Blockchain Papers

Samwel Moses Ntapanta

In Community in a Crowd: Bitcoin and the Quest for Liberty in Tel Aviv, Matan Shapiro offers a carefully crafted ethnography of Bitcoin socialities grounded in a long fieldwork at the Bitcoin Embas...

Abdourahmane Diallo, Akhtarzaite Binti Hj. Abdul Aziz

This article examines whether zakat is applicable to cryptocurrencies via a study of the fatwa genre on this topic. Fatwas from seven legal specialists in the Muslim world will be examined. These juristic opinions range from considering cryptocurrencies to be permissible to those that consider it prohibited. However, across this spectrum these authorities argue for zakat application to cryptocurrencies. The analysis will isolate and identify the relevant proof texts and principles relied upon. It will be shown that a unifying theme across the fatwa genre is of how thamaniyya is vital in linking cryptocurrencies to zakat-applicability. The study concludes that Islamic Finance successfully contains a theoretic concept, namely thamaniyya, that can help Muslim scholarship engage with advancements in cryptocurrencies regardless of future technological innovations. This study is novel for focusing on fatwa analysis through a theoretical orientation. This article sheds light on how contemporary fatwas are used in the field of Islamic Finance to negotiate between the jurisprudential tradition and cutting-edge developments in cryptocurrencies. The study is limited in not considering socio-political factors in the analysis. It is hoped the results of this study can highlight how disparate legal opinions in Islamic Finance actually share common ground.

