PUBLICATIONS

Uttering a vow was an important and popular religious practice in ancient Judaism. It is mentioned frequently in biblical literature, and an entire rabbinic tractate, Nedarim , is devoted to this subject. In this article, I argue that starting from the Second Temple period, alongside the regular use of the vow, vows were also used as an aggressive binding mechanism in interpersonal situations. This practice became so popular that in certain contexts the vow became synonymous with the curse, as in a number of ossuaries in Jerusalem and in the later Aramaic incantation bowls. Moreover, this semantic expansion was not an isolated Jewish phenomenon but echoed both the use of the anathema in the Pauline epistles and contemporary Greco-Roman and Babylonian magical practices.

The special issue of Journal of Classical Sociology is an outcome of MBSF activities. Edited by Nitzan Rothem and Shlomo Fischer, this volume points to the significance of Arnold van Gennep's  Les rites de passage for contemporary social thought and research. MBSF articles include: Orit Gazit on migration and van Gennep's theory of the limit, Ruthie Abeliovich on Les rites de passage's contribution to the field of Performance Studies, Moshe Blidstein on the theoretical problem of purity, and Nitzan Rothem on Turner's and van Gennep's frameworks vis-à-vis contemporary warfare. Also in this volume: Ilana Silber on gift theory, Nicole Hochner on rhythm and social kinesis and Harvey Goldberg on early 20^th-century social thought.  

-hour struggles are a key element in the historical study of organized labor. Little attention has been paid, however, to long-term changes in the rationale underlying demands for work time reductions. Comparing arguments formulated by German workers around 1900 with arguments put forward half a century later, this article detects a fundamental narrowing of discourse in twentieth-century labor disputes. While trade unions once drew on a strikingly broad rationale when demanding work time reductions, the post-WW II decades witnessed a strategic departure from arguments that had long constituted the bedrock of shorter-hour rhetoric. Analyzing a leading theoretical labor organ as well as the members’ publication of West Germany’s largest single-industry union, the article reveals that work time reductions were increasingly framed as a powerful measure to improve workers’ health and safety and to increase leisure and family time. In so doing, West German trade unions abandoned a crucial link between work time reductions and the vision for a more democratic and participatory society. The article thus shows how strategic bargaining decisions helped undermine the rich legacy of the historical struggle for shorter hours.

In this article I analyze Van Gennep’s understanding of purity, impurity, and purification and its relationship with ancient Christian texts discussing these subjects. Through this comparison, I show how modern and ancient theories of ritual can illuminate each other, and more specifically, how purification was a problematic and ambivalent concept for both ancient Christian writers and for Van Gennep, making it a fruitful one for investigating the thought of both.