Genetic citizenship: DNA testing and the Israeli Law of Return

The Israeli State recently announced that it may begin to use genetic tests to determine whether potential immigrants are Jewish or not. This development would demand a rethinking of Israeli law on the issue of the definition of Jewishness. In this article, we discuss the historical and legal context of secular and religious definitions of Jewishness and rights to immigration in the State of Israel. We give a brief overview of different ways in which genes have been regarded as Jewish, and we discuss the relationship between this new use of genetics and the society with which it is co-produced. In conclusion, we raise several questions about future potential impacts of Jewish genetics on Israeli law and society.     

马克思《论犹太人问题》的批判原则及其价值立场

在《论犹太人问题》中,马克思第一次从理论上直接阐述了人权理论,并提出了其人权理想的最高价值目标——人类解放。本文试图揭示马克思在《论》中所体现的主要批判原则和价值立场,包括:批判宗教神学的历史唯物主义原则,批判政治、市民社会二元化中所体现的对个体与类和谐统一的追求及以人为基本价值取向的人类解放理想,对我们今天的马克思研究具有重要的理论意义和现实意义。     

Jewish Religiosity and Political Attitudes in the United States and Israel

Does religious commitment have a common political impact across national frontiers? To date, that question has been explored empirically only for Roman Catholics, who might be expected to behave similarly because of centralizing resources in their tradition. This article explores the extent of transnational political attitudes among Jews in the United States and Israel, two groups with less centralized authority structures and radically different religious situations. Parallel surveys of Jews in the United States and Israel, analyzed by OLS regression with the slope dummy approach, indicate that Jewish religiosity has a common influence on most political issues but often has much sharper effects in one society than the other. Given our expectation that Jews would exhibit lower levels of transnational similarity than Roman Catholics, the findings reinforce scholars who perceive religion as a potent transnational political factor.     

On building a sovereign state from scratch: The law and economics of Theodor Herzl's programmatic work

Rarely has one book had the impact of Herzl's Der Judenstaat. To which other book can we points as having led to the creation of an entire state? In looking at the slim volume today, we are struck by its freshness of insight and its strict adherence to trying to find institutional solutions that would allow people to establish the new state and then conduct their lives according to what Herzl conceived as modern Jewish principles. This study is exemplary not only for its success. In a time of great economic and legal change, scholars particularly in the transitional economies are looking for analyses that help them create the functioning institutions that need to be built, often quite literally, from scratch. Herzl, who wrote his book not as a contribution to law and economics but as a contribution to furthering his cause, nevertheless left a remarkable exercise in applied law and economics.     

Promising Justice: Derrida with Jewish Jurisprudence

Law and Critique - “Deconstruction is justice”. How are we to understand this striking and extraordinary sentence Jacques Derrida has written? Whose justice? Which deconstruction? The...     

Vigilantism as community social control: Developing a quantitative criminological model

This paper presents the first systematic quantitative examination of participation in vigilante behavior. Data collected as part of a larger study of Jewish settler violence in the Israeli-controlled West Bank region are used to analyze the factors that lead members of a community to become involved in vigilante violence. Using logistic regression techniques it is found that settlers who fulfill requirements of the vigilante role and those located in outposts where the demand for vigilantes is greatest are most likely to be involved in vigilante activities. In conclusion, it is argued that these findings provide strong support for a criminological model of vigilante behavior that emphasizes the role of the vigilante as an agent of community social control.     

The controversial question of “French Jewish literature”

Is there is specific Jewish literature in France? The study of Jewish authors and their writing is not sufficient grounds to indicate that such a group exists as a socio-historiacal entity; that their existence is real and not merely nominal. The question of the existence of Jewish literature – not to be confused with Jewish writing – is a central preoccupation of the community press, in which preferred answers are formulated with reference to an organised group of artists rather than in terms of artistic expression. We will attempt to show how and by what devices the position adopted by the press in question, often lacking in coherence and sufficient justification, has influenced that adopted by certain writers and academics.     

The Impact of Russian Terrorism in Kishinev on the Zionist Movement and the Jewish Intelligentsia

The explosion of terror which took place in the Bessarabian capital in April 1903 and which has since become known as the Kishinev Pogrom had a profound impact on all of Russian Jewry. But as far as the Zionist movement is concerned, and in opposition to what is generally believed about the Pogrom's central role in the history of Zionism, the Pogrom did not lead to any changes in the activities undertaken by the Zionists or in the ideology which they espoused. It was rather that the Pogrom triggered certain phenomena already present in Zionism during the preceding few years.     

The Jews of early modern Marburg, 1640s—1800

This article examines Jewish household and family organization in a middle-sized German city, the Upper Hessian regional center of Marburg, the population of which ranged from 2500 to 6000 from the Thirty Years War to the end of the 18th century. Some general hypotheses about population development, household structure, and family life conveniently summarized by Toch [Toch, M. (1995). Aspects of stratification in early modern German Jewry: Population history and village Jews. In R. P. Hsia & H. Lehmann (Eds.). In and out of the ghetto: Jewish-Gentile relations in late medieval and early modern Germany (pp. 77-89). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] serve as an organizational frame for the case study. In Toch's view, Jews' comparative wealth, as well as governmental restrictions on their settlement and marriage in central Europe, led to their having larger and more complex households than those of the Christian majority. While household enumerations over time confirm several of Toch's observations, especially the larger size of Jewish families, neither Hessian settlement policy nor local Marburg opposition prevented the Jewish minority of about 1% from keeping pace with general population growth. Moreover, Jews did not respond to their regulated living conditions and status as cultural outsiders with a family organization exhibiting remarkably more internal complexity than did Christian households.