Steven Fesmire

I sometimes ask my students if they would be willing to raise their hand and pledge the following: There's a single basis of moral life, and it determines the right way to proceed. I have access to this supreme basis. When others don't agree with me, it's because they have the wrong faith commitments, they aren't analyzing things properly, or they aren't letting conscience be their guide. Agreement with me is a prerequisite to solving our problems. Consequently, I have nothing to learn about these matters from those who disagree with me. Their participation is, at best, an irrelevant distraction and, at worst, an evil to be defeated. My diagnosis of the issue has precisely captured all that is morally relevant. It's exhaustive, hence beyond revision and reformulation.I rarely get any takers. After the students and I swap stories about those who might blithely take such a pledge, we invariably conclude that the pledgers are outnumbered by their counterparts: conservatives, liberals, and radicals who would, upon conscious reflection, reject this outright as closed-minded arrogance. Moreover, it quickly becomes clear that this pledge doesn't speak to the sort of people they wish to be. (I later explain that “ethical monists” accept the first sentence, “moral fallibilists” reject the second, and almost all moral philosophers would reject the baselessness of the rest.)And yet, our class conversation continues, how many of us certified broader-minded souls act as though complex problems come prepackaged with our interpretation of them? Do we prejudge and offhandedly dismiss alternative diagnoses of shared problems? However open-minded we may seem to ourselves, do we habitually react to others as though we're navigating with the one universal moral compass? Are our real behaviors implicated in this pledge that most of us would consciously disavow?At this point, I introduce another classroom activity, inspired by Anthony Weston's A 21st Century Ethical Toolbox. Suppose we wanted to codify rules to sabotage democratic dialogue and make debates as fruitless as possible. The idea here is to spell out rules that maximize the distance between “us” and “them,” ensuring that possibilities for cooperatively setting and achieving social goals—like peace, security, justice, public health, or sustainability—go forever unnoticed. For example, consider things like “stereotype the other side” or “prepare your comeback instead of listening.”I divide students into groups and ask them to develop five more rules. They come up with an excellent tool kit for torpedoing public deliberation: “Approach any debate as a zero-sum game.” “Widen the gulf that separates us.” “Be uncharitable: always present your side at its best and the other at its worst.” “Ignore context.” “Be angrier and talk louder.” “Be smug.” “Trust your anger; it would never steer you wrong.” “Inflate certainty.” “Gaslight.” “Dog whistle.” “Assume your interlocuter is clueless.” “Reject complexity.” “Be visibly offended by any questioning of your conclusions.” “Act as though your values and concerns invariably overrule theirs.”Gradually some of the fun fades. Is there any link between the pledge activity and your new diabolical tool kit, I ask? The sense of the class is that the tool kit clarifies the practical upshot of the pledge, identifying legitimized behaviors. We end up recognizing ourselves, myself included. We purposefully drew up a malicious playbook for undermining democracy, and it mirrored the status quo. Many of my liberal-identified American students interpret the activity as a send-up of conservatives. Their imagined tool kit-users sport “Make America Great Again” hats and threaten DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) advocates. Meanwhile, many conservative students interpret the activity as damning liberal wokeness, “virtue signaling,” and “cancel culture.” Through this discussion, the class gets an experiential introduction to work in moral psychology that bears on moral politics, such as Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind.We conclude this introductory unit of the course with issues that tend to counteract fuzzy relativism by evoking strong condemnation, such as Nussbaum's essay on female genital cutting (“Judging Other Cultures”). Joining millions of ethics students before them, most conclude that extreme relativism leaves much to be desired as a coherent way to express the virtue of tolerance. Most want to show courage. Yet as they reach for their received language, many are now unnerved by their own pledge-like tone. They're habituated to assuming that a kind of moral fundamentalism is the irreplaceable steam that powers activism and advocacy, that resistance to injustice is unintelligible without it, and that the virtues of moral clarity and conviction somehow imply a my-way-or-the-highway approach.Shifting uncomfortably, we pause to explore our dissonance. Perhaps we're merely hypocrites, parading open-mindedness while betraying its opposite. Or perhaps we're beset with a neural vestige of moral tribalism, as Joshua Greene explored in Moral Tribes. Minimally, we're exhibiting what social psychologist Lee Ross studied as the illusion of objectivity, the error of assuming that our perceptions, motivations, and assessments are objective while those who disagree with us are irrational (Ross 751–52). But there are additional philosophically interesting things at work, and they highlight conditions that pour gasoline on our usual hypocrisy and attribution errors. I'll explore some of these today by asking five questions about moral fundamentalism: (1) What is it? (2) Is it really such a bad thing? (3) Isn't it good for motivating social action? (4) Do many theorists inadvertently legitimize it? and (5) Can we educate beyond it?I call this cluster of pledge-and-tool kit-like habits “moral fundamentalism.” The term was used by Mark Johnson (163) as a synonym for moral absolutism, and by Robert Baker (201) as a broad-brush label for any principle-based moral universalism. But, for three reasons, it's helpful to disentangle the term from just any commitment to moral absolutism: Philosophers who are moral absolutists generally condemn pledge-like traits, and their theoretical commitments don't necessarily imply fundamentalist behaviors.A name is needed for the offending habits, whatever one's worldview. Rejecting self-certainty in theory doesn't imply rejecting it in practice.Moral fundamentalist habits thrive today among groups whose outlook seems little troubled by the lack of a final mooring for their beliefs.Moral fundamentalism can be ostensively defined as the cluster of habits exhibited in “the pledge” activity. A moral fundamentalist may be more precisely defined, minimally, as someone disposed to act as if they have access to (1) the exclusively right way to diagnose moral or political problems, and (2) the single approvable practical solution to any particular problem.Although the word “fundamentalism” is contested (Peels 1), it automatically suggests a helpful analogy to rigid religious dogmatism, which carries the idea that a select few have accessed self-evident ideals that should be heeded without public investigation, critique, and reformation. The dogmatist's notion that some statements are inherently and self-sufficiently true (Dewey, “Propositions” 171–72) is diametrically opposed to Peirce's fallibilist notion that a “skeptical element” is involved in any claim that follows on the heels of inquiry. Accordingly, in moral education, the ardent fundamentalist leader is contented only after a young member of the flock arrives safely at a foregone conclusion.Fundamentalists speak authoritatively about all-encompassing essences, including the essence of morality. As pragmatists have long observed, such essentialism freezes creative processes—through which people work things out together—into static things. Pretending to speak for the universal essence of morality turns to stone what should be a collaborative project (cf. Appiah, Lies That Bind 97). Fundamentalism turns moral artistry into moralizing.Fealty to inerrant essential doctrines or principles isn't a promising resource for public dialogue, restoration of trust, or reconciliation. When combined with nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, racism, massive out-migration, and economic dislocation, it's a resource for reactionary oppression, rage, and fanaticism on all sides. We must find our diverse ways beyond the hell we inflict in the name of righteous certainty.The preceding discussion clarifies, I hope, several senses in which moral fundamentalism is a vice. For a moral fundamentalist, the main moral, social, or political problem is presumed to be that others don't get the problem (Norton 37), as though events carry their own meanings. Or the main problem is presumed to be the failure of others to bow to our brilliant solutions. Never mind that these solutions are ideas that flow from values and purposes, and that have consequences that reshape subsequent facts to be interpreted. And never mind aspects of the situation that are obfuscated by our way of casting the problem or are occluded by our principles. We too readily assume that, unlike their concerns, ours are value-neutral and free of interest-driven rationalizations and biases. We never doctor facts to predetermine results.Moral fundamentalism is a drag on democracy. This drag is to be expected when people feel backed into a corner or when their social position limits opportunities. But fundamentalism anywhere blocks communication and inquiry across differences. Whenever people suppose their reading of a problem is exhaustive, they autocratically predefine what's relevant, and they covertly prejudge alternatives. They assume, as a matter of course, that others are stubbornly refusing to accept the interpretation that (in Dewey's words) is staring right out at them (Dewey, Public and Its Problems 38).When we disagree about problems, it's one thing to reflectively conclude that others are willfully refusing to face conditions, as Eddie Glaude explores in Begin Again. It's quite another thing to start with the default assumption that we alone are taking the wide view.Despite these habits—not because of them—moral fundamentalists have historically done many good things through their dealings with opposing fundamentalisms. But what else have they done that might in future be minimized by delegitimizing moral fundamentalism? When we take up the one-way mentality, what happens to opportunities for reflexively learning our way toward a healthier, more just, and more sustainable future across the dynamic spectrum of values, beliefs, and concerns?Does activism require and benefit from moral fundamentalism? In order to motivate actions that restructure conditions and redress wrongs, must people harden their hearts and minds against the clamor of contradictory theories, both speaking and acting as if they're governed by final truths?If so, then perhaps a kind of incorrigibility is a virtue of public philosophizing. To some intellectuals, the international resurgence of gaslighting demagogues and self-seeking cronyism is incontrovertible proof that we can ultimately expect very little of the public. It's assumed by some that the public switch is permanently set to dim, so it's up to intellectuals to take up the civilizing burden of enlightenment. If this requires us to default to moral fundamentalism, then so be it.However, we got here by expecting too little of the public. We've long been running self-verifying experiments in low expectations. 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Sujeet Raosaheb Suryawanshi, Prashant B Kumbharkar, Shailesh Kumar

