The article traces the production and reception of Love as Strong as Death, a dramatization of the Song of Songs that was performed in Mandatory Palestine in the years 1940–42 by a group of Yemenite Jewish actors. We argue that the tensions between the actors’ amateur status and their image as embodying a long-lost Biblical heritage were emblematic of the inherent contradictions within the hegemonic Ashkenazi Zionist discourse and the Orientalist perception of the role of Yemenite Jews in it. By exploring both Yemenite and Ashkenazi voices in and around the production, we analyse how the stage, the theatre hall and the written press all served as contested sites regarding the participation of non-European Jews in Hebrew theatre and culture. In the paper's conclusion, we demonstrate how Love as Strong as Death anticipated later debates in Israeli theatre about the place of Mizrahi Jews on stage and in the auditorium.

In this note, we prove a formula for the cancellation exponent $k_{v,n}$ between division polynomials $\psi _n$ and $\phi _n$ associated with a sequence $\{nP\}_{n\in \mathbb {N}}$ of points on an elliptic curve $E$ defined over a discrete valuation field $K$. The formula greatly generalizes the previously known special cases and treats also the case of non-standard Kodaira types for non-perfect residue fields.

Nestled at the eastern corner of the Mediterranean, the island of Cyprus is a popular locale for archaeological research by resident and foreigner alike despite its modest size. The roots of this popularity run deep; Cyprus can boast for capturing people's attention with its antiquities since the start of the nineteenth century (Clarke 1813, pp.165–97). Authored by veterans of Cypriot archaeology, each of these three books is a valuable addition to the ever-expanding scholarship that is the legacy of this colourful history of aesthetic/financial curiosity transformed into meticulous research. Additionally, these three publications stand out among the avalanche of archaeological research on Cyprus due to their shared links.

Research experience is often important for academic and career development. This paper describes the implementation and impact of a training program for temporary research assistants (RAs) at an academic medical center. The program includes a 9-month didactic lecture series covering research and professional development skills, a Quality Improvement project focused on improving research processes, and manuscript writing. Overall, the program goals of increasing confidence, self-efficacy, job satisfaction, and well-being, as well as providing an opportunity for career exploration, were met. Thus, this program has the potential to support temporary RAs and enhance their early research experiences.

Fifty years ago, the infamous bank robbery and ensuing hostage crisis that took place in a Stockholm bank gave rise to the so-called ‘Stockholm syndrome’. Though never recognized as a valid medical diagnosis, the (allegedly) pathological relationship between kidnapper and hostage has become an omnipresent media phenomenon that inspires movies and television series to this day. However, this forced bond was not always seen as problematic. The years between 1860 and 1910 witnessed the rise of kidnappings in the Mediterranean world (Southern Italy, Greece, the Ottoman Balkan region, and Morocco) involving English, American, and European hostages. Today, we know about these incidents from autobiographical narratives by the former captives. They painted a surprisingly favourable picture of their captors – and found enthusiastic audiences for their stories. Looking at the interplay of feelings, coercion, and empowerment, the article opens up a new perspective on the history of emotions that brings both victims and perpetrators into the picture.

In this paper, we review some recent results on nonlocal interaction problems. The focus is on interaction kernels that are anisotropic variants of the classical Coulomb kernel. In other words, while preserving the same singularity at zero of the Coulomb kernel, they present preferred directions of interaction. For kernels of this kind and general confinement we will prove existence and uniqueness of minimizers of the corresponding energy. In the case of a quadratic confinement we will review a recent result by Carrillo and Shu about the explicit characterization of minimizers, and present a new proof, which has the advantage of being extendable to higher dimensions. In light of this result, we will re-examine some previous works motivated by applications to dislocation theory in materials science. Finally, we will discuss some related results and open questions.

This article explores the intricate relationship between transnational solidarity and citizenship in socialist Tanzania, renowned for its extensive and enduring support of liberation movements from the 1960s to the 1980s. Termed “frontline citizenship”, this unique political subjectivity, evolving in the 1960s, was shaped not only by Tanzania's geopolitical location, nationalist struggles against colonialism, and government efforts to instil attitudes of anti-colonial solidarity in the population, but also by initiatives of hosted liberation movements, Tanzanians’ embrace of global anti-imperialist currents from Cuba to China and Vietnam, and critiques of politicians in exile. The article highlights the gendered and generational aspects of the solidarity regime, scrutinizes contested material solidarities, and discusses the partial decline of the frontline citizenship discourse. It does so by investigating the role of media, the impact of the paramilitary National Service, and the dynamics of material support practices. Drawing on multi-archival research, interviews, memoirs, and secondary literature, with a focus on South Africa's African National Congress (ANC), the analysis challenges conventional views of state-sponsored solidarity, emphasizing the dynamic interplay between state initiatives and grassroots participation as well as “external” and “internal” actors. Conceiving socialist Tanzania's solidarity regime in this way contributes to a broader understanding of the intersection between anti-imperialist world-making, nationalist state-building, and everyday performances of citizenship.

