Research Bites

In this mini-series, Dr. Anna Gutgarts, Dr. Amit Gvaryahu and Dr. Idit Ben-Or will talk about how money makes the bonds that connect us to other people – and separates us as well. It's about how money constitutes what is public and what is private. 

In the third act of the mini-series about money, Dr. Amit Gvaryahu will talk about how paying money would constitute the body politic of the ancient Jewish people and the Jerusalem temple, year after year.

This mini series is about how money makes the bonds that connect us to other people – and separates us as well. It's about how money constitutes what is public and what is private.

In this mini-series, Dr. Anna Gutgarts, Dr. Amit Gvaryahu and Dr. Idit Ben-Or will talk to each other about the role of money in making the bonds that connect us to other people – and erecting the fences that separate us from them, too. 

This is the first act, in which Dr. Idit Ben-Or will talk about enterprising English individuals who made their own coins, and what exactly other people did with them, besides, of course, buying beer.

Some things seem like they just can't be coincidences. They seem to call for explanation. If you toss a coin many times and it repeatedly lands heads, that might be an example. Philosophers have used this idea to argue for some far-reaching conclusions, such as that there aren't really any numbers, that other universes exist and, more famously, that an all-powerful god exists. But what does it mean for something to call for explanation? And, are these arguments good ones?

In the 5th century C.E. the Greek philosopher Proclus wrote that “the same argument that keeps the whole world perfect posits evil among beings.”

In the eighteenth century, the satirist Bernard Mandeville would inspire the economist Adam Smith with his poem describing a city where “every Part was full of Vice, Yet the whole Mass a Paradise.” Connecting these two distant thinkers is the claim that evil somehow contributes to the good of the whole. How can such an articulation of good and evil make sense? And how can studying such historical arguments be relevant to understanding our situation today?

Only fifteen years after the Second World War some cities in western Germany started to contact former citizens living abroad who had been persecuted during National Socialism. A few of these cities also granted invitations to these former victims of National Socialism, inviting them to visit their former places of residency in Germany for one or two weeks. Some of these contacts and invitations started in the 1960s. Since the 1980s they took place all over Germany. Surprisingly, most of these contacts and invitations were not initiated by German politicians. Instead, former victims of the Nazi persecution within the cities as well as abroad played a major role in the initiation and the success of these initiatives. This apparent paradox is at the center of this episode about “invitations to the old hometown”.

Tens of thousands of Indonesian tourists come to Israel/Palestine every year. Some of them come in groups that consist only of Muslims, while others are made up by Christians. How are the experiences and itineraries of the two types of groups different, and how are they similar? And what can we learn from these about tourism, identity formation, Indonesia, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

We often think of religious membership as clear-cut and exclusive: A member of group A could not possibly also be a follower of group B. Conversely, and especially among scholars observing disempowered populations, religion is often seen as instrumental – a means for accumulating material, social, or symbolic capital. How do these two perspectives fit together in Kenya – a diverse and predominantly Christian country with high rates of material insecurities? How has the Christian revival of recent decades, associated with neo-Pentecostalism and with becoming born again, influenced patterns of mobility and conceptions of religious belonging among Kenyan Christians? And what are the broader social and political implications of such observations?

In this episode, Prof. Ruth HaCohen interviews Yonatan Gez, an anthropologist that specializes in Religion and society in East Africa.

We often imagine the Jewish family of past generations to have been a bastion of stability and affection in uncertain times. However, at least in eleventh and twelfth century Egypt, the Jewish family was fluid and unstable. Women occasionally married several times during their lives, husbands were often away for long periods of time, and polygamy was not uncommon. The documents of the Cairo Geniza, a rich trove of documents discovered in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo, reveal how women, with their limited resources, maneuvered in such unstable conditions. Of special interest are the more than 200 women's letters in the Geniza, giving us practically the only extended example of writing by Jewish women from the Middle Ages. How these letters were written? Do they reflect women's authentic voices? What did these women write about? Come and hear!   

In this episode, Dr. Miriam Goldstein interviews Oded Zinger, a historian that specializes in Jews in Islamic lands.

Language teachers make us believe that learning a language means learning a bunch of grammatical rules. But we all know that native speakers don't have the slightest problem bending those rules backwards to carve out nuances and to skillfully avoid tricky topics. In southern Northeast India, a number of related languages have come up with new forms replacing 'you' and 'me'. But how can you replace expressions as basic as 'you' and 'me'? And why would you?

In this episode, Dr. Daphna Oren-Magidor interviews Dr. Linda Konnerth, a linguistician that studies the  Trans-Himalayan languages of Northeast India.