Identity management, encompassing authentication and authorization within a networked environment, stands as a paramount security aspect. Over time, various identity management paradigms have evolved, progressing from the isolated silo model to the federated model and, more recently, the self-sovereign identity (SSI’) approach. Notably, SSI empowers users to autonomously oversee their own data, irrespective of organizational involvement, through the utilization of emerging blockchain technology. Numerous ongoing studies are exploring the potential of SSI.Nevertheless, SSI adoption has remained limited due to its inherent compatibility issues and user inconveniences, stemming from an unfamiliar user experience and a nascent development phase. In response, this research paper proposes a novel SSI approach rooted in blockchain technology that aligns with the widely accepted and mature OAuth 2.0 standard. This blockchain-based model ensures users’ data sovereignty, allowing them to wield control over their information in a decentralized manner, free from reliance on specific monopolistic service providers.The proposed model boasts high usability and scalability, as it can be readily embraced and implemented by users and clients familiar with existing OAuth protocols. The feasibility of the proposed model is confirmed through its implementation, accompanied by a thorough security analysis. It is anticipated that this innovative model will play a pivotal role in advancing both blockchain technology and the adoption of self-sovereign identity solutions.

Authors unavailable

The media has become one of the important industries in developed countries due to the huge capital invested in the diverse and numerous fields of media, and according to experts, the media is considered the third largest industry in the world after the manufacture of weapons and chemicals, and this industry has played a role in shaping the economy, politics, religion and society's culture at the present time. . The media is considered an investment in knowledge, in a world that witnesses an information revolution every day in various fields, where different media have witnessed tangible changes in their ownership patterns, management, organizational structures, sources of financing and production techniques in light of these rapid changes, and these changes were reflected in media institutions, which made adjustments. Fundamental to its media, administrative and economic policy, and as a result of the developments brought about by the technological revolution, the forms of ownership and methods of media management diversified, as it brought about a clear change in the network of social relations and the prevailing pattern of control, and contributed to the creation of the decentralized style of management and the trend towards integrative management in which the lines of ownership, management and responsibility go. Vertically and horizontally at the same time and in more than one direction. The issue of the relationship between the ownership pattern in the Western media system and the media policy of the media is one of the issues raised in the agenda of Western media research. Ralf Thrift (1977) is considered one of the first Western media researchers to research this issue, and it was preceded by references to it by some researchers, as a reaction to the dramatic shift in media ownership there since the beginning of the sixties of the twentieth century, but in-depth studies of this The case has been delayed for some time until the phenomenon is completed and crystallized.

