and boundaries of structuralist approaches are starting to show. There is a growing need for more adequate theoretical frames of reference to interpret and complement the taxonomies of distributional patterns. In light of developments in the fields of pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and sociolinguistics, some pointers are formulated that may assist scholars in their quest for a more comprehensive model of language and language use. It is believed that such a model, on the one hand, will help Biblical Hebrew scholars in defining more adequate heuristic tools for the investigation of specific problems, and, on the other hand, may serve itself as an integrating frame of reference for the interpretation of research results of various problems.
Latin Conversion of Hebrew: Grammatical, Full and Deficient
Authors: Ornan Uzzi
Published: February 2012

Latin script for Hebrew is being used in many domains. A uniform system is desirable, and might be better achieved by a phonemic conversion rather than by transliteration or transcription. In this approach a unified set of rules of writing covers all periods of Hebrew, while for each period and dialect a separate set of reading rules should be formulated. Thus we consider Hebrew to be one language since it first appeared until this day, but recognize different realizations of the language in various periods. Both kinds of rules are supplied here, and a third set of "reconstruction rules," that is, re-converting converted texts into regular Hebrew script is also given.
The Preparation of the Jerusalem Crown Edition of the Bible Text
Authors: Ofer Yosef
Published: February 2012

The new edition of the Bible, Keter Yerushalayim , was prepared under the aegis of the Hebrew University, following the text and the Masora of the Aleppo Codex and related manuscripts according to the Method of Rabbi Mordechai Breuer (supervising editor: Yosef Ofer, Jerusalem 2000). The article reviews the principles according to which the biblical text was determined, comparisons made to other variants, and explicates the decisions taken. Such documentation is an essential part of any modern scientific Bible edition.
Alternate Chapter Divisions in the Pentateuch in the Light of the Masoretic Sections
Authors: Marcus David
Published: February 2012

There are a number of cases in the Pentateuch when chapters in both Hebrew and non-Hebrew printed editions start at different places within one verse of each other. Masoretic sectional divisions of a petuḥah , a setumah , or a seder sometimes coincide with the standard chapter division, sometimes with the alternate chapter division, and sometimes with both. There are also cases where Masoretic sectional divisions are found within two or three verses of the differing chapter divisions. The existence of these alternate chapter divisions has practical consequences for modern students of the Bible. One is the obvious fact that since different chapter divisions will produce different enumeration of verses, the different division can lead to confusion in citing references. Another is the fact that by starting the chapter at a different place, the parameters of the text are then changed and so a different hermeneutic may be produced. In this paper, we shall survey these alternate chapter divisions and see how they correspond with adjacent Masoretic paragraph divisions.
"Internal Homeland" and "External Homeland": A Literary and Psychoanalytical Study of the Narrative of R. Assi and His Aged Mother
Authors: Kosman Admiel
Published: February 2012

This article deals with an aggadic story in the Babylonian Talmud ( Qidd. 31b) concerning Rav Asa who fled from his mother to "Eretz Israel," after she began relating to him with sexual innuendos. Consequently, he hears that she was pursuing him and solicits Rabbi Johanan for permission to flee. Basically this story deals with the complicated relationship between two systems or languages: The aggadic system (which reveals the hidden desire between the son and his mother) and the halakhic system (which " covers" it with another " language" or a different set of explanations). This article tries to understand the relationship between the two systems, making use of the psychoanalytic model of J. Lacan.
Auto-Erotic Cosmogenies: The Poetry of Ḥaya Esther after Walt Whitman
Authors: Glazer Aubrey L.
Published: February 2012

The "auto-erotic" and "cosmogonic" share a correlation within aspects of contemporary Hebrew Poetry. Both deal with a self-delight that comes from reconciling disparate conceptions and experiences of self. Self-delight as an integral component of the creative process has yet to be as passionately evoked in American English or in Jerusalemite Hebrew as in the epic poems of Walt Whitman and Ḥaya Esther. This "Afterword" ( Nachwort ) focuses on Whitman's "Song of Myself" (1855) as a dissonant poetic precursor to Esther's אֱּלו֗֗הַּ מְדַבּר בּשַ֗רִי (My flesh speaks God) (2001). If Israeli poetry continues to serve as a peculiar nexus of public and private experience of trauma, where the value of love over-rides death, then how is the role of eros in Hebrew poetry to be read? Since the Song of Songs , I argue that these two epic poems of Whitman and Esther stand as touchstones of the songs of self-delight that recreate and rebirth the reality of the "real Me" that is the embodied soul.
Biblical Texts Cannot be Dated Linguistically
Authors: Young Ian
Published: February 2012

Linguistic evidence alone is not able to date biblical texts. Among the arguments challenged in this paper are that the archaic linguistic forms of Archaic Biblical Hebrew poems such as the Song of Moses in Exodus 15 demonstrate the great antiquity of those texts; that Standard Biblical Hebrew, such as the prose of the book of Samuel, is a phenomenon restricted to the pre-exilic or monarchic period of Israelite history; and that biblical texts which share the features of Late Biblical Hebrew as it is exemplified in works such as the book of Chronicles could only have been written in the post-exilic period. Modern text critical research indicates that we cannot be certain that the linguistic profile of the text we have is that of the original author. Nor, even if it is original, is any aspect of linguistic evidence necessarily indicative of only one chronological period of the Hebrew language.
A Textlinguistic Analysis of Isaiah 25
Authors: Hosch Harold E.
Published: February 2012

The question concerning the discourse structure of Isaiah 25 remains something of a challenge for biblical scholars. English versions of the Bible and commentaries show a significant diversity of structural patterns. This present study displays a basic structure found in the NRSV, but with internal differences that suggests a marked genre difference between the first poem (25:1-5), and the remaining two poems (25:6-10a and 10b-12). There is a thematic relationship between the three poems with the first expressing thanksgiving to YHWH for His intervention in exacting judgment upon hostile nations while providing salvation for the poor and needy. Poem 2 draws primarily on the salvation theme, and Poem 3 draws on the judgment theme. But whereas Poem 1 has a mix of perfect and imperfect verb forms representing for the most part general or gnomic mode, Poems 2 and 3 are marked with weqatal verb forms prominent in predictive genre. There is, furthermore, the peak that appears at the final strophes of Poems 1 and 3 with the peak appearing at the center of Poem 2. Thus the structural patterns highlighted in the chapter create the awareness of three distinct poems in the chapter while yet marking the internal unity of the chapter.