Introduction

Author(s):  
Adam J. Silverstein

This chapter explains what this book is about and why the topic is important. Some of the challenges in writing a book on this topic are also described. Thereafter, a short summary of each chapter is presented, followed by an overview of Esther in the Hebrew Bible. Although most of the book’s contents deal with the premodern period, in this introductory chapter I present a handful of examples in which Esther has been discussed in modern Muslim contexts, focusing on an Egyptian “televangelist” on the one hand, and a handful of Iranian politicians on the other. Moreover, the ways in which this study of a biblical book’s reception in Islamic cultures differs from other examples of Islamic reception history are described.

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
William Skiles

This article examines the nature and frequency of comments about Jews and Judaism in sermons delivered by Confessing Church pastors in the Nazi dictatorship.  The approach of most historians has focused on the history of antisemitism in the German Protestant tradition—in the works, pronouncements, and policies of the German churches and its leading figures.  Yet historians have left unexamined the most elemental task of the pastor—that is, preaching from the pulpit to the German people.  What would the average German congregant have heard from his pastor about the Jews and Judaism on any given Sunday?  I searched German archives, libraries, and used book stores, and analyzed 910 sermon manuscripts that were produced and disseminated in the Nazi regime.  I argue that these sermons provide mixed messages about Jews and Judaism.  While on the one hand, the sermons express admiration for Judaism as a foundation for Christianity, an insistence on the usage of the Hebrew Bible in the German churches, and the conviction that the Jews are spiritual cousins of Christians.  On the other hand, the sermons express religious prejudice in the form of anti-Judaic tropes that corroborated the Nazi ideology that portrayed Jews and Judaism as inferior: for instance, that Judaism is an antiquated religion of works rather than grace; that the Jews killed Christ and have been punished throughout history as a consequence.  Furthermore, I demonstrate that Confessing Church pastors commonly expressed anti-Judaic statements in the process of criticizing the Nazi regime, its leadership, and its policies.


Author(s):  
Harold James

This introductory chapter sketches a brief portrait of the Krupp company. It first explores the various symbolisms of the Krupp name over the years, the criticisms and praise leveled at the company, and considers how this company had become as iconic as was and is, especially in the world of business. The chapter examines three themes which it credits with the development of the Krupp company: the absence of an exclusive focus on profitability, an acknowledgement that technically advanced enterprises exist in an international and even global system, and the company's position between family affairs on the one hand and the establishment of a business organization on the other.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Gracia Liu-Farrer

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Japan as an immigrant country. Japan has become an immigrant country de facto. Starting in the 1980s, to stave off economic decline caused by labor shortage and in the name of internationalization, Japan has tried different programs to bring in foreign workers. In 2012, Japan became one of the most liberal states in its policies for granting permanent residency to highly skilled migrants. As a result, the population of foreigners has been rising for the past three decades and is likely to increase significantly in the near future. Why, then, do both the Japanese government and people inside and outside Japan hesitate to accept the discourse of immigration and the reality of its transformation into an immigrant society? This hesitation has to do with Japan's ethno-nationalist self-identity and the widespread myth surrounding its monoethnic nationhood, on the one hand, and the conventional, albeit anachronistic, definition of “immigrant country” and the difficulty for people to associate an immigrant country with an ethno-nationalist one, on the other hand.


Author(s):  
Laura Quick

The conclusion brings together the threads of the preceding chapters in order to demonstrate the major insight of the book, namely, that for the biblical authors personhood was negotiated in relation to the body and bodily objects. These insights have far-reaching implications for how we understand ancient conceptions of the body, the person, and relationships. On the one hand, dress is essential to the articulation and construction of identity, and this is also the case in the modern world. On the other, the multi-material aspect to ancient bodies is very different from modern Western ontologies. Ancient constructions of dress and the body are thus like and at the same time quite unlike our own. These constructions animate and inform biblical literature, and so are essential to properly understand and unpack the Hebrew Bible.