Debra Caplan

Alisa Solomon’s Wonder of Wonders opens with two brief stories that, in the hands of another writer, might be mere anecdotes: Fiddler on the Roof’s near-simultaneous invocation in 2011 by political radio talk show host Glenn Beck and Jewish protestors involved with Occupy Wall Street. Indeed, the entire introduction, aptly named “A little bit of this, a little bit of that,” seems at first to dwell on the anecdotal. Before we come to the evolution of the musical Fiddler on the Roof, we are first introduced to kids singing “Sabbath Prayer” at summer camps, interfaith holiday greeting cards featuring Tevye, Augusto Pinochet’s banning of Fiddler in Chile in the mid-1970s, and references to Fiddler in The Simpsons. But, like the modest yet treasured possessions of the residents of Anatevka, there’s a lot more to these little bits then meets the eye. By page 2, Solomon has already essentially proven her central argument—that “Fiddler, like no other musical before or since, has seeped into the culture more widely, functioning in sometimes contradictory ways” (2) as a signifier of various kinds and degrees of Jewishness, a measure of political affiliation, and a mode of Jewish ritual practice, among others. Indeed, Wonder of Wonders tells the story of Fiddler on the Roof’s evolution and cultural impact with an astonishing breadth that is itself proof positive for her argument.The juxtaposition of Glenn Beck and Occupy at the start of the book is no mere anecdote, but a hint of what’s to come. For this book is not only about how Fiddler on the Roof came into being and its reception, though Solomon does provide a fresh take on that subject. But more than anything else, this is a book about the musical’s “radiant afterlife” as a global cultural phenomenon with “surprising, enduring, shape-shifting utility” (4). It is this shape-shifting quality that Solomon traces most closely, following the trail of each new permutation of Sholem-Aleichem’s original Tevye stories like a magician demonstrating how a simple scarf can change color and texture, become a bird, vanish into thin air, and then suddenly reappear. In Wonder of Wonders, we catch a glimpse of how this beloved, shape-shifting Broadway musical has become part of the world’s cultural ether, ever ready to meet the changing needs of its audiences.Time and time again, as Solomon demonstrates, Fiddler has morphed anew across a wide range of cultural contexts and locales. From the readers who first loved Tevye in Eastern Europe to the middle schoolers in a controversial Brownsville student production of Fiddler in 1968, from young Poles’ attempts to understand their country’s past via musical theater to Jewish parents hiring bottle dancers for bar and bat mitzvahs, from Sholem-Aleichem’s years of struggle to bring his work to the Yiddish stage to the Fiddler-themed Judaica and dishware that can be found in synagogue gift shops across the country, Solomon examines it all. In the hands of another writer, these might have been rendered picayune episodes, nothing more than footnotes to the “real” story of the Broadway musical. Not so in Wonder of Wonders. Instead, these examples illuminate Fiddler’s remarkable staying power as something more than just a play with many productions: a cultural touchstone.In Solomon’s capable hands, we readers are thus presented with dozens of incarnations of Tevye’s story as it is told and retold, deconstructed, reconfigured, and revived over the course of more than a century. Many fine books and articles have been written about Fiddler on the Roof, of course, but no one before Solomon has ever examined Fiddler as a cultural phenomenon with such comprehensive scope. Encompassing not only the expected topics (Sholem Aleichem’s stories, Jerome Robbins’s feud with Zero Mostel, the casting for the film) but also subjects that have never before been considered vis-à-vis their relationship to Fiddler (Hebrew theater in the forties, black-Jewish relations in the sixties, Fiddler’s impact on contemporary Jewish rituals), this is cultural history at its finest.Like the writers and artists who are her subjects, Solomon knows how to create dramatic tension. The single word that readers are most likely to automatically associate with Fiddler on the Roof (and the title of the show’s signature opening number, “Tradition!”), doesn’t appear in Wonder of Wonders until well over a hundred pages in, when Jerome Robbins finally realizes what his show is actually about. Solomon thus enables her readers to develop a fresh view of Fiddler on the Roof, one that builds and grows over the course of the book. When Jerome Robbins has his “aha” moment and realizes that tradition is the heart of the show, we experience the rush of enthusiasm and recognition that must have filled the room along with the creative team. Indeed, a full half of the book covers events that happened before Fiddler even opened on Broadway. By the time we arrive at opening night, the reader has the sense of only just understanding this iconic musical for the first time.Wonder of Wonders is structured in three parts, arranged chronologically. The first set of chapters considers the Yiddish writer Sholem-Aleichem and his authorship of the Tevye stories, his failure to break into the Yiddish theater, and the subsequent work of translators, writers, and artists who garnered visibility for this work among English speakers (Maurice Samuel, Arnold Perl, Frances Butwin, and others). Part 2, “Tevye Strikes It Rich,” examines the long process via which Fiddler came to Broadway and its initial reception. But it is part 3, “Tevye’s Travels,” that represents the most significant contribution of this book: Solomon’s careful tracing of how Fiddler on the Roof has, to an extent unique among Broadway musicals, thoroughly permeated the cultural landscape with a broad global audience that includes Jews and non-Jews, and theatergoers and non-theatergoers, within its reach.Solomon displays many talents in these pages: careful researcher, astute scholar, skilled cultural critic. But above all, it is Solomon’s power as a storyteller that is on fullest display. In clever, witty, memorable prose, Solomon introduces us to a vivid cast of characters who at times seem to almost burst forth from the page. On Jerome Robbins’s goals for Fiddler: “[he] labored mightily to burn away the schmaltz that for two decades had encased the world of the shtetl like amber.” (119) Or on Zero Mostel’s relationship to his mother tongue: “Yiddish never stopped gurgling within him; often it spilled out.” (154). Or, about the rivalry between the two men: “If a time machine could put a story about them on the Yiddish stage of earlier decades, charismatic, outsize Thomashefsky would have to play Mostel and haughty, blazing Jacob Adler would embody Robbins” (151). Solomon’s description of the Yiddish theater rivals in chapter 1 is so vivid that she can continue to reference them throughout the book.Indeed, Wonder of Wonders offers the reader a refreshingly rich and nuanced overview of Yiddish literature and the history of the Yiddish stage interwoven with a century of Tevye’s journeys. The triumph of this book lies in Solomon’s exacting insistence on telling the whole story of Fiddler on the Roof, leaving no stone unturned. To entice the wary reader who may not consider him- or herself interested in such details as the state of Yiddish publishing in the nineteenth century or the history of translations of Sholem-Aleichem, Wonder of Wonders explains the significance of these contextual pieces through superb historical storytelling that makes the fluid and multifaceted relationship between the turn-of-the-century explosion of modern Yiddish culture and Fiddler transparent. Fiddler, in other words, didn’t emerge in a vacuum; and Solomon wants to make sure that the reader understands the cultural landscape that birthed Tevye’s story. Not only does Wonder of Wonders provide a rich mini-history of Yiddish literature, but Solomon also leverages Yiddish sources to demonstrate how Yiddish culture influenced the production itself. For instance, she explores Boris Aronson and Jerome Robbins’s involvement with Yiddish theater prior to their Broadway careers, and analyzes how their experiences might have influenced particular production choices (like Robbins drawing upon his experience acting in Di brider ashkenazi at Maurice Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theater for Fiddler’s wedding scene). Solomon also examines the response to Fiddler in the Yiddish press, which has never before been examined, when considering the Jewish community’s reaction to the musical. This is, to my knowledge, the first time in musical theater scholarship that a direct, continuous relationship between the Yiddish theater and Fiddler has been suggested, and it is a significant contribution. Solomon is implicitly proposing—quite rightly, I believe—that Fiddler represents a moment of sharp continuity between the Yiddish stage and Broadway, in which American Jewish theater artists drew directly upon what they had learned early in their careers in the Yiddish theater. This perspective is far too often overlooked, and is a much needed corrective to scholarship that assumes that Yiddish culture was already long gone in postwar America.In sum, Alisa Solomon has written a brilliant, eminently readable, remarkable gem of a book that is so delightful to read that one has the sense of guzzling down her prose, all 448 pages of it. Upon finishing the introduction, my first thought was, “I can’t wait to read the rest of this book.” My second thought was, “I can’t wait to have my students read this book.” This is no small feat for a hefty, meticulously researched scholarly book, steeped in years of archival research. And yet—wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles—Solomon pulls it off, this fusion of sophisticated academic argumentation with all of the literary qualities of a page-turner in a manner so seamless that it is nothing short of miraculous.

