A Swastika in the Temple

2018 ◽  
pp. 200-216
Author(s):  
Eyal Lewin
Keyword(s):  
Educational System ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Israeli Society ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
The West ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Historical Origins

Holocaust inversion is the demonization of Jews, who were the major victims of the criminality of Nazi Germany. It is the claim that Israel behaves toward the Palestinians as Nazi Germany behaved toward the Jews. After reviewing the phenomenon and understanding its psychological, political, and historical origins, this chapter focuses on its strange occurrence in the West, most strangely among the Jewish people, and oddly enough within Israeli society. This study shows how Israeli Holocaust inversion is manifested among intellectuals, political leaders, and most disturbingly among the rank and file of the IDF, even within this institute's educational system.

A Pleasing Odour for Yahweh

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-24
Author(s):  
Anne Katrine De Hemmer Gudme
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The West ◽  
Sense Of Smell ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Crucial Part

This article investigates the importance of smell in the sacrificial cults of the ancient Mediterranean, using the Yahweh temple on Mount Gerizim and the Hebrew Bible as a case-study. The material shows that smell was an important factor in delineating sacred space in the ancient world and that the sense of smell was a crucial part of the conceptualization of the meeting between the human and the divine.  In the Hebrew Bible, the temple cult is pervaded by smell. There is the sacred oil laced with spices and aromatics with which the sanctuary and the priests are anointed. There is the fragrant and luxurious incense, which is burnt every day in front of Yahweh and finally there are the sacrifices and offerings that are burnt on the altar as ‘gifts of fire’ and as ‘pleasing odors’ to Yahweh. The gifts that are given to Yahweh are explicitly described as pleasing to the deity’s sense of smell. On Mount Gerizim, which is close to present-day Nablus on the west bank, there once stood a temple dedicated to the god Yahweh, whom we also know from the Hebrew Bible. The temple was in use from the Persian to the Hellenistic period (ca. 450 – 110 BCE) and during this time thousands of animals (mostly goats, sheep, pigeons and cows) were slaughtered and burnt on the altar as gifts to Yahweh. The worshippers who came to the sanctuary – and we know some of them by name because they left inscriptions commemorating their visit to the temple – would have experienced an overwhelming combination of smells: the smell of spicy herbs baked by the sun that is carried by the wind, the smell of humans standing close together and the smell of animals, of dung and blood, and behind it all as a backdrop of scent the constant smell of the sacrificial smoke that rises to the sky.

Schooling the Muslim Nation

2011 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iqbal Singh Sevea
Keyword(s):  
Educational System ◽  
National Character ◽  
The West ◽  
Western Education ◽  
Modern Education ◽  
Muslim Education

This article examines Muhammad Iqbal’s critique of contemporary approaches towards Muslim education. In his writings, poetic and prose, Iqbal took on both the traditional religious authorities who administered the Madrasas and the modernists associated with the Aligarh College for failing to provide an education that was true to the ‘national character’ and to develop a synthesis of Islamic and western knowledge. While the former were criticised for ignoring modern intellectual developments, the latter were attacked for being intellectually captive to the West. At a broader level, this article employs Iqbal as a foil to debates over the empowering potential of western education. Iqbal’s views are examined against the background of attempts by Muslim intel-lectuals to negotiate between the adoption of a universal modern education and the development of an educational system that kept Muslims grounded in Islam and their ‘national character’. These negotiations took on a number of shapes, pedagogical and polemical as well as theological.

scholarly journals DENATURALIZING CULTURE: SAYED KASHUA'S NEWSPAPER COLUMNS ON THE TOPIC OF PREJUDICE

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 911-933
Author(s):  
Juliana Portenoy Schlesinger
Keyword(s):  
Educational System ◽  
Jewish Population ◽  
Israeli Society ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
The Law ◽  
Significant Change

Abstract Discrimination is a recurrent topic in the work of the Israeli-Arab writer Sayed Kashua. In the last couple of years, Sayed Kashua has moved away from writing about the prejudice expressed by his own Israeli Muslim community towards the Israeli Jewish population to focus his attention instead on the prejudice shown by Jews against Arabs in Israel. Self-criticism has always been a hallmark of Sayed Kashua's work so this shift indicates a significant change in the columnist's perception of his own society. Based on a survey of various issues relating to Israeli society, such as the law, the educational system and language, as well as a theoretical review of authors who observe a mutual alienation of Arabs and Jews in Israel, this article analyses several of Sayed Kashua's recent columns in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. It also investigates how the author understands prejudice and, in a singular and surprising way, expresses his concerns and solutions to this problem.

