פרסומים

This chapter examines the career and political satire of comic duo Shimen Dzigan and Yisroel Shumacher. Their performances dealt with issues that reflected the major topics that preoccupied Jews of their era: the vagaries of making a living, the state of the economy, world and local politics, marriage, Jewish tradition, antisemitism, and current events. After they emigrated to Israel, their repertoire expanded to include such issues as the individual confronting the Israeli bureaucracy, the question of Yiddish versus Hebrew, the Jewish-Arab conflict, relations between diaspora Jewry (especially American Jews) and Israel, the memory of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust. The chapter analyzes two pairs of skits that focused on two prime ministers: David Ben-Gurion in “ Der nayer dybbek” (The New Dybbuk, 1957) and “In der yeshive fun plonsker rebbe” (In the Plonsker Rebbe’s Yeshiva; 1961); and Golda Meir in the monologue “Goldenyu” (1971) and the skit “Golde baym poypst” (Golda Visits the Pope; 1973).

BACKGROUND:

The life-review experience (LRE) is a most intriguing mental phenomenon that fascinated humans from time immemorial. In LRE one sees vividly a succession of one's own life-events. While reports of LRE are abundant in the medical, psychological and popular literature, not much is known about LRE's cognitive and psychological basis. Moreover, while LRE is known as part of the phenomenology of near-death experience, its manifestation in the general population and in other circumstances is still to be investigated.

METHODS:

In a first step we studied the phenomenology of LRE by means of in-depth qualitative interview of 7 people who underwent full LRE. In a second step we extracted the main characters of LRE, to develop a questionnaire and an LRE-score that best reflects LRE phenomenology. This questionnaire was then run on 264 participants of diverse ages and backgrounds, and the resulted score was further subjected to statistical analyses.

RESULTS:

Qualitative analysis showed the LRE to manifest several subtypes of characteristics in terms of order, continuity, the covered period, extension to the future, valence, emotions, and perspective taking. Quantitative results in the normal population showed normal distribution of the LRE-score over participants.

CONCLUSION:

Re-experiencing one's own life-events, so-called LRE, is a phenomenon with well-defined characteristics, and its subcomponents may be also evident in healthy people. This suggests that a representation of life-events as a continuum exists in the cognitive system, and maybe further expressed in extreme conditions of psychological and physiological stress.

While many countries define poverty in a relative manner, whereby poverty threshold is set at 40% to 60% of median income, some countries use absolute definitions, according to which being poor implies lacking the minimum amount of income for meeting some basic living conditions, e.g. proper nutrition, shelter, physical and mental health, access to clean water, and so on. Recently conservative politicians and parties have suggested that the relative definition of poverty should be abandoned and that absolute measures should be applied. Those promoting defining poverty in relative terms answer, quite rightly, that the most important reason for sticking to the relative measure is that it is more sensitive to inequalities in society. In that sense Living in dignity in the 21^st Century is timely and important as it relates to poverty and inequality as a single issue. Moreover, the authors also tie in the two with human rights as well. Therefore this book can be described as a non-neutral (although very objective) treatment of poverty, and should be of interest not only to students and researchers of poverty but also to NGOs and decision makers. It is written in a very accessible manner, and while the book is not jargon free, the authors explain all the concepts very clearly, using, among other things, comics.