Adam Gregerman

Comparative Christian Hermeneutical Approaches to the Land Promises to Abraham Adam Gregerman While formerly inflammatory topics such as the deicide charge have waned in Jewish–Christian relations, disputes over the land and State of Israel provoke intense controversy and disagreement. Decades ago, in the Christian world, this topic was already widely said to be especially divisive, and today, it remains so. It is not surprising that an issue that provokes intense geopolitical interest and touches on territory of nearly unsurpassed religious significance would be so provocative. The nexus of politics and religion is especially volatile. Among Christians, church organizations and individual theologians in the west (North America, Europe) join diverse religious claims and biblical interpretations to their foreign policy statements and arguments. Sometimes, it seems that the political views trump the religious. For example, Christian disputes over the State of Israel often can be mapped onto existing deep divisions in the American churches over domestic policies or military action, with left and right presenting predictable arguments. It is understandably tempting to see appeals to Scripture and theology as tools to buttress pre‐existing political views. However, a sympathetic reader should also recognize the presence of serious theological reflections on this contested and fraught sacred space. Christians who grapple with the land and State of Israel do so in the wake of highly complex millennia‐old Christian theological traditions about Jews and Judaism, sacred space generally, and the land of Israel in particular. There are profound religious issues at stake that go beyond politics, for the State of Israel as a “Jewish state” inevitably raises religious questions for Christians, especially for those rethinking largely negative historical views of Jews and Judaism. For many centuries, nearly all Christians believed that Jewish powerlessness and exile were divine punishment for Jews’ refusal to believe in and/or murder of Jesus. The ejection of many Jews from the biblical land of Israel and the end to Jewish sovereignty there were proofs of the truth of Christianity. Not surprisingly, then, in the wake of the 1948 creation of the State of Israel, the ingathering of (some) Jews to the land, and the (partial) end of Jewish subordination to Gentile rulers, many Christians struggled to make sense of this event not just politically but theologically. The difficult theological questions raised by this event, and for some subsequent events, such as the Israeli capture of all of Jerusalem in 1967, include as follows: Does the creation of the state—though a result of a United Nations vote—have any religious significance for Christians, as a contemporary act of God in history or manifestation of God's will? Need it prompt changes in Christians’ views about Jewish landedness or landlessness, and if so, how broad might these changes be? Are the policies of the state to be evaluated by Christians using religious criteria different from those used when evaluating other countries? Because these questions rest on underlying (and changing) Christian theological views about Jews and Judaism, they should be situated in a broader context: how do widespread contemporary Christian efforts to understand Judaism in theologically positive ways influence Christian views of the land and State of Israel specifically? This last question provides the context for addressing this topic. Since many western Christian groups and thinkers now reject supersessionism and affirm the ongoing legitimacy of the Jews’ covenant, the biblical promises concerning the land are an unavoidable topic. Even those who deny any contemporary religious significance to the State of Israel must face it, if only to make this separation between biblical promises and the modern nation‐state clear. There have been studies on contemporary Christian views of the religious significance or lack of religious significance of the land and State of Israel. Most have focused on one group or one perspective, such as liberal Christians, Catholics, evangelical/conservative Christians, and even British churches or Canadian churches. Other studies—fewer in number—survey a variety of perspectives. Much attention has been paid in particular to church/Christian activism, such as support for or opposition to Israel and its policies. Surprisingly, less attention has been paid to the underlying religious issues of the covenant between God and the Israelites/Jews and...

Heidi James-Dunbar

This thesis recalls and surveys the work of major theorists in the field of Trauma theory, including Freud, Charcot, Prince, Caruth and Leys. It will consider if literature can provide a positive response to the attestation and representation of trauma. For Derrida, testimony must always remain irreducible to evidence or proof. This secret at the heart of every telling is what is at stake for survivors of trauma. Further, pain (either physical or mental) is that which precisely can't be shared between subjects it cannot be denied neither can it be confirmed. On the one hand it induces certainty
\n(I feel pain) and on the other, doubt (I can't see or feel your pain). One's pain is entirely aversive, a secret that evades language. How does this affect the textual production of trauma narratives? And how are those narratives received?
\nThe definition of testimony, that it alone can't constitute a 'proof whilst possibly recuperating one's right to 'tell' insomuch as one can construct an apparatus to evade censorship by government or other authorities, reduces that telling to a fiction, a story; which could be described as akin to the violence of blocking one's ears, refusing to partake in witnessing, a dismissal of subjectivity/sovereignty. Can
\nliterature and the art of testimony confront the impossibility of a proper response to trauma, a trauma that evades language and majority discursive practices?

