274 research outputs found
The Weak Scale from BBN
The measured values of the weak scale, , and the first generation masses,
, are simultaneously explained in the multiverse, with all these
parameters scanning independently. At the same time, several remarkable
coincidences are understood. Small variations in these parameters away from
their measured values lead to the instability of hydrogen, the instability of
heavy nuclei, and either a hydrogen or a helium dominated universe from Big
Bang Nucleosynthesis. In the 4d parameter space of ,
catastrophic boundaries are reached by separately increasing each parameter
above its measured value by a factor of , respectively.
The fine-tuning problem of the weak scale in the Standard Model is solved: as
is increased beyond the observed value, it is impossible to maintain a
significant cosmological hydrogen abundance for any values of that
yield both hydrogen and heavy nuclei stability.
For very large values of a new regime is entered where weak interactions
freeze out before the QCD phase transition. The helium abundance becomes
independent of and is determined by the cosmic baryon and lepton
asymmetries. To maintain our explanation of from the anthropic cost of
helium dominance then requires universes with such large to be rare in the
multiverse. Implications of this are explored, including the possibility that
new physics below 10 TeV cuts off the fine-tuning in .Comment: 26 pages plus appendix, 13 figure
Cecil Roth, Historian of Italian Jewry: A Reassessment
I have a confession to make. I have long been a fan of Cecil Roth (1899-1970) and his histories of Italian Jewry. My copy of Roth\u27s The Jews in the Renaissance, published in 1959, was one of the first books in Jewish history I acquired as a youth, years before I became interested in the profession of history. This relatively worn copy still adorns my shelf and dates quite accurately my fascination with this engaging popularizer of the Jewish historical experience from my high school years
Review of Adam Sutcliffe, \u3cem\u3eJudaism and Enlightenment\u3c/em\u3e
Adam Sutcliffe\u27s book represents an important new synthesis, offering novel and insightful readings of both familiar and less-known thinkers. Since no one before him has attempted to examine so broadly European intellectual life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from the perspective of attitudes toward Jews and Judaism, Sutcliffe\u27s monograph represents a major contribution to Jewish and Enlightenment studies alike. What is especially remarkable is the range of erudition and mastery of sources on the part of a youthful author of a first book. Based on his doctoral dissertation written at University College London, the work shows immense learning, elegant prose, and a nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the Enlightenment project as well as the place of Judaism in the consciousness of its primary and less primary exponents
Jewish Medicine and Science
It is difficult to speak about Jewish involvement in the medicine and science during the Renaissance and beyond without reference to Jewish traditions of medical and scientific activity in the ancient and medieval periods. Perceiving themselves as proud heirs of such medieval luminaries as the physician Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), the astrologer Abraham ibn Ezra (1089-1164), and the astronomer Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides; 1288-1344), as well as the biblical Abraham, Solomon, and the ancient rabbis, Jewish thinkers living in early modern Europe continued to believe that the study of nature was a supreme religious ideal and that the roots of magic and medicine, astrology and astronomy, were ultimately located in ancient Jewish sources
Three Reviewers and the Academic Style of the \u3cem\u3eJewish Quarterly Review\u3c/em\u3e at Midcentury
A hundred years is a remarkable lifetime for any journal, especially a scholarly one in English focusing exclusively on Jewish civilization. During this impressive time span a dramatic and radical shift in the character and place of academic Jewish studies in the United States and throughout the world took place. JQR is surely a primary historical source for charting the history of higher Jewish learning in North America and its ultimate entrance and integration into the university
Towards a Preliminary Portrait of an Evangelical Missionary to the Jews: The Many Faces of Alexander McCaul (1799-1863)
We live in a time of prolific scholarly output on the history of Jews and Judaism where most inhibitions about what are appropriate subjects for study and what are not have disappeared. This is especially apparent with regard to the study of converts who opted to leave the Jewish faith and community both in the pre-modern and modern eras. Labelled disparagingly in the Jewish tradition as meshumadim (apostates), many earlier Jewish scholars treated them in a negative light or generally ignored them as not properly belonging any longer to the community and its historical legacy. When they were mentioned in historical accounts, they were often seen as self-hating Jews who had become adversaries of their former co-religionists or simply as dishonorable individuals who were notorious in attempting to escape the burden of their Jewish particularity. This situation has radically changed in recent years with an outpouring of new studies on converts in a variety of times and places, culminating perhaps in the most recent synthesis of Todd Endelman, one of the pioneers in the study of converts in the modern era.
Review of John M. Efron, \u3cem\u3eMedicine and the German Jews: A History\u3c/em\u3e
John Efron\u27s new book pursues two scholarly trajectories simultaneously. On the one hand, it offers a history of Jewish physicians and medical practice in Germany from the Middle Ages until the Holocaust period. On the other hand, it examines the uses of medicine and medical discourse to bolster or undermine political, racial, and national agendas, both Jewish and antisemitic, in the modern era. Although Efron seeks to link these two subjects as one, they do not mesh as organically as he intends. Moreover, while the second trajectory is generally well-conceived and well-argued, making a genuine contribution to modern Jewish cultural history, the first is more sketchy and uneven, and is clearly less accomplished
Review of Robert Bonfil, \u3cem\u3eThe Rabbinate in Renaissance Italy\u3c/em\u3e
At least since the publication of Shlomo Simonsohn\u27s comprehensive study of Mantuan Jewry, Italian Jewish history has emerged as a significant scholarly field for a growing number of researchers in Israel and abroad. Their numerous publications have considerably supplemented and refined the earlier attempts by Cecil Roth, Moses Avigdor Shulvass, Israel Zinberg and Attlilio Milano to chart the course of Italian Jewish history in the Renaissance period and before. They have also revealed all too glaringly the inadequacies of the edifice the earlier researchers had constructed. When Shulvass and Roth, in particular, wrote their popular surveys of Jewish life in the Renaissance, neither had sufficiently utilized the voluminous archival and manuscript resources now more readily available some twenty years later; nor did either of their works deeply penetrate the larger Christian cultural and social context of Jewish life on Italian soil
The Cultural Significance of the Ghetto in Jewish History
Surely one way of understanding the title of our distinguished conference, From Ghetto to Emancipation, is the conventional way.2 One might assume that the direction of our deliberations should lead from an inherently bad condition, designated by the term ghetto, to a good one, leading to a desirable state of freedom. This trajectory follows that of most standard accounts of the Jewish experience: Jews who had lived a ghettotized existence were finally emancipated in the modern era, and despite the negative consequences of their liberation and integration within Western secular cultures—virulent anti-Semitism and genocide—their emancipated state was surely a boon in comparison with the hermetically sealed and alienated existence of their preliberated state. And indeed, for most modern Jews, the term ghetto is laden with similar negative connotations. Such expressions as the age of the ghetto, ghetto mentality, ghetto Jew, out of the ghetto, all imply a highly negative existence, a throwback to an era when Jews were legally and socially restricted and when their culture revealed narrow and pedestrian features, clearly the result of their sequestration. The term ghetto has now assumed an even more general designation for neighborhoods densely inhabited by members of minority groups, such as African-Americans or Native Americans, who are forced to live in miserable and deprived conditions because of socioeconomic restraints as well as legal ones.
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