Five tombs at Knossos

1963 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 30-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. N. Coldstream
Keyword(s):  
Good Condition ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Lower Edge ◽  
Water Pipe ◽  
The West ◽  
Light In August ◽  
South West ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Temple

On the east slope of Lower Gypsades hill, about 100 metres west of the Temple Tomb, a chamber tomb came to light in August 1958, when a cutting for a new water pipe was driven through the area (A in Plate 9 a). In the course of this operation, part of a plain larnax (iii) was sliced off, and much earth removed from the west end of the collapsed chamber: at no point, however, had the municipal workmen penetrated to the tomb floor.The chamber was approached by a sloping dromos (Plate 9 a: length 2·80 metres; max. width 1 metre), roughly cut into the natural kouskouras rock: its walls were approximately perpendicular. Although the gradient varied a good deal, there was no suggestion of a stairway.The blocking wall was found in good condition. Of especial interest were the numerous fragments of larnakes that had been built into its fabric: some of them could be recognized as belonging to each of the three fragmentary larnakes (i, ii, v) whose scattered pieces were found below and around the two undisturbed burials in the chamber (iii, iv). We may thus distinguish two periods in the history of the tomb: larnakes i, ii, and v were evidently smashed up in order to make room for iv and iii, which must have been deposited in that order. The debris of v was found under iv, with a few adult bones in its wreckage. Part of i lay on the floor near the south-west corner, where two plain vases (2, 3) were found in situ, hence, also, came most of the fragments of the fine L.M. IIIA 2 stirrup vase (1), although its other pieces were scattered all over the floor of the tomb. This small group of offerings may belong to the disturbed adult skeleton, whose skull lay up against the lower edge of iii. Curiously, some fragments of i and ii were also found above the broken lid of iv (Plate 9 b): perhaps the lid of the later larnax was accidentally smashed at the time of the funeral, in which case the debris from earlier burials could have been piled up above it, as a rough and ready means of protection.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noah Benezra Strote
Keyword(s):  
Federal Republic ◽  
Educational System ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
German Society ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Cultural Conflicts ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Ideal

This concluding chapter argues that Germans themselves imagined the framework for a more stable political structure before the arrival of American troops. The reconstruction of post-Nazi Germany relied so much on the reconciliation of previously conflicting groups that “partnership” became its foundational ideology. The Germans who rebuilt the educational system in the Federal Republic, West Germany's intelligentsia, were the lions and lambs of the Weimar Republic in their youth. They lived through and participated in the social, economic, political, and cultural conflicts that tore apart German society before Hitler's rise. They also witnessed the Nazi attempt to overcome those conflicts, and some supported Hitler publicly before opposing him as he led Europe and the world into a catastrophic war. When this generation of Germans designed courses of education for the rising post-Nazi generations, they celebrated the ideal of partnership precisely to avoid the earlier conflicts.

Sacrifice in Jewish Tradition

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David L. Weddle
Keyword(s):  
Jewish People ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
God's Will ◽  
Redemptive Suffering ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Tikkun Olam ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Temple

After Roman destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70CE, Jewish tradition reimagined animal sacrifices as devotional acts, such as prayer, fasting, and study of Torah, as well as giving up individual desires to fulfil God’s will. Rabbis interpreted the story of Abraham’s binding Isaac for sacrifice (the Akedah) as the model of absolute obedience to divine commands (mitzvoth) and as the basis for the election of the Jewish people to bear witness to the one God. Their commentary, however, included the horrified reaction of Sarah’s scream to the news of Abraham’s act, ending in her death, indicating dissent from sacrifice as religious ideal. Rabbinic tradition transferred the site of sacrifice from temple to synagogue in rituals of High Holy Days, to the family table in Passover and Sabbath rituals, and to the individual will in submission to Torah. In the mystical teaching of Kabbalah, God sacrifices to create the world and Jews are called to sacrifice to redeem the world (tikkun olam). Such vocation of redemptive suffering was called into question by the Holocaust, and some contemporary Israeli poets refer to the Akedah in expressing misgivings about calls to sacrifice in defense of Israel.

The Trial of the Refuseniks

2006 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 131-153
Author(s):  
Igal Ezraty ◽  
Freddie Rokem
Keyword(s):  
West Bank ◽  
Israeli Society ◽  
Moral Issues ◽  
The West ◽  
Conscientious Objectors ◽  
The Military ◽  
Israeli Occupation

The Trial of the Refuseniks drew attention to the moral issues of the conflict over the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, a conflict that is still tearing Israeli society in two irreconcilable directions. The “theatrical documentary reading” is a reenactment of the military trial of five conscientious objectors, based on court transcripts.