Sabrina Stone

Keeping religion and politics apart is an idea with a history. That history is a Christian one, however, rooted in the experience of European Christendom and made possible because Christians, virtually from the beginning, viewed church and state as conceptually separate entities, with different jurisdictions and powers and even a different logic.1 It may be, as Mark Lilla recently argued, that the complex picture of the Christian triune God is inextricably caught up in this story.2 Divided sovereignty is more compatible with the picture of a divided God than a unified one. Other religious traditions may have different resources, however, enabling them to embrace or even stumble into the separation of religion and state. In the case of religions framed around legal traditions, pictures of the divine law are as important as pictures of God.3 Is the law imagined as a comprehensive system uniting all aspects of life under a single sacred framework, thus leaving no room for a separate political domain? Is the law imagined as primarily political, a blueprint for government; or as exquisitely ethical, taking into account only the rights of individuals and not societal needs or a collective such as the state? If so, what law regulates social need? Is there a universal law that has an origin outside of itself on which it can draw even in an internal context? These pictures of the divine law vary over time and among groups within the tradition, just as do pictures of secular law. Certain pictures of law, however, may assume mythic proportions over time, especially in the popular imagination, and this can be a potent obstacle to retrieving from within the tradition alternative images of the law more congenial to a separation of religion and state. It is in this spirit that two intellectual retrieval projects, both responding to the rise of modern nation-states in the Middle East, are taking place today. Muslim and Jewish thinkers are looking back on a wide variety of legal doctrines and theories, as well as historical experiences, in order to engage the question whether there are authentic warrants from within their respective traditions for separating religion and state. These two legal traditions begin with strong original visions of a unified religious polity in which the political authority both is subject to and enforces the divine law. The original model not to in in the of and Jewish intellectual both and doctrines the of divine law in that from and powers in the political the on the popular of the original of a unified polity is all as a and not as a political have that an polity as a and the to which a polity is In to and history of as a in modern as a the question whether there are authentic within the religious tradition for separating religion and state primarily in to and the original of a unified religious polity the or the of the state of with the of a Jewish religious into in the the question whether there are warrants for separating religion and state wide variety of with this for the of law, the law of religious the of an the of under Jewish of religious groups with the state and legal and the of Jewish law in the legal of the state. 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law and as a for and for the for a the of of as to political the itself to the to the the political with religious and the Jewish into the religious as a or and to it into the and universal in which is the as the and the political law as In this is the for the in the and the which is the and which the of this to a a and in the of in the to separate for religion and a for from law in the of the Jewish an to the question to a in the of of to social law, with of in with the of two and this it is with political the itself the for this The is only with or may to the of the authority to a religious to social be in the and is the not as a as an for of social and on the are the as a legal as not is for the religious is not to a to in the Jewish the is the of social order the may the the for order and social is that it is virtually to the is to to powers as as not place the powers within the more the or is a and under is on what are and whether there are to the of the as the political is of of the can as the in in Christian and the in of law as law, social and the in of from this be on the of two there in the and a of the to on the of traditions, a of an be and a both powers and for of social into in the with not framework, which a and to the of law is the sacred and the in the of the of the law, the of the in with law as a to it to on the divine can be in two as two are in of their political to the in with and law is because the law is to the rights of the into account the needs of and to the rights of the The the to that which is just in itself to the of the which are just in of of divine law in and the the that the not in with law. this the of which on the of in the of political to the more religious law more that of the that is is a even the social of the is and are primarily to the divine of the social in is not to and may or may not be and on to in this the system of to this to law, the of and intellectual is not to this If of Christian the is the of the two and is as 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political which as to the rights of the Jewish religion is of God the of that are from and thus the social and is the of the sacred and to the state be and of religious because outside place is the time, however, the state is from the of the political and as The of and religion the state in system is to for an a of of the the of the this is both from that of the the state as from political in the secular as itself a religious and from the more of the religious to the and for the of Jewish be not The law of the is is in the of the of to and the of no to more the of Jewish sovereignty than this one, which in the have this is from on the is in the In of is it as a to or an of the in original the to the in The is a

