Living with Contradiction: Examining the Worldview of the Jewish Settlers in Hebron

In the West Bank city of Hebron the Israeli-Palestinian conflict still overshadows all activities. Despite the tension, friction, and violence that have become integral to the city’s everyday life, the Jewish Community of Hebron is expanding in numbers and geographical extent. Since the Six Day War, the community has attracted some of the most militant groups among the settlers in the West Bank, responsible for severe violence against Palestinians, including harassment, car bombs, and attempts to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque itself. Why do the members of the Jewish Community of Hebron wish to live and raise their children in such a violent setting? Using a series of interviews with members of the Jewish Community of Hebron and related settler communities in the period 2000–05, the article examines the ways the Jewish Community legitimizes its disputed presence. It reveals a deep religious belief, blended with intense distrust of and hatred toward the Palestinian population.

The Usual Suspects: Jewish Magical Realism, Trauma and the Holocaust

Jewish magical realism is often associated immediately with the historical trauma of the Holocaust. This article sets out to point to some of the problems and limitations such an interpretive approach may bring. After a reconsideration of the allegedly inherent subversive qualities of the mode and a discussion of its frequent association with trauma narratives, especially in the case of Jewish texts engaging with the Holocaust, the discussion will focus on two examples, Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2002). The aim throughout is to caution against rashly reproducing familiar interpretive maneuvers, which may be in need of reassessment in face of recent fictions like the ones under discussion in this article.

"Old proverbs in new skins – an fMRI study on defamiliarization"

We investigated how processing fluency and defamiliarization (the art of rendering familiar notions unfamiliar) contribute to the affective and esthetic processing of reading in an event-related functional magnetic-resonance-imaging experiment.We compared the neural correlates of processing (a) familiar German proverbs, (b) unfamiliar proverbs, (c) defamiliarized variations with altered content relative to the original proverb (proverb-variants), (d) defamiliarized versions with unexpected wording but the same content as the original proverb (proverb-substitutions), and (e) non-rhetorical sentences. Here, we demonstrate that defamiliarization is an effectiveway of guiding attention, but that the degree of affective involvement depends on the type of defamiliarization: enhanced activation in affect-related regions (orbito-frontal cortex, medPFC) was found only if defamiliarization altered the content of the original proverb. Defamiliarization on the level of wording was associated with attention processes and error monitoring. Although proverb-variants evoked activation in affect-related regions, familiar proverbs received the highest beauty ratings.