Jewish Dimensions in Modern Visual Culture: Antisemitism, Assimilation, Affirmation

Gavriel Rosenfeld is a contributing author, “Postwar Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust”, pp.285-302. Book description: A fascinating look at key aspects of visual culture in modern Jewish history In modern western history, the cultural and social developments of modernism have long been associated with Jews. Usually this has been a negative association: the perceived breakdown of traditional norms was blamed on Jewish influence in politics, society, and the arts. Throughout Europe, Jews were viewed as carriers of industrialized and cosmopolitan developments that threatened to undermine a cherished way of life. This anthology speaks to this issue through the lens of modernist visual production including paintings, posters, sculpture, and architecture. Essays by scholars from the U.S. and Israel confront the contradictory impulses that modernism’s interaction with Jewish culture provoked. Discussing how religion, class, race, and political alignments were used to provide attacks on modern art, the scholars also comment on visual responses to anti-semitism and the mainstream success of artists in the U.S. and Israel since World War II.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/history-books/1013/thumbnail.jp

Progressive pulmonary hypertension: Another criterion for expeditious renal transplantation

The aim of this retrospective study was to compare the prevalence of pulmonary hypertension in a cohort of patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) prior to and following renal transplantation and to identify the possible risk factors. Of the 425 renal transplantations performed between 2001 and 2007, Doppler echocardiographic findings were available in 124. The echocardiographic data, collected both pre- and post-transplant, included the pulmonary artery pressure (PAP), ejection fraction and left ventricular hypertrophy. The data analyzed included age, gender, hypertension, diabetes, smoking status, along with blood urea, creatinine, glomerular filtration rate, hemoglobin, hemodialysis duration, urine albumin, arterio-venous access and body mass index (BMI). Chi-square test was used for discrete variables and ANOVA was used for continuous variables. Of the patients studied, males comprised 72%; the mean age was 43.3 ± 13.02 years; 87% were hypertensive, 30% were diabetic and 4% were smokers. Statistical analysis revealed a significant reduction of the PAP, irrespective of its severity, following renal transplantation (P <0.05). The PAP had no significant correlation with any of the parameters analyzed, with the exception of BMI (P <0.05). Our study suggests that the PAP gets reduced in patients with ESRD after renal transplantation

Broad range of 2050 warming from an observationally constrained large climate model ensemble

Incomplete understanding of three aspects of the climate system-equilibrium climate sensitivity, rate of ocean heat uptake and historical aerosol forcing-and the physical processes underlying them lead to uncertainties in our assessment of the global-mean temperature evolution in the twenty-first century. Explorations of these uncertainties have so far relied on scaling approaches, large ensembles of simplified climate models, or small ensembles of complex coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models which under-represent uncertainties in key climate system properties derived from independent sources. Here we present results from a multi-thousand-member perturbed-physics ensemble of transient coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation model simulations. We find that model versions that reproduce observed surface temperature changes over the past 50 years show global-mean temperature increases of 1.4-3 K by 2050, relative to 1961-1990, under a mid-range forcing scenario. This range of warming is broadly consistent with the expert assessment provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report, but extends towards larger warming than observed in ensembles-of-opportunity typically used for climate impact assessments. From our simulations, we conclude that warming by the middle of the twenty-first century that is stronger than earlier estimates is consistent with recent observed temperature changes and a mid-range 'no mitigation' scenario for greenhouse-gas emissions