Yohanan Petrovsky‐Shtern

It took Hasidism only two or three decades to establish an efficient, long-lasting leadership in the Jewish communities throughout the territory of pre-partitioned Poland. This rapid spread of the new movement within the traditionally homogeneous Jewish society required much more than an appealing religious ideology.1 To gain power over East European Jewry, Hasidism had to become a full-fledged social movement as well. The transformation of Hasidism from a religious philosophy available to a few elitist and self-sufficient circles of Jewish mystics in Brody or Kuty in Eastern Galicia into a social movement available to any Jew in Berdichev or Warsaw was twofold. While Hasidism considerably changed the outlook of the Jewish society, above all its modus vivendi, the community simultaneously changed Hasidism, in the first place its modus operandi. The necessity to spread Hasidic ideas to the Jewish society at large—be it the idea of dvekut (cleaving to God) or that of the tsadik (spiritual leader)—compelled Hasidism to address Jewish society in its own communal language. In other words, in order to convey its ideological message Hasidism had to use the available communal forms and patterns. In turn, these communal patterns shaped the social message of Hasidism. This article will cover only one aspect of the spread and transformation of Hasidism—namely, the role of havurot (or hevrot), Jewish traditional self-governing institutions.2 Analyzing the relationship between the Hasidic movement and the institutions of Jewish communal organization in Eastern Europe, Shmuel Ettinger wrote: "The main obstacle has been the dislocation and probable destruction of the bulk of the evidence—the minute books (pinkasim) in which community councils (kehalim) as well as various societies (havurot) which operated within [End Page 20] their organizational framework had kept their records for centuries."3 Ettinger reiterated his complaints about the "small number" of available original documents and "scarcity of communal records," upon which scholars relied in their "sweeping generalizations" as well as "far- fetched assumptions."4 It was the rediscovery of a bulk of primary documents that radically changed the available pool of sources—namely, pinkasim, or record books of Jewish societies.5 I will analyze the relations between Hasidism and havurot through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, projected against broader geographical, social, and historical context, drawing from some 25 (out of 100 newly uncovered) pinkasim that originated from the Volhynia, Podolia, and Kiev provinces.6 This article defines, systematizes, and comments on a variety of patterns of the encounter between Hasidism and havurot. It revisits the assumption that the spread of Hasidism did not alter the established patterns of communal administration. It introduces new methodology in the research of communal documents, and it provides insights into the sources previously unknown to scholarship. Methodological Concerns The transformation of Hasidism into a wide-ranging social movement is poorly documented and has, therefore, been neglected by scholarship. New trends in Jewish social studies have contributed to the reassessment of this important issue. However, beyond David Assaf's recently published monograph on Rabbi Israel of Ruzhin, Paul Radensky's dissertation on Rabbi David Twersky of Talnoe, and Glenn Dynner's ongoing research on the spread of early Polish Hasidism,7 almost no substantial survey exists of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century developments of Hasidism in terms of social history. Yet several insights suggested by Jewish social historians are worth mentioning, particularly in view of the fact that this article supports some of their insights with new documentary evidence, and raises questions concerning others. As most historians have tended to see it, the spread of the Hasidic movement was promoted by vagabond preachers and healers who became sedentary tsadikim8 or Hasidic pietists who joined havurot and enforced halakhic rules,9 or by the decentralization of the traditional Jewish authority (kahal) and the emerging new forms of autonomous activity of the local Jewish communities,10 or by the Mishnah study societies that spiritually accommodated Jewish families in case of the loss [End...

Nelly Hanna

States and elites The culture of the Ottoman period has often been analyzed by using the same criteria applied to the periods before and after it, Mamluk Egypt (1250–1517) and the nineteenth century. This is problematic for two reasons, firstly because of the very different roles played by the state in relation to culture and learning and secondly because of the role of elites in providing models and patterns of culture. The influence of the ruling class in shaping culture can change between one period and another, and can be greater at certain times than at others. When the state is centralized, the ruling class is much more likely to play a dominant role than it is in a decentralized state. The cultural production is more likely to be polished and refined when ruling classes dominate the direction that it takes, and less so when their role is reduced. When the state is decentralized, as it was during the Ottoman period, and the structures at the top are weaker, the cultural forms and patterns from below are more likely to emerge. Therefore, rather than compare this period to those before or after it, we may approach it through the larger framework of its changing social and political structures. In both Mamluk Egypt and Egypt under the rule of Muhammad ’Ali and his descendants (nineteenth century), the state was very centralized and played an active role in financing and shaping culture and in education. Likewise the ruling elites were actively involved in creating cultural models.

Carmel Shalev, David Chinitz

Israel's ongoing health reform provides lessons regarding attempts to combine universal coverage under national health insurance with a version of managed competition. Based on principles of 'justice, equality and mutual aid," Israel's National Health Insurance Law, 1994 guarantees access to a broad basket of basic services to be provided by four competing sick funds, and the availability of resources adequate to finance the basket. The new rights of citizens to universal coverage and to move freely among sick funds constituted a major policy breakthrough. However, successive amendments to the Law reflect continuing controversy over the amount of resources required to finance the basic basket. Despite the intention to base the system on decentralization and competition, successive amendments have placed more control over health system finance and sick fund management in the hands of the Ministries of Finance and Health. Updating the basic basket to take account of new technologies and drugs has raised unresolved dilemmas. In the Israeli case the dialectic of management vs. competition and of government vs. market, obscures fundamental issues related to the right of citizens to health services. The process set in motion by adoption of The National Health Insurance Law, 1994 calls on public managers and politicians to design institutions which can set priorities within a limited budget and effectively regulate the health care system.

