To enter Agnon's fictive universe, one must acknowledge the very central place occupied by Torah as the fabric of the world that both contains Creation and binds God to Israel. Torah, as pre-existing text, authorizes subsequent interpretations in the assumption that they are already contained within it. Using the texts of rabbinic tradition, Agnon maps out this territory in Seper, soper vesippu...

China is not only the most populous country in the world, but also a multinational country with 56 ethnic groups. Tibetans (4.6 million in 1990) ranked in number as the ninth largest minority group. The Tibet question has attracted wide publicity in the Western media in recent years. The Chinese government is frequently criticised for political oppression and human rights violation in Tibet, pa...

The overseas Chinese democracy movement started in the early 1980s and comprised of the networks, organisations and campaigns of those mainland Chinese activists, in exile mostly in the West, particularly the United States. These dissidents were mainly Democracy Wall (1978-79) veterans, the Tiananmen Square event (1989) student leaders and intellectuals, and other activists who became politicis...

In her article "Exile, Homeland, and Milieu in the Oral Lore of Carpatho-Russian Jews" Ilana Rosen analyzes oral narratives of Central and East European Jewish communities. The Jewish people have spent most of their lifetime outside their promised land. Accordingly, their ethos, as reflected by holy teachings, expresses a yearning for a return to the holy land by divine agency once the nation i...

The town of Dharamsala in the Himalayas of India harbors not only the Tibetan government in-exile, but also a very unique Internet community operated by AirJaldi. The combination of high-profile clientele and naive users makes for a very interesting setting from a network security standpoint. Using packet capture and network intrusion detection systems (NIDS), we analyze the security of the net...