Individual vs. collective responsibilty: From the ancient near east and the bible to the Greco‐Roman World

Abstract

The question of individual and collective responsibility and punishment in the Hebrew Bible has been discussed since the 19th century as an important indicator of the changing standards of justice present at different historical periods in ancient Israel. The question, of course, of changing standards of justice based on changing social, religious or political circumstances is itself of interest here. If one has a standard of justice mentioned in one section of the Bible and in another section of the Bible this standard is negated, one is confronting the issue of the mechanism for change of Biblical Law itself. I will for the sake of clarity during this paper be using the standard of “Poqed Avon Avot” as a short marker for individual responsibility. I realize, of course, that it is usually taken as simply intergenerational punishment, but as I will delineate, it was seen from the biblical period through the early medieval period as much more.     

From water to tears: extra-curricular activities and the search for substance in China’s universities

ABSTRACT

Why do university students participate in extra-curricular activities in China? What do they seek in a meaningful education? This paper explains the rising interest in extra-curricular activities by looking into students’ frustration about classroom-bounded education in China’s universities. A transforming socio-economic landscape and increasing imagination about global modernity have inspired new neoliberal demands for practical knowledge and personal meaning. And yet, China’s universities have failed to keep up with students’ changing visions of education, success, and productive personhood. This paper explores students’ agentive pursuit of sociability and emotional sensitivity through extra-curricular activities as a lens to examine the fluidity of meaning-making in contemporary China. In the process, I discuss why self-reported aspirations in skill cultivation cannot encompass the range of motivations that have driven students to extra-curricular participation, and explain how the ethnographic method can help to address gaps of knowledge in inquiries about youthful aspirations.     

From Moscow to Curaçao: Orthodoxy,Evasion, and Competition in Jewish Life 1

Edwin Hutchins. Culture and Inference: A Trobriand Case Study. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980. x + 143 pp. Notes, references, glossary index. $14.00.     

Beyond Nussbaum’s Ethics of Reading: Camus,Arendt, and the Political Significance of Narrative Imagination

The article contributes to current theoretical debates about the political significance of narrative imagination by drawing on Camus’s and Arendt’s existential aesthetic judging sensibility. It seeks to displace the prevalent tendency to probe literature for its moral-philosophical insights, and instead delves into the experiential reality of our engagement with literary works. It starts from Martha Nussbaum’s recognition of the literary ability to account for the fragility of human affairs, yet finds her reduction of narrative imagination to the role of furthering moral lessons wanting politically. Against this background, the article reclaims Camus’s and Arendt’s dialogical-representative judging orientation and its insight into the narrative ability to respond to the intersubjective character of politics. As such, their aesthetic sensibility reveals the potential political significance of literary imagination in its capacity to open a public space where the contradictions of our situated existence can be confronted through politics between plural equals.     

From the Atlantic to the Bug,from the Arctic to the Tigris? The Transformation of the EU and NATO

Both the European Union and NATO are now committed in principle to substantial enlargement. It remains doubtful, however, how far member governments are making a success of further enlargement, let alone thinking through its strategic implications. Yet the process of dual enlargement will define the future security, political and economic structures of the European region. During the past year west European governments have extended promises of eventual membership to the western Balkan states and to Turkey; while the future positions of Ukraine, Russia, the Caucasus states and the southern Mediterranean associates all raise delicate policy issues. Hard choices remain to be made about the adaptation of these organizations to eastern enlargement, and about the management of relations with the near neighbours who will remain outside.     

“From one April to another”: remembering and acknowledging the Holocaust in the poetry of Michael Longley

Michael Longley has written and spoken of the responsibility to commemorate the Holocaust in a manner which is free from historical or political distortion. This article will consider his poetry about the Holocaust in the light of these statements, arguing that the epigraph in Gorse Fires (1991) from the work of Paul Celan provides an indication of Longley's strategy. The close association of elegy and botanical life in Longley's work manifests in the reconfiguration of remembrance poppies in relation to Celan and the Holocaust. The article discusses Longley's work in relation to Ireland's refugee policies during the Second World War, with recourse to the poems “Buchenwald Museum” and “Poppies”. Finally, the article considers Longley's personal link to the Holocaust through his friend Helen Lewis. The representation of the Holocaust in Longley's poetry is always associated with other traumatic events and this article extracts the threads which entangle Longley's evocations of historical violence.     

Nuclear Superiority in the Age of Parity: US Planning,Intelligence Analysis,Weapons Innovation and the Search for a Qualitative Edge 1969–1976

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that between 1969 and 1976 US policy-makers actively sought to transcend nuclear parity. The Nixon and Ford administrations demonstrated increasing uneasiness toward nuclear parity and yet, proved unwilling to match the Soviet Union quantitatively. In the search for an answer to the question of what strategic superiority was in the age of parity, they came to understand it in distinctly qualitative terms, adopting a number of decisions related to nuclear planning, intelligence analysis of the nuclear balance, and nuclear weapons innovation and modernization, aimed at securing a qualitative edge over the USSR.     

From the Mountains to the Sea—Ki Uta ki Tai: Ecological Enclosure,Interconnection, and Subjectivity in the Commons

This paper explores the ways in which the affective and material dimensions of the commons come together to produce commoner subjectivities. Threats of enclosure can draw attention to the ways in which subjectivity reproduction is dependent on an environment which enables embodied acts of care. Using the example of the East Otago Taiāpure and Waikouaiti Mātaitai, a form of customary fisheries management in New Zealand, this paper illustrates the limitations of the institutionalised commons in its capacity to create an effective caring and protective space. Historical colonial transformation of the landscape and contemporary industrial activities have resulted in an “ecological enclosure” of the area, threatening the health of the ecosystem and its ability to encourage Māori subjectivities, specifically, kaitiakitanga, a relational responsibility to care for the physical and social environment.     

“From the cradle to the grave”: Jim Williams,black manhood,and militia activism in Reconstruction South Carolina

The life of Jim Williams, an African American militia captain hanged by the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina in 1871, illuminates the history of martial black manhood during Reconstruction. Service in state militias seemed to afford black men the opportunity to assert a new kind of manhood, grounded in a desire to defend black communities and exercise political rights gained after emancipation. But conservative white southerners met these assertions of black manhood with a campaign of vigilantism. Racist violence by conservative white southerners worked to reverse the support militias had received from white Republicans, and the militias were disbanded and blamed for the very violence they suffered. This article explores Williams’s story, analyzes both officers and troops of black militia companies in the South Carolina upcountry, and charts how real and rhetorical violence silenced the militias’ assertions of a new form of black manhood and freedom.