Kennedy's China

Book reviewed:
Noam Kochavi. A Conflict Perpetuated: China Policy during the Kennedy Years.     

The Dynamics and Interactions Between the President's and the Public's Civil Rights Agendas: A Study in Presidential Leadership and Representation

Past research views presidents as reactive and minor actors in the civilrights policy process. However, that research has focused solely on the latter stages of the policy process. This report views the president's role from an agendasetting perspective. A content analysis reveals that presidents lead public opinion on civil rights, but that the public has little impact on the president's civil rights agenda. The distinction between discretionary and required agenda items explains this asymmetry between the president and the public in civil rights policymaking. A fuller notion of policymaking that includes all stages of the process, from agendasetting to implementation and evaluation, is required to understand the role of the president in civil rights policymaking and leads us to revise the perception that presidents play reactive and minor roles in civil rights policy.     

The global circulation of Marxist perspectives on the national question: Borochovism at the service of the Eritrean cause

In 1979, a group of activists belonging to the EPLF (the Eritrean People's Liberation Front) came across a materialistic interpretation of the national question, which was penned at the turn of the century by one Dov Ber Borochov (1881–1917), a Russian–Jewish intellectual who was a leading ideologue of Marxist Zionism. Among the fruits of this encounter was a book advocating the Eritrean people's right to self-determination. Owing to developments in the Soviet Union and Marxist circles in the 1920s, Borochov's works were all but ignored throughout the remainder of the century. How, then, did a Spanish translation of his treatise, Nationalismo y lucha de clases (known in English as The National Question and Class Struggle), find its way into the hands of Eritrean nationalists? Furthermore, against the backdrop of Moscow and Havana's open support for Ethiopia, what attracted these Eritreans to the thought of an obscure Marxist–Zionist intellectual?     

Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised?

From Hellenistic to modern times, in the eyes of Jews and non-Jews alike, circumcision is a sign that marks the boundary between Jews and non-Jews. Jews are circumcised, gentiles are not. What, then, of Jewish women? Why are they not marked with a bodily sign attesting to their place within the covenant? Cohen argues that the Jews of antiquity seem not to have been bothered by this question probably because the fundamental Otherness of women was clear to them. Jewish women were Jewish by birth, but their Jewishness was assumed to be inferior to that of Jewish men. Jews and Christians, however, who opposed circumcision, used the non-circumcision of women as one of their supporting arguments.