Are head coverings the new black?:Sheitels and the religious-secular culture wars in twenty-first-century America and its literature

In 1896, when Abraham Cahan’s collection of new Americans encouraged his greenhorn Gitl to remove her wig—which sits on her head as the metonymic symbol of religious ritual and thus Old World shame—readers of Yekl were offered an account of twentieth-century American progress, rendered necessary (if painful). Just as Yekl/Jake shaved his earlocks and beard, so Gitl must give up her Jewish wig and stand before the world in her ‘own hair’. But we might imagine the necessity of such a sacrifice has become obsolete in twenty-first-century America, particularly as we see that what the grandmother doffed, the granddaughter comes to don. Beginning with a revival of religious themes in the 1980s, heralded by Cynthia Ozick, Jewish American literature is now rich with narratives centered on secular characters becoming Orthodox; on the inner-worlds of insular Orthodox communities; and on reimagining the potential of Orthodoxy within the context of Americanness. Interestingly, most of these narratives have been written by women, and it is the experiences of Jewish American women–the latter-day Gitls–that are foregrounded. Despite the proliferation of such narratives, it is important to recognize that the choice to embrace religion (made visible through wigs and shpitzels, turbans and kerchiefs) continues to be fraught. The increasingly popular ‘off-the-derech’, or ex-Orthodox, memoirs of the twenty-first century identify the Jewish sheitel, like the Muslim veil, as a symbol of oppression, and the act of uncovering (like unveiling) a tale of feminist triumph. Still, looking at a range of fiction, including Allegra Goodman’s Kaaterskill Falls (1998), Nathan Englander’s short story ‘The Wig’ (2000), and Naomi Ragen’s satire, The Saturday Wife (2007), we find the multivalent appearance and complexity of Jewish American women’s head coverings in recent literature suggest a different and varied signification, and a more nuanced negotiation between religious and national values. This is significant because it is allows readers to see how seemingly comprehensive religious communities, which could be marked as a form of ‘counter-cosmopolitanism’ in the words of Kwame Anthony Appiah, actually engage with the broader spectrum of American culture, which in turn is able to both accommodate the communities and alter itself through the accommodation.

Alcoholic Pancreatitis: Pathogenesis, Incidence and Treatment with Special Reference to the Associated Pain

Alcoholic pancreatitis continues to stir up controversy. One of the most debated points is whether from onset it is a chronic disease or whether it progresses to a chronic form after repeated episodes of acute pancreatitis. Histological studies on patients with alcoholic pancreatitis have shown that the disease is chronic from onset and that alcoholic acute pancreatitis occurs in a pancreas already damaged by chronic lesions. Genetic factors may also play a role in the pathogenesis of alcoholic disease. The incidence of chronic alcoholic pancreatitis seems to have decreased in the last twenty years. Finally, recent therapeutic studies which have shown medical or surgical approaches capable of reducing the pain episodes in chronic pancreatitis patients will be described

Animal People: Freaks, Elitists, Fanatics, and Haters in U.S. Discourses about Veganism (1995-2019)

This dissertation emerged out of my efforts to understand what keeps animal lovers or animal people from identifying as vegans. Animal People traces anti-vegan discourses, alongside problematic white vegan discourses, in the U.S. over the last quarter century in journalistic, film, social media, legal, and literary texts to tell the story of how an eating and living practice that seeks to reduce harm has become a subject of cultural ridicule. If one-third of Americans think that other animals should be protected from exploitation, then why are only three to six percent of Americans vegan? (Gallup 2015). Animal People explores this aporetic discrepancy by analyzing discourses that negatively construct vegans and veganism(s) as sentimental, militant, elitist, anti-American, fanatical, sanctimonious, and misanthropic. Each chapter also addresses problems in mainstream veganism as a counter-discourse, such as white privilege, single-issue optics, consumerism, and perfectionism. Animal People looks at the way many vegans and vegan organizations fail to address issues of race and class in access to non-animal based foods and in animal rights more generally. Eating choices are complicated and contingent: they straddle the borders between the conscious and the unconscious, the individual and the collective, the personal and the political. These choices, or lack thereof, are distributed unevenly along racial and class lines. Vast differences exist across communities and regions in terms of what foods are accessible. Advertising by the government-subsidized animal-abusing industries and the artificially low prices of many foods made from and by animal bodies compound the confusion. The fact that other animals exist both as sentient beings and as food makes it uniquely difficult to discuss, let alone legislate, justice for them. Veganism should be a bridge to critical re-evaluations of our exploitative relations and the way these relations negatively affect the wellbeing of others and the planet––and not an obstacle to such re-evaluations, which are increasingly urgent, according to every recent major scientific study about the effects of animal-abusing industries on climate change. Animal People tries to clear some of these obstructions to reveal ideological biases, larger philosophical, epistemological issues, and the way vegans sometimes perpetuate the stigmas. Animal People proposes that these stigmas do a great disservice to other animals; the animal liberation movement; marginalized communities that have disproportionate numbers of animal-based fast food restaurants and lack access to fresh fruits and vegetables and bear the brunt of the environmental degradation caused by factory farms and slaughterhouses; and the planet at large, by keeping a large number of non-vegan animal people from taking animals off of their plates. People are far less likely to go against social norms in ways that threaten their social relationships to adopt an undesirable and derided identity position

Sur des solutions de l'equation de sin-Gordon

SIGLECNRS T 57039 / INIST-CNRS - Institut de l'Information Scientifique et TechniqueFRFranc