Jewish–Ukrainian Relations in Inter-War Poland as Reflected in Some Ukrainian Publications

1998 ◽  
pp. 232-246
Author(s):  
Shimon Redlich
Keyword(s):  
Nazi Germany ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
National Minorities ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Face ◽  
Soviet Russia

This chapter surveys Jewish–Ukrainian relations in inter-war Poland as reflected in some Ukrainian publications. The historiography of Jewish–Ukrainian relations, although quite extensive, has usually tended towards partisanship, caused by the uneasy, and at times tragic, relations between Ukrainians and Jews. To provide an understanding of Ukrainian attitudes towards Jews between the two world wars, the chapter examines the perceptions and images of the Jews in the Ukrainian press in Poland in the inter-war years. The Ukrainian press reflects traditional Ukrainian attitudes towards Jews as well as some images formed specifically during the period under discussion. It also helps one understand how Ukrainians felt towards Jews during the war years in the face of the Holocaust. Since Ukrainians and Jews formed the two largest national minorities in inter-war Poland, their interrelations reflected issues relating to Poles and the Polish state as well. Moreover, Ukrainian–Jewish relations were influenced by problems relating to Poland's most significant neighbours, Soviet Russia in the east and Weimar and later Nazi Germany in the west. Thus, an examination of the Ukrainian press in Poland also throws light on broader ideological and political issues.

After the Wall II: The Fall and Rise of an Educational System

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
John G. Rodden
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Family Member ◽  
Educational System ◽  
Maximum Speed ◽  
The West ◽  
System P ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
Journey To The West ◽  
The 1960S

In the fall of 1990, a hit movie comedy opened to packed houses in eastern German theaters. Go, Trabi, Go!—the producers gave the film an English title—celebrated with rollicking Weltschmerz the misadventures of Georg, a hapless baby-blue Trabant 601—whose jinxed capers make him the undeniable screen successor to Herbie, the Disney VW Beetle of the 1960s. Georg stalls pitifully on the Autobahn, is shorn of his bumper in Munich traffic, is robbed of all four tires by pranksters during a camping stop, and even gets mistaken for scrap near an auto junkyard, an obvious metaphor for the DDR running out of gas—as it lurches toward unity. Go, Trabi, Go! begins with DDR German teacher Udo Struutz deciding to fulfill a long-deferred dream: his first journey to the West will be to travel from his hellhole hometown of industrial Bitterfield, the dirtiest city in all of Eastern Europe, to balmy Naples, thereby tracing the footsteps of his beloved Goethe, whose Italian Journey recorded his own (less quixotic) southern pilgrimage from Weimar in the 1780s. Herr Struutz packs his wife and daughter into little Georg, a family member for 20 years whom Herr Struutz lovingly wipes down with his own washcloth. “See Naples and Die!” scrawls Herr Struutz on Georg’s trunk, recalling Goethe’s clarion call to self-actualization: “Sterbe und werde!” (“die and become!”). The adventure turns out to be a story of Innocent Ossis Abroad and their psychological collision with the West. Numerous scenes in Go, Trabi, Go! allude to the region’s plight: putt-putting along on the Autobahn, little Georg strains to do his maximum speed of 60 mph as contemptuous Mercedes-Benzes, Porsches, and BMWs fly by; broken-down in Bavaria, Georg costs the Struutz family a steep (an outrageously inflated) price for repair, which the intrepid socialist entrepreneurs earn by charging curious Bavarians DM 5 for a “Trabi Peep Show” and a five-minute joy ride in Georg. Reassuringly, the Struutz family eventually does reach its destination, albeit with the accident-prone but indomitable Georg—now minus his top—as a breezy convertible.

Electoral Competition and the Gorkhaland Movement

2018 ◽  
pp. 99-112
Author(s):  
Bethany Lacina
Keyword(s):  
State Government ◽  
West Bengal ◽  
Electoral Competition ◽  
National Government ◽  
Mass Movements ◽  
New Delhi ◽  
Local Autonomy ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
The West ◽  
Personal Power

This chapter examines movements for greater local autonomy in Darjeeling since India’s independence. Political leaders generally mobilize to demand autonomy during periods of heightened electoral competition. These movements tend to fade when electoral competition is low. When mass movements have won autonomous institutions for Darjeeling, movement leaders have used these institutions to repress local electoral competition. Without electoral pressure, incumbent leaders in Darjeeling are feckless in pressing autonomy demands. Both the national government in New Delhi and the West Bengal state government in Kolkata have encouraged the anti-democratic features of Darjeeling’s autonomous institutions as a means of maintaining stability. I make this case by showing the parallels in the careers of Deoprakash Rai, Subash Ghisingh, and Bimal Gurung. Each leader de-escalated demands for Darjeeling’s autonomy as his personal power consolidated.

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