End of organised atheism. The genealogy of the law on freedom of conscience and its conceptual effects in Russia

In the current climate of the perceived alliance between the Russian Orthodox Church and the state, atheist activists in Moscow share a sense of juridical marginality that they seek to mitigate through claims to equal rights between believers and atheists under the Russian law on freedom of conscience. In their demands for their constitutional rights, including the right to political critique, atheist activists come across as figures of dissent at risk of the state's persecution. Their experiences constitute a remarkable (and unexamined in anthropology) reversal of political and ideological primacy of state-sponsored atheism during the Soviet days. To illuminate the legal context of the atheists’ current predicament, the article traces an alternative genealogy of the Russian law on freedom of conscience from the inception of the Soviet state through the law's post-Soviet reforms. The article shows that the legal reforms have paved the way for practical changes to the privileged legal status of organized atheism and brought about implicit conceptual effects that sideline the Soviet meaning of freedom of conscience as freedom from religion and obscure historical references to conscience as an atheist tenet of Soviet ethics

Evolution of Thermal Response Properties in a Cold-Activated TRP Channel

Animals sense changes in ambient temperature irrespective of whether core body temperature is internally maintained (homeotherms) or subject to environmental variation (poikilotherms). Here we show that a cold-sensitive ion channel, TRPM8, displays dramatically different thermal activation ranges in frogs versus mammals or birds, consistent with variations in these species' cutaneous and core body temperatures. Thus, somatosensory receptors are not static through evolution, but show functional diversity reflecting the characteristics of an organism's ecological niche

Beyond the pale: the Jewish encounter with late imperial Russia

A surprising number of Jews lived, literally and figuratively, "beyond the Pale" of Jewish Settlement in tsarist Russia during the half-century before the Revolution of 1917. Thanks to the availability of long-closed Russian archives, along with a wide range of other sources, Benjamin Nathans reinterprets the history of the Russian-Jewish encounter. In the wake of Russia's "Great Reforms," Nathans writes, a policy of selective integration stimulated social and geographic mobility among the empire's Jews. The reaction that culminated, toward the turn of the century, in ethnic restrictions on admission to universities, the professions, and other institutions of civil society reflected broad anxieties that Russians were being placed at a disadvantage in their own empire. Nathans's conclusions about the effects of selective integration and the Russian-Jewish encounter during this formative period will be of great interest to all students of modern Jewish and modern Russian history

Imagining and living gender: Rabbis and Jewish women in fin de siecle Vienna, 1867-1914

This dissertation examines the lives of Jewish women living a traditional Jewish life within a culture that was exploring very non-traditional ideas about gender and sexuality. Fin de siecle Vienna was a place of remarkable transformation, in which new political movements and unprecedented cultural and intellectual explorations destabilized age-old norms and categories and questioned many long-standing assumptions about gender, women's roles, and sexuality. Unlike the image of fin de siecle Jewish Vienna most often invoked by scholars that centers on assimilated Jewish men who made significant contributions to avant-garde Viennese culture, this work presents an alternative picture of Jewish life in turn of the century Vienna: one of persisting traditional values and a deep attachment to the time-honored notions of female domesticity and separate spheres. Jewish women as well, through their involvement in women's benevolence, utilized these traditional ideas to blur the imagined boundary between public and private, expand their sphere of influence, and position themselves in the heart of Jewish communal politics. This work investigates the lives of fin de siecle Viennese Jewish women from two different angles. On the one hand, using rabbinic responsa, sermons, and educational curricula, it details the construction of gender among the rabbinic leadership and the institutions of the Jewish community as a means of uncovering the gender norms and sexual ideology of the Jewish community in which these women lived. On the other hand, it explores the actual lives of Jewish women, through examining their own writings and activities, which reveal the nature of their experiences and self-conceptions as Jews and as fin de siecle Viennese women.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 2008.School code: 0175

Conflicting diasporas, shifting centers: Migration and identity in a transnational Polish Jewish community, 1878--1952.

Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, millions of East European Jews made the decision to abandon their places of birth and migrate to larger cities throughout the world. This dissertation examines how mass migration prompted the development of new forms of Jewish communal organization and identification. Focusing on one city in Poland, Bialystok, this dissertation explores the strategies and organizations Jews developed as they tried to cope with the challenges of migrant life. When inhospitable conditions forced Jews to leave Bialystok in their search for better living conditions, they transplanted and reconfigured the institutions and strategies they had developed in Bialystok to facilitate their adaptation to their new homes. Through a cross cultural analysis of the institutions, philanthropic organizations and writings of Bialystoker Jewish emigres in the United States, Argentina, and Palestine, the three main places of Bialystoker emigre settlement, this dissertation highlights the shared and distinct forces that shaped East European Jewish migration, adaptation and acculturation at the turn of the century.As Bialystoker Jewish emigres settled throughout the world, they still maintained a close relationship with their former home. While both popular folklore and scholarship have portrayed Jewish life, culture and identity as primarily shaped by Jews' diasporic mentality rooted in their dispersal from the biblical land of Israel, this dissertation illustrates how the institutions, philanthropy and writings of the transnational Bialystoker Jewish community belie the standard, static view of the Jewish diaspora. These East European Jews saw themselves as part of a diaspora stemming from Eastern Europe and the created new strategies to remain connected with their former home. This examination highlights how in its contemporary context, and in the perspective of history, the generalized notion a Jewish identity informed by one dispersal rooted only in Zion overlooks many of the complexities which informed the geographies of East European Jewish identity in the age of mass migration.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 2002.School code: 0175

Genetically engineered mice with an additional class of cone photoreceptors: Implications for the evolution of color vision

Among eutherian mammals, only primates possess trichromatic color vision. In Old World primates, trichromacy was made possible by a visual pigment gene duplication. In most New World primates, trichromacy is based on polymorphic variation in a single X-linked gene that produces, by random X inactivation, a patchy mosaic of spectrally distinct cone photoreceptors in heterozygous females. In the present work, we have modeled the latter strategy in a nonprimate by replacing the X-linked mouse green pigment gene with one encoding the human red pigment. In the mouse retina, the human red pigment seems to function normally, and heterozygous female mice express the human red and mouse green pigments at levels that vary between animals. Multielectrode array recordings from heterozygous female retinas reveal significant variation in the chromatic sensitivities of retinal ganglion cells. The data are consistent with a model in which these retinal ganglion cells draw their inputs indiscriminately from a coarse-grained mosaic of red and green cones. These observations support the ideas that (i) chromatic signals could arise from stochastic variation in inputs drawn nonselectively from red and green cones and (ii) tissue mosaicism due to X chromosome inactivation could be one mechanism for driving the evolution of CNS diversity