Academic literature on the topic 'Naomi Shor'

This chapter explores characters and point of view in the book of Ruth as an example of narrative analysis. Both major (rounded or developed) and minor (flat) characters in the narrative are examined. The depiction of Israel’s God, also a character in the short story, is also briefly discussed. Three pairs of characters play off one another. They are Ruth and Orpah, Ruth and Naomi, Boaz and an unnamed kinsman. The relationships between the characters present aspects of an Israelite community ethos, the positive elements of which are commitment to the health and vitality of the family. The acti

Sesame Street has a global reach, with more than thirty co-productions that are viewed in over 150 countries. In recent years, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has provided funding to the New York-based Sesame Workshop to create international versions of Sesame Street. Many of these programs teach children to respect diversity and tolerate others, which some hope will ultimately help to build peace in conflict-affected societies. In fact, the U.S. government has funded local versions of the show in several countries enmeshed in conflict, including Afghanistan, Kos

This chapter examines Naomi Seidman's A Marriage Made in Heaven, the first book-length study of the importance of issues of gender to modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature and to cultural processes. The perspective of the study is comparative. As such it provides new insights into interrelations of gender and Jewish literature and expands our understanding of Jewish cultural development in important ways. Ties between language and gender in Jewish languages have already been noted by Jewish critics such as Shmuel Niger and Max Weinreich. Seidman's study, however, is the first to show how these connections corresponded to and reinforced the culture's social division along sexual lines. It demonstrates how the sexual linguistic system worked in Hebrew and Yiddish literature in the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, and emphasizes how specific intersections between linguistic and gender structures eventually connected language ideologies to ideals of modern nation-building in later decades of the twentieth century.

The majority of Naomi Kawase’s documentary films are based on her own life experiences, leading to conclusions that they are entirely self-reflexive. The author argues that ‘they instead show an alternative way of constructing relationships among people’. She also claims that indicate a possibility to ‘go beyond the binarism between ‘individual’ and ‘society’’ by creating an ‘intimate sphere’ which transcends the general idea of societal discourse.

This chapter examines another key element in Time and Tide’s rebranding as a more general-audience weekly review: the increase of male writers within its contributor base. Early accounts of the periodical suggest that this shift in the early 1930s represents a weakening of Time and Tide’s feminism. However, this chapter argues that the signatures of male contributors including George Bernard Shaw, St John Ervine and Wyndham Lewis were strategically deployed to advertise the paper beyond its core readership; it also considers the uses of anonymity for women who continued to occupy key editorial and staff positions. Discussing the contributions of Time and Tide’s youngest director, Winifred Holtby, as well as parodies by E. Delafield and short stories by Naomi Mitchison, the chapter explores the strategies by which Time and Tide sustained its commitment to female culture and through cross-gender collaboration created a ‘common platform’ for both thinking women and men.

In 1941, the writer Nogawa Takashi (1901-1944) was both nominated for the Akutagawa Prize in Japan and arrested in Manchukuo for his involvement in the Cooperative Movement (gassakusha undō) in rural north Manchuria. This dissonance between the literary recognition of Nogawa in the imperial metropole and his tragic fate—he died in prison three years after his arrest—marks him as an emblematic figure of the complexities of Manchukuo and the Japanese empire. Drawing on Naoki Sakai’s concept of heterolingual address, this chapter examines how Nogawa’s short story “The People Who Go to the Hamlet” (“Tonzu ni iku hitobito”) narratively stages ethnic interaction in the Cooperative Movement as a process of articulation between individuals in order to explore the (im)possibility of cross-class, cross-ethnic alliance. In contrast with the dominant state metaphor of “ethnic harmony” as a state of being between different peoples, Nogawa’s fiction both portrays and performs acts of “harmonization” and dissonance through grassroots organizing in a way that acknowledges the reality of class and ethnic difference, while also scrutinizing these differences and maintaining their possible permeability.

As contributors to Mass-Observation, Naomi Mitchison and Celia Fremlin emphasize the important, and often undervalued, role of qualitative analysis in the assessment of public opinion throughout their fiction. While the British Institute for Public Opinion often excluded women as both researchers and research subjects, Mass-Observation’s (M-O) structure was more open to input from women as both observers and subjects of observation. After she touted the political value of mathematics in her Greek-inspired short story collection The Delicate Fire, Mitchison uses her novel We Have Been Warned to imbue more skepticism about the egalitarian value of statistical analysis; the protagonist, Dione Galton, learns only too late that her own instincts about the rise of fascism in England, ventriloquized through the ghost Green Jean, were far more accurate than the polling cards she used to predict her husband’s eventual electoral defeat. Likewise, Celia Fremlin’s postwar novel, The Hours Before Dawn, validates the supposedly irrational fears of her protagonist, Louise Henderson, who must contend with patronizing experts in her effort to thwart the violent impulses of her new tenant Vera Brandon. Both novels, influenced by the authors’ experiences working for M-O, contend that quantitative analysis alone is insufficient to capture the complexity of women’s wartime experiences. This chapter argues that the contributions of M-O researchers and novelists like Fremlin and Mitchison present the possibility of a road untrodden in the history of social psychology research, as the fetishizaton of data over experience eventually drowned out the possibilities of more holistic and qualitative methods.

According to Imamura (1937: 123), the term tunami or tsunami is a combination of the Japanese word tu (meaning a port) and nami (a long wave), hence long wave in a harbour. He goes on to say that the meaning might also be defined as a seismic sea-wave since most tsunamis are produced by a sudden dip-slip motion along faults during major earthquakes. Other submarine or coastal phenomena, however, such as volcanic eruptions, landslides, and gas escapes, are also known to cause tsunamis. According to Van Dorn (1968), ‘tsunami’ is the Japanese name for the gravity wave system formed in the sea following any large-scale, short-duration disturbance of the free surface. Tsunamis fall under the general classification of long waves. The length of the waves is of the order of several tens or hundreds of kilometres and tsunamis usually consist of a series of waves that approach the coast with periods ranging from 5 to 90 minutes (Murty 1977). Some commonly used terms that describe tsunami wave propagation and inundation are illustrated in Figure 17.2. Because of the active lithospheric plate convergence, the Mediterranean area is geodynamically characterized by significant volcanism and high seismicity as discussed in Chapters 15 and 16 respectively. Furthermore, coastal and submarine landslides are quite frequent and this is partly in response to the steep terrain of much of the basin (Papadopoulos et al. 2007a). Tsunamis are among the most remarkable phenomena associated with earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and landslides in the Mediterranean basin. Until recently, however, it was widely believed that tsunamis either did not occur in the Mediterranean Sea, or they were so rare that they did not pose a threat to coastal communities. Catastrophic tsunamis are more frequent on Pacific Ocean coasts where both local and transoceanic tsunamis have been documented (Soloviev 1970). In contrast, large tsunami recurrence in the Mediterranean is of the order of several decades and the memory of tsunamis is short-lived. Most people are only aware of the extreme Late Bronge Age tsunami that has been linked to the powerful eruption of Thera volcano in the south Aegean Sea (Marinatos 1939; Chapter 15).