Ghetto Voyeurism?

Ghetto medicine: the special case of Ghetto Lodz, 1940-44.

The first Jewish ghetto in Poland, established soon after the German invasion in 1939, was perhaps the most hermetically sealed-off mass prison of World War II. As the living conditions deteriorated year after year, the depleted community was plagued by epidemics of infections and endemic diseases. The extermination process was completed with frequent “relocations to the East,” as the deportati...

Consuming Violence: Voyeurism versus Vision

In a memorable story about his friend Alypius, Augustine presents a portrait of both the strong appeal of viewing violence and our ineffectual struggle to resist it. Alypius, who “had been carried away by an incredible passion for gladiatorial shows,” became deeply ashamed of his fascination with the gruesome contests and vowed never to return to the “games.” Then one evening some of Alypius’s ...

Intellectual Voyeurism in Legal Scholarship

What Is a Ghetto?

Although the social sciences have made extensive use of the term “ghetto” as a descriptive term, they have failed to forge a robust analytical concept of the same, relying instead on the folk notions taken for granted at each epoch in the society under examination. This article constructs a relational concept of the ghetto as a Janus-faced instrument of ethnoracial closure and control by drawin...

Immigration, integration and ghetto formation

We study ghetto formation in a population with natives and immigrants in the framework of the two-dimensional Ising-model with Kawasaki-exchange dynamics. It is the phase structure of the Ising model, the integration speed and the immigration rate which determine whether ghetto formation between natives and immigrants can be avoided or not. Our simulations are performed in and out-of equilibrium.