Parallel pseudospectral domain decomposition techniques

The influence of interface boundary conditions on the ability to parallelize pseudospectral multidomain algorithms is investigated. Using the properties of spectral expansions, a novel parallel two domain procedure is generalized to an arbitrary number of domains each of which can be solved on a separate processor. This interface boundary condition considerably simplifies influence matrix techniques

Corbyn to Zionists: Even if you've lived here all your life, you don't get the English

“The other evening we had a meeting in Parliament in which Manuel made an incredibly powerful and passionate and effective speech about the history of Palestine and the rights of the Palestinian people. This was dutifully recorded by the – the thankfully silent Zionists who were in the audience on that occasion and then came up and berated him afterwards for what he had said. They clearly have two problems: one is they don’t want to study history and secondly having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony either. Manuel does understand English irony and he uses it very very effectively.

The trial of Andrei Sawoniuk: Holocaust testimony under cross-examination

Andrei Sawoniuk, a member of a Nazi-organized police outfit, led an operation in a small town in Belorus in 1942-3 to kill the Jews who had evaded the main Nazi massacre. He was found guilty, not of genocide or crimes against humanity, but of murder, according to the War Crimes Act (1991) in a trial in London in 1999. This article explores the ways in which the testimonies elicited were transformed from memoirs of the Holocaust by the rules and norms of the trial process into legally admissible evidence by the processes of cross-examination and of selecting what evidence was suitable to be considered by the jury and what was not. The extraordinariness of the events with which the trial was concerned accentuated the differences between memoir and evidence. The key witnesses in the trial found ways to circumvent the rules of the court and to speak directly to the jury

The Meaning of David Miller

According to Bristol University Professor David Miller, ‘Britain is in the grip of an assault on its public sphere by the state of Israel and its advocates’. He believes ‘Bristol’s JSoc [Jewish Society. Ed], like all JSocs, operates under the auspices of the Union of Jewish Students (UJS), an Israel lobby group’ and is part of ‘a campaign of censorship and manufactured hysteria’ that is ‘directed by the State of Israel’. The campaign involves false claims of antisemitism designed ‘to give cover to Zionist activists’. His outburst has led to outraged calls for his removal but also fulsome messages of support from the academic left, in the form of open letters that do not simply argue Miller has free speech rights but which endorse his world view. David Hirsh, author of Contemporary Left Antisemitism, explores the wider meanings and deeper roots of the controversy

Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism: Cosmopolitan Reflections

This paper aims to disentangle the difficult relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. On one side, antisemitism appears as a pressing contemporary problem, intimately connected to an intensification of hostility to Israel. Opposing accounts downplay the fact of antisemitism and tend to treat the charge as an instrumental attempt to de-legitimize criticism of Israel. I address the central relationship both conceptually and through a number of empirical case studies which lie in the disputed territory between criticism and demonization. The paper focuses on current debates in the British public sphere and in particular on the campaign to boycott Israeli academia. Sociologically the paper seeks to develop a cosmopolitan framework to confront the methodological nationalism of both Zionism and anti-Zionism. It does not assume that exaggerated hostility to Israel is caused by underlying antisemitism but it explores the possibility that antisemitism may be an effect even of some antiracist forms of anti-Zionism

Solid-state NMR of Complex Nano- and Microcrystalline Materials

The work in this thesis demonstrates the utility and broad applicability of solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (SSNMR) spectroscopy to the study of complex materials containing mixtures of multiple structures and/or disparate local environments. Multinuclear SSNMR is particularly well-suited to the characterization of such systems, and can provide a wealth of information that cannot be obtained with other instrumental methods. Studies involving two classes of materials are detailed herein, namely rare-earth nanoparticles and active pharmaceutical ingredients

It was the new phenomenon of Israel-focused antisemitism that required the new definition of antisemitism. David Hirsh responds to a recent ‘call to reject’ the IHRA

40 UK-based Israeli academics, broadly from the anti-Zionist left, have issued a ‘call to reject’ the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism. David Hirsh, author of Contemporary Left Antisemitism, reviews and rejects their arguments here. He points out that the phenomenon of contemporary antisemitism came before, and required, the definition: ‘The IHRA highlights the possibility of antisemitism which is related to hostility to Israel because that is a significant part of the antisemitism to which actual Jewish people are subjected in the material world, as it exists’. Calls to reject the definition, he argues, are ‘not concerned with the constructive work of describing and opposing antisemitism,’ but only with ‘the purely negative work of rejecting efforts to do so’. Too often that negative work gives succor to some of the core ideas of contemporary antisemitism

Jews are asking for protection from their universities from antisemitism: David Feldman’s ‘All Lives Matter’ response is not helpful

This is a response to an article by David Feldman, ‘The government should not impose a faulty definition of antisemitism on universities’, published by The Guardian on 2 December 2020. David Hirsh is author of Contemporary Left Antisemitism (Routledge 2018). This opinion piece first appeared at the Engage blog and is reproduced here with thanks to David

How the word ‘Zionist’ functions in antisemitic vocabulary

This paper is a partial response to the intuitive claim that hostility to ‘Zionists’ is not hostility to Jews and so is not antisemitic. It examines ways in which the terms ‘Zionist’ and ‘Zionism’ themselves feature in antisemitic text and discourse. It argues that antisemitism should be understood as a complex phenomenon that is observable in the social world only with some difficulty, and that understanding should begin in a consideration of that observation data. This paper is critical of the opposite method, which sees the observable world only through pre-existing a priori concepts; an example of this is the construction of the concept of Zionism as essentially racist. This method treats observable phenomena, like racism, as inevitable manifestations of the pre-determined concept, Zionism. Zionism, and its relationship to racism, should be understood after observing their actuality in the world, not as a priori definitions which then structure what is observed. Much understanding of Zionism therefore adds a methodological double standard to the double standards of judgment which have already been well described. The paper draws on a number of case studies, that is actualizations of Zionism and antisemitism in the existing world: the opposition to David Unterhalter’s nomination to the Constitution Court in South Africa; the antizionist construction of Zionism as racism without the consent or the collaboration of people who self-identify as Zionists; statements circulating in academia which define the communities of scholarship and of morality in ways which exclude most Jews; the designation of Israel as apartheid. The paper concludes with a word on how antizionist nostalgia resists facing the material changes to Jewish life which were enforced during the 20th century