| Vol.
7 No. 5
April/May 2005
Special Issue
Re-Placing
Cultures
A dialogue among disciplines
On
transculture
Mikhail
Epstein
I
think the boogieman of AIDS has more resonance in the United States
than it might have in a community in Africa, where people are accommodating
to it.
Deborah
McFarland, Associate Professor of International Health
Increasingly,
our law is so tied up with the religiosity of this society that
it’s not just repositioning law, it’s
repositioning the role of religion in American culture.
Martha L.A. Fineman, Robert W. Woodruff Professor
of Law
Re-placing
National Culture
Globalization and collective identity in the Netherlands
Frank
Lechner, Associate Professor of Sociology
Digital
Nationalism
Re-placing
place in the Indian diaspora
Deepika
Bahri, Associate Professor of English
Further
reading
God’s
Chosen Tongues
Hebrew and Arabic in the Qur’an
Devin
J. Stewart, Associate Professor of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies
Further
reading
Endnotes
Return
to Contents
|
The
Superpowers of the Middle East
The gross domestic product of all the Arab states combined—all
300 million people—is less than that of Spain, which has 40
million people. It should not be surprising, then, that the Arabs
have less of a say in what happens in the Middle East in comparison
to wealthier and stronger states, like Israel, Turkey, and Iran.
The United States gave the impression when it occupied Iraq that
it was at the height of its regional power. That image has dissipated,
and the U.S. looks less omnipotent today than it did a year or so
ago. But that could not be said of Iran, Turkey, or Israel. The
difference between these three regional players and the U.S. is
that they are not going anywhere. The United States will one day
leave Iraq; Turkey and Iran, the neighbors of Iraq, are not going
anywhere. They will have a greater say in how Iraq turns out than
all the Arab states combined, and they will have a greater say than
the United States. They are regional superpowers.
—Asher Susser, Senior Research Fellow, Dayan Centre for
Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University, from his talk “Headings
for the Arab World and Israel: Continuity and Change in the Twenty-First
Century,” co-sponsored by the Middle East Research Program,
Claus M. Halle Institute for Global Learning, Institute for Jewish
Studies, Institute for the Study of Modern Israel, Office of International
Affairs, and Department of Political Science, on February 14, 2005
Russian Jews in Germany
[In the past fifteen years, an estimated 180,000 to 200,000 Russian
Jews have emigrated to Germany. The Jewish population of Germany
before 1991 had been about 30,000.] For a few visionary community
leaders, the chances offered by the prospect of Russian Jewish immigration
[after the dissolution of the Soviet Union] were clear. It would
give the small German-Jewish community a chance for greater numbers
to achieve a permanence that no one had dared to dream was possible.
An argument often employed by Holocaust survivors was that the reestablishment
of a large Jewish community in Germany would be ultimate victory
over Hitler. Even with these widespread attitudes in the Jewish
world about Jewish life in Germany, it may seem odd that tens of
thousands of Jews in Russia were now lining up to move to Germany.
Their calculations, however, were on somewhat different levels.
Many of them were not directly affected by the Holocaust, and they
shared Russian pride at its victory over the Nazis. They identified
less with the victims than with the victors.
—Deidre Berger, Managing Director of the American Jewish
Committee Berlin Office, and formerly a foreign correspondent for
National Public Radio, speaking on “The Future of Jewish Life
in Germany,” sponsored by the Halle Distinguished Fellow Program,
February 8, 2005
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