25 research outputs found
'The Heartache of Two Homelands...': Ideological and Emotional Perspectives on Hebrew Transnational Writing
The work of immigrant writers, whose professional identity is built around language, can deepen understandings of sociolinguistic and psychological issues, including aspects of the immigration experience; the position of language in the ideological and emotional value systems, and the significance of language for individual development. This paper deals with a number of translingual writers who immigrated to Israel prior to its establishment as an independent state and who chose Hebrew as their language. The paper focuses on three figuresâAlexander Penn, Leah Goldberg, and Aharon Appelfeldâwho came from different countries and different language backgrounds but have in common that Hebrew was not their first language.
Two issues are discussed in depth in this article. One is the unique position of Hebrew, a language that retains high symbolic significance given its association with holy texts and the ideological role its revival played in the Zionist enterprise. Its association with identity issues or childhood memories may thus be somewhat different from that of other second languages. The other issue is the psychological motivations that affected these writersâ language shift. Despite the broad consensus on this shift as having been inspired by ideological/Zionist motives, my claim is that their motives may have been broader. Ideologies may at times serve as camouflageâused either by wider societyâs collective interest in promoting its ethos, or by the individuals themselves, who prefer to be viewed as part of the collective and lean on its ideology to serve their own psychological needs
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'The Heartache of Two Homelands...': Ideological and Emotional Perspectives on Hebrew Transnational Writing
The work of immigrant writers, whose professional identity is built around language, can deepen understandings of sociolinguistic and psychological issues, including aspects of the immigration experience; the position of language in the ideological and emotional value systems, and the significance of language for individual development. This paper deals with a number of translingual writers who immigrated to Israel prior to its establishment as an independent state and who chose Hebrew as their language. The paper focuses on three figuresâAlexander Penn, Leah Goldberg, and Aharon Appelfeldâwho came from different countries and different language backgrounds but have in common that Hebrew was not their first language.Two issues are discussed in depth in this article. One is the unique position of Hebrew, a language that retains high symbolic significance given its association with holy texts and the ideological role its revival played in the Zionist enterprise. Its association with identity issues or childhood memories may thus be somewhat different from that of other second languages. The other issue is the psychological motivations that affected these writersâ language shift. Despite the broad consensus on this shift as having been inspired by ideological/Zionist motives, my claim is that their motives may have been broader. Ideologies may at times serve as camouflageâused either by wider societyâs collective interest in promoting its ethos, or by the individuals themselves, who prefer to be viewed as part of the collective and lean on its ideology to serve their own psychological needs.
Regulatory chromatin landscape in Arabidopsis thaliana roots uncovered by coupling INTACT and ATAC-seq
Abstract Background There is a growing interest in the role of chromatin in acquiring and maintaining cell identity. Despite the ever-growing availability of genome-wide gene expression data, understanding how transcription programs are established and regulated to define cell identity remains a puzzle. An important mechanism of gene regulation is the binding of transcription factors (TFs) to specific DNA sequence motifs across the genome. However, these sequences are hindered by the packaging of DNA to chromatin. Thus, the accessibility of these loci for TF binding is highly regulated and determines where and when TFs bind. We present a workflow for measuring chromatin accessibility in Arabidopsis thaliana and define organ-specific regulatory sites and binding motifs of TFs at these sites. Results We coupled the recently described isolation of nuclei tagged in specific cell types (INTACT) and assay for transposase-accessible chromatin with high-throughput sequencing (ATAC-seq) as a genome-wide strategy to uncover accessible regulatory sites in Arabidopsis based on their accessibility to nuclease digestion. By applying this pipeline in Arabidopsis roots, we revealed 41,419 accessible sites, of which approximately half are found in gene promoters and contain the H3K4me3 active histone mark. The root-unique accessible sites from this group are enriched for root processes. Interestingly, most of the root-unique accessible sites are found in nongenic regions but are correlated with root-specific expression of distant genes. Importantly, these gene-distant sites are enriched for binding motifs of TFs important for root development as well as motifs for TFs that may play a role as novel transcriptional regulators in roots, suggesting that these accessible loci are functional novel gene-distant regulatory elements. Conclusions By coupling INTACT with ATAC-seq methods, we present a feasible pipeline to profile accessible chromatin in plants. We also introduce a rapid measure of the experiment quality. We find that chromatin accessibility at promoter regions is strongly associated with transcription and active histone marks. However, root-specific chromatin accessibility is primarily found at intergenic regions, suggesting their predominance in defining organ identity possibly via long-range chromatin interactions. This workflow can be rapidly applied to study the regulatory landscape in other cell types, plant species and conditions