The three million-strong Jewish community constituted almost ten per cent of the population of the Polish state that emerged from the Great War in 1918. In the turbulent years of Poland’s reformation many of them suffered from anti-Semitic excesses and a number of pogroms. However, the threat of violence and an electoral system biased in favour of big parties proved insufficient in uniting the ...

112 * I wish to thank the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, Germany, and Slavic Research Center at the University of Hokkaido, Japan, for financial support for the research and writing of this essay. For astute criticism and useful suggestions on its earlier draft, I am grateful to two anonymous readers of Acta Slavica Iaponica. The final version of the essay also benefited from discussions of my presenta...

INTRODUCTION In Israel, 58.9% of Jewish and Arab Israeli women aged 25 to 64 years are overweight or obese (body mass index >or=25 kg/m(2)). The objective of this analysis is to describe body weight dissatisfaction differences between Jewish and Arab Israeli women with normal or overweight-obese body mass index. METHODS This analysis included 1,393 Jewish and Arab women who participated in th...

This article deals with a typology of 45 techniques of humor that I found when doing research on the mechanisms that generate humor in texts, lists the techniques and applies them to a Jewish joke. It references the work of Vladimir Propp on folktales as analogous in that both are concerned with mechanisms in text that generate meaning. It also deals with four theories about why people find tex...

Economics – in the general sense of the critical study of production, distribution and consumption of wealth in human society – is a central theme of liberation theology. Although liberation theologians do not address the technical questions that constitute modern economic theory, they are concerned with the broader issues of the way in which economic organisation relates to the historical expe...

OBJECTIVES Recent studies have highlighted the potential of analyses of genomic sharing to produce insight into the demographic processes affecting human populations. We study runs of homozygosity (ROH) in 18 Jewish populations, examining these groups in relation to 123 non-Jewish populations sampled worldwide. METHODS By sorting ROH into 3 length classes (short, intermediate, and long), we e...

WHEN AN IMPORTANT new name appears on the theological horizon thinking Christians experience a natural though probably an unwise urge to classify the newcomer in terms of established labels, so that his contribution might the more readily be assimilated into current church thinking. In the case of Wolfhart Pannenberg this would seem to be a mistake. Not only is his theology still only roughly s...