Stability of the Front under a Vlasov-Fokker-Planck Dynamics

We consider a kinetic model for a system of two species of particles interacting through a longrange repulsive potential and a reservoir at given temperature. The model is described by a set of two coupled Vlasov-Fokker-Plank equations. The important front solution, which represents the phase boundary, is a one-dimensional stationary solution on the real line with given asymptotic values at infinity. We prove the asymptotic stability of the front for small symmetric perturbations.Comment: 42 pages, latex2

The hero and his death. Hebrew theatre between national revival and voices of dissent

The first play staged after Israel’s Independence in May 1948, Moshe Shamir’s He walked in the fields, was regarded as a secret weapon in the ongoing war. Its hero, young kibbutznik and fighter Uri, was the embodiment of the New Israeli Jew, one of the founding myths of the nation. The birth of a Hebrew-language theatre few decades before had closely intertwined with the national and linguistic revival in the Land of Israel. Hebrew theatre and the Zionist enterprise were in a two-way relationship, advancing in parallel towards shared goals, with the political establishment supporting the arts and the arts reinforcing national ideology. The hero created and hitherto promoted on stage found his death right on the stage after the 1967 Six-Day War. In the euphoric and triumphant national mood following the recent victory, Hanoch Levin’s satirical cabarets abruptly introduced new narratives of the war, ridiculing the sacred national values and rejecting the rhetoric of sacrifice. The shows were met with hostility by many, yet the the heroic narrative had been called into question once and for all, freeing Hebrew theatre from its role in the national enterprise and paving the way to more mature drama

«A Little No. 5 didn't blow up that morning». Israeli fiction in the time of the Second Intifada

Two novels published in Hebrew during the Second Intifada and immediately after deal with the effects of the unprecedented string of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilian population. Human parts by Orly Castel-Bloom creates a doomsday scenario where terrorism is associated with fictive calamities, thus emphasizing both the absurdity of suicide bombings and the perception of terrorism as a natural phenomenon. Almost dead by Assaf Gavron offers a double first-person narrative from the point of view of a young Israeli man and a Palestinian boy, the latter being a terrorist. Both novels emphasize the normalisation of terrorism through the tone of the narrators, an unemotional narration of shocking events, yet in Gavron’s work the reader witnesses a development of characters following the knowledge of the enemy

Real and imaginary Yiddishland. A journey along the borders of a borderless nation

Yiddishland is a concept variously applied to manifestations of Yiddish culture, although its definition is problematic due to both translation issues and the deterritorialized nature of Yiddish cultural, linguistic, and national space. This paper will explore various instances and understandings of Yiddishland throughout history, including Yiddish nationalism, the revolutionary experience, and the Birobidzhan experiment. Re-enactments of Yiddishland following the sudden disappearance of the Ashkenazi homeland in Eastern Europe will be analysed, as well as depictions of Yiddishland in post-Holocaust fiction. The conclusion will emerge that despite its inherently diasporic nature, Yiddishland in all its instances appears as deeply rooted in a pre-war Eastern European landscape

Lexical wars: Hebrew euphemisms and dysphemisms in phrases relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict

Euphemisms are widely used in public discourse in order to obfuscate potentially unwelcome or unacceptable measures and policies, whereas dysphemisms (i.e. their unpleasant counterparts) offer a means of expressing strong feelings on disputed issues. Alternative phrasings denoting the same referent were observed for several topics in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict: depending on the choice between euphemism and dysphemism, they convey profoundly different connotations. This research was conducted through a content analysis of the four most widely circulated Israeli daily newspapers in Hebrew; three subjects – the territories, the separation barrier, and violent actions such as targeted killings and terror attacks – were taken into account in order to highlight the connection between linguistic choices and political stances