Narratives abound concerning the religious and political positioning of Jerusalem in the past as well as the present and have been used in a variety of ways to serve various ideologies or political ends. One such narrative (which can be found even in some academic treatises of the history of Jerusalem) states that following the Muslim re-conquest of the city after the Crusades Muslim rulers neg...

This article gives the background to a public lecture delivered in Hebrew by Edmund Landau at the opening ceremony of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1925. On the surface, the lecture appears to be a slightly awkward attempt by a distinguished German-Jewish mathematician to popularize a few number-theoretical tidbits. However, quite unexpectedly, what emerges here is Landau’s personal ble...

In her article "Exile, Homeland, and Milieu in the Oral Lore of Carpatho-Russian Jews" Ilana Rosen analyzes oral narratives of Central and East European Jewish communities. The Jewish people have spent most of their lifetime outside their promised land. Accordingly, their ethos, as reflected by holy teachings, expresses a yearning for a return to the holy land by divine agency once the nation i...

This article finds that states can use street renaming as an act of retaliation against other international actors (states and organizations). Specifically, it shows how employ to symbolically insult thus diminish their opponent’s sense self. After situating the practice retaliatory within study emotions in relations (IR), symbolic insults diplomacy, particular, surveys a multitude cases which ...

During Yemenite Jews’ stay in Israeli transit camps during 1948–1950, many of their children disappeared the so-called “Yemenite Children Affair,” undermining immigrants’ faith redemptive ethos Zionism. To better understand this collective trauma, we return to original Freudian conceptualization melancholia as “failed mourning,” locating it within ethnographic context Affair and integrating its...

The status of Jewish identity in cases conversion to another religion is a contentious issue and was brought the forefront public attention with 1962 court case Oswald Rufeisen, convert Christianity known as Br. Daniel, which led shift way that state Israel defines for purposes citizenship. At same time, however, test conflicting interpretations after playing out Rufeisen’s own monastery, hidde...