2021 ◽  
pp. 150-152
Author(s):  
David Evans

In this chapter I compare settings of Verlaine’s ‘La Lune blanche’ (‘The White Moon’) by composers of different nationalities (Delius, Webern, Sorabji, Loomis, Nevin, Loeffler, Hennessy, Poldowski, McEwen, Szulc, Stravinsky) in order to show how different ideas of French song – and of art song itself – emerge through the multiple dialogues of its transnational crossings. Two opposing approaches become clear: on the one hand, songs which maintain a reverence towards the source text as a symbol of the cultural cachet which French mélodie has enjoyed since its 1880-1930 heyday; and on the other, songs which offer a curiously unplaceable musical material, staking a claim for music as an mode of articulation which functions independently from language and, indeed, from national identities which are always in danger of falling into repetition, cliché, and pastiche. This latter mode, I suggest, comes closest to the real heart of mélodie as understood by its foremost French purveyors, Fauré and Debussy, and which composers like Stravinsky draw out of Verlaine’s text: a conception of song as an art form uniquely placed to offer a critique of fixed national paradigms and stable interpretative systems, by constantly calling into question, through their formal complexities, the very processes by which meaning itself is produced.


2020 ◽  
pp. 161-182
Author(s):  
Pallavi Raghavan

In this chapter, I chart out how partition shifted the terms of trade between two points now divided by the boundary line. While, on the one hand, both governments made lofty declarations of carrying out trade with one another as independent nation states—taxable, and liable to regulations by both states—on the other, they were also forced to come to a series of arrangements to accommodate commercial transactions to continue in the way that they had always existed before the making of the boundary. In many instances, in fact, it was actually impossible to physically stop the process of commercial transactions between both sides of the border, and the boundary line. Therefore, the question this chapter is concerned with is the extent to which both governments’ positions were amenable to the necessities of contingency, demand, and genuine emergency, in the face of a great deal of rhetoric about how the Indian and Pakistani economies had to be bolstered on their own merits.


2011 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROSWITHA HOFER ◽  
PETER KRITZER

AbstractWe discuss the distribution properties of hybrid sequences whose components stem from Niederreiter–Halton sequences on the one hand, and Kronecker sequences on the other. In this paper, we give necessary and sufficient conditions on the uniform distribution of such sequences, and derive a result regarding their discrepancy. We conclude with a short summary and a discussion of topics for future research.


Author(s):  
Steven Nadler
Keyword(s):  

Spinoza’s relationship to Descartes and his followers is complex. On the one hand, he was clearly inspired and influenced by the metaphysical and epistemological principles of Cartesian philosophy. On the other hand, his system represents a significant departure from some of that philosophy’s most fundamental principles. In this chapter, I consider those aspects of Descartes’s thought that Spinoza, over the course of his philosophical career, accepted, modified, and rejected, as well as his tense relations with later Cartesians who sought to distance themselves from a “heretic” perceived by ecclesiastic, academic, and civil authorities as one of their own.


2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-306
Author(s):  
Shimon Gesundheit

Abstract For quite a long time it has been part of the opinio communis within Hebrew Bible scholarship that compassion and empathy with persona miserae is in its very meaning invented by Ancient Israel. This view has been challenged by a comparative study of Frank C. Fensham. The present article shows on the one hand that care for the poor, widows and orphans is in fact not innovative. On the other hand, a closer analysis is able to show that the biblical and Jewish care for the strangers, slaves and animals is indeed unique.


Author(s):  
Veronica Pravadelli

This introductory chapter argues that the existing literature on classical Hollywood could roughly be divided into two sets. On the one hand, there were those scholars who had analyzed the whole period arguing for continuities and similarities in most domains, from production to plot structure, from stylistic procedures to viewing experience, and so forth. On the other hand, critical work on Hollywood cinema had more often approached the topic by selecting a specific genre and period and making a statement about the peculiar relations between aesthetics and ideology. Often focusing on a specific genre, many investigated especially 1940s and 1950s Hollywood cinema in relation to cultural, artistic, and social dynamics. Indeed, for four decades, film noir, the woman's film, and melodrama have been the locus of such innovative research—from the theory of the “progressive text” in the early 1970s to “cinema and modernity studies” during the last twenty years or so.


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