Laura Levitt

Embracing, Ambiguities. EMBRACING, AMBIGIDTIES. by Laura Levitt Laura Levitt works as an Assistant Professor of Religion at Temple University, teaching also in the Women's Studies Program. Her writing attends to feminist theory and contemporary Jewish culture. She is the author of the forthcoming book Ambivalent Embraces: Jewish Feminist Identities as Home (New York: Routledge). 131 Perhaps "embrace" is an odd way to explain a methodological turn in one's work, but it captures well the way I work with texts. According to·The American Heritage Dictionary, to "embrace" means: To clasp or hold with arms, usually as an expression of affection.... To surround; enclose.... To twine around. . .. To include as part of something broader. . . . To take up willingly or eagerly. . . . An act of holding close with the arms, usually as an expression ofaffection; a hug.... An enclosure or encirclement. . . . Eager acceptance.1 Implicit in this definition is a desire, an attraction that calls for a response. An embrace is such a response. But in acting on such a desire, there is already a tension. Although an embrace can be a loving gesture, a tender act of affection, or protection, it has other connotations. To hold is also to assume control over another, even, and perhaps especially, the other who is the object of one's affection. In the American Heritage to "embrace" is to surround or enclose. One may hold on too tight, not allowing the other enough space to breathe and to grow on their own. When I think about being entwined I worry about the damage done by vines like kudzu that take over all that comes into their grasp. These vines kill the trees and bushes within their embrace. lThe American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition, (Boston, Houghton, Mimin Company, 1992). 132 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 Reading is about desire, and about different kinds of embraces. In reading a text, something brings you in, captures your imagination, hooks you. To embrace a text is to give yourself to these desires. This is a joy, but with dangers. One danger is holding on too tightly; the text loses its distinct character and becomes a reflection of the reader. The reader takes the text into herself. It becomes an extension of her. Another danger, an inversion of the first: the reader loses herself in the text. Whereas in the first danger, the text gets swallowed, here the reader's difference dissolves. She is reduced to another instance ofthe text's argument. In becoming the text, she loses her own voice by taking on that of the text. Both of these forms ofreading blur boundaries. Distinctions between reader and text are lost. This blurring of distinctions gets tricky when such reading is accompanied by, and part of, one's writing. In writing we stake out positions and this feels risky. Yet, what goes on in forms of writing-such as academic scholarship-that depend on citations of other writers' texts? Sometimes finding and staking out one's own positions happens in response, while reading texts with similar commitments. Their similarities offer a kind of (em)brace. They hold us up as we attempt to take a stand, especially for the first time. Citations of other people's writing can brace our own argument. They provide weight, authority, and precedent. But sometimes in this process, one of the writers gets lost. As readers who write about other people's writing, we can lose our own voices, holding on too tightly to the authority of other people's writing. And so in writing this essay, I find myself a bit wobbly. There are texts that I want to bring into this discussion, passages I want to cite as proof for what I am saying. For the moment, I will resist the temptation. I will let my words stand alone. I have been able to find my voice as a writer by reading and engaging with the texts of others. The text that speaks to me right now-pushing through the seams of my essay with such force that I can barely keep myself from quoting it at length-is Susan Rubin Suleiman's Risking Who...

Walid Raad

“Beyrouth, á la Folie” 1 Walid Ra’ad H ORS LA VIE by Maroun Baghdadi, the French official selection to the 1991 Cannes film festival, is about a Frenchman’s ordeal in Beirut as a “ Western hostage.” Inspired by the real-life account written by Roger Auque, Hors la Vie proposes a complex and original treatment of the episode in Franco-Lebanese relations referred to as “ PAffaire des Otages.” 2 This treatment clarifies some aspects of the complex nature of France’s historical relations with Lebanon, and chal­ lenges the hitherto narrowly geopolitical analyses of the Western hostage crisis.3In this essay, I will concentrate on the following questions: How does the film’s treatment of a French photojournalist’s “ ordeal” as a Western hostage contest France’s historical ties to Lebanon? And what is at stake in Baghdadi’s emphasis on reading the Western hostage crisis through specific representations of the Lebanese capital? Paris o f the Middle East—Hors la Vie’s opening sequence, praised by critics as presenting “the truth of this city [Beirut] and of this war [the Lebanese civil war],” offers two very familiar images.4The first is that of the photojournalist hero in the figure of Patrick Perrault, and the second is that of the Lebanon of the past 17 years, the Lebanon that has become synonymous with anarchy and destruction. I propose first that Hors la Vie relies on a popular conception of photojournalism in order to present Perrault as a politically and ideo­ logically neutral witness to the civil war, and subsequently to offer his account as the uncontested proof of the inability of the Lebanese and the Arabs to govern themselves. Both instances, I will argue, function, on the one hand, to displace French complicity in the abduction of French nationals in Beirut and the socio-political turmoil in Lebanon and, on the other, to justify France’s colonial intervention in Lebanon. Having qualified as “ the hot spot” in the world from the mid-seven­ ties on, Lebanon witnessed a deluge of Western correspondents seeking to provide news agencies and institutions with a bank of images and analyses that, it would seem, could just as easily have been borrowed from previous Third World “ hot spot” civil wars—Biafra, Benin, Chad, Bangladesh, or Katanga. However, Lebanon and the Lebanese civil war came to represent not just another Third World “ hot spot.” The naming Vol. XXXIV, No. 2 31 L ’E spr it C réa te u r and visualizing of the Lebanon of the past two decades betrayed an ambivalence that fluctuated between “ nostalgia and regret” and “’fear and loathing.” I can but marvel and be baffled by the avalanche of terms and images that have come to dominate the bank of descriptions and characterizations of Lebanese subjects and spaces, both in and outside of Lebanon.5Indeed, Beirut for some Western reporters was not only “ the most important story for quite a while,” 6but it was also “ exciting, it was intoxicating, it was journalistic paradise” (Gersh 9), “ the Casablanca, the center for the Middle East correspondents” (10). Steve Hagey of United Press International comments, “ The dirty little secret about Beirut is what fun it was. It was often scary and creepy, but it was absolutely hilarious fun. I can’t remember anything that was as much fun or as exhilarating” (Gersh 11). That correspondents should unabash­ edly extol the joys of working in war-torn terrain should not come as much of a surprise. One only needs to be reminded of the statements of such heralded war photojournalists as Don McCullin boasting that he “ used to be a war a year man, but now it is not enough. I need two a year.” 7 Such statements highlight a seldom publicly acknowledged aspect of photojournalism and photojournalists’ interests in war, an aspect that challenges the popular conception which holds that: (1) war photojournalists are neutral observers, faithful and uncorrupted wit­ nesses to the situations and events of the world; (2) that they are commit­ ted, humanly and morally, to the stories they cover and are willing to put themselves in situations of extreme danger in order to record and report on the oppression...