Trust is often the premier concern highlighted in relation to the formation of mercantile business partnerships, the role of culture, family, and religion at the forefront. This is especially the case for expatriate communities. However, the Danish merchants of nineteenth century Newcastle-upon-Tyne, as especially demonstrated in the diaries of one of their number, Richard Steenberg, did not conform to this trend. This article investigates Steenberg and two other leading merchants, the Borries cousins, as well as some of their former employees, who typify trends within a wider body of 126 businessmen. It will show that they strategically chose partners who had complimentary supplies of financial, human, and social capital to improve the position of a shared firm, and these supplies formed the key criteria in forming or entering these businesses. The role of trust is not denied. Rather, this article seeks to direct debate toward the importance of financial, human, and social capital in commercial partnership formation in relation to trust.

Despite increasing attention to the importance of gender as an analytic to understanding neoliberal welfare reform, little attention has been paid to how motherhood operates to structure experiences. We propose the term ‘maternal activation’ to describe how homeless mothers as a group are subject to, and yet repurpose and resist, specific forms of social control characterising neoliberal paternalistic welfare structures. Drawing on a Critical Discourse Analysis of semi-structured interviews with fifty-four frontline homelessness workers, and eighteen homeless mothers, within the newly conditionalised Welsh homelessness system, we argue that homeless mothers have distinct experiences of neoliberal welfare governance. They navigate contradictory demands of attentive caregiving and economically engaged citizenship, amid devaluation of care created by a neoliberal emphasis on entrepreneurialism. However, performing intense motherhood offers strategic advantage for homeless mothers by enabling them to be read as ‘legible’. This highlights the utility of motherhood as a framework to understand welfare citizenship.

Recent research has shown the potential of speleothem δ13C to record a range of environmental processes. Here, we report on 230Th-dated stalagmite δ13C records for southwest Sulawesi, Indonesia, over the last 40,000 yr to investigate the relationship between tropical vegetation productivity and atmospheric methane concentrations. We demonstrate that the Sulawesi stalagmite δ13C record is driven by changes in vegetation productivity and soil respiration and explore the link between soil respiration and tropical methane emissions using HadCM3 and the Sheffield Dynamic Global Vegetation Model. The model indicates that changes in soil respiration are primarily driven by changes in temperature and CO2, in line with our interpretation of stalagmite δ13C. In turn, modelled methane emissions are driven by soil respiration, providing a mechanism that links methane to stalagmite δ13C. This relationship is particularly strong during the last glaciation, indicating a key role for the tropics in controlling atmospheric methane when emissions from high-latitude boreal wetlands were suppressed. With further investigation, the link between δ13C in stalagmites and tropical methane could provide a low-latitude proxy complementary to polar ice core records to improve our understanding of the glacial–interglacial methane budget.

The ∼407-myr-old Rhynie chert of Scotland contains exquisite body fossils of land plants, animals and microorganisms, which provide our earliest reasonably complete snapshot of a Phanerozoic terrestrial ecosystem. These fossils have been instrumental to our understanding of the ‘greening of the land’, a major transition in the history of the Earth–life system. Among the primary producers preserved in the chert are cyanobacteria, of which only a fraction have been formally described. Here, we report the occurrence of the colony-forming cyanobacterium Eoentophysalis in the Rhynie chert. To our knowledge, this represents the first bona fide record of Entophysalidaceae from any post-Cambrian fossil assemblage or any non-marine fossil assemblage of any age. The Rhynie Eoentophysalis appears remarkably similar in appearance both to modern marine and freshwater Entophysalis ssp. and to Eoentophysalis belcherensis, a shallow-marine fossil from the ∼2 Ga Belcher Group of Canada that is perhaps the oldest convincing cyanobacterium on record. Darkened cell envelopes in the Rhynie Eoentophysalis correspond well with both E. belcherensis and modern Entophysalis, whose cell envelopes often contain the photoprotective brown pigment scytonemin. The occurrence of Eoentophysalis in the Rhynie chert supports previous claims that the fossilisable traits of entophysalid cyanobacteria are evolutionarily static through geological time. These organisms may be such effective generalists that major changes in their environment – in this case, the transition to a fully non-marine habitat – have not imposed significant selection pressure on these traits.

Due to the limited landmasses in the Southern Hemisphere, we must rely on data from sub-Antarctic islands within the Southern Ocean to record historical climate patterns. Over the past few decades, glaciers throughout the Southern Ocean region have experienced a noticeable retreat, especially in the Kerguelen Archipelago, whose glacial landforms offer valuable insights into long-term climate fluctuations. Our comprehensive glacial geomorphological study conducted in its remote north-western region meticulously examines morainic complexes from smaller cirque glaciers and larger outlet glaciers stemming from the Cook Ice Cap. We mapped these landforms to reconstruct historical glacier extents during the Holocene. The surface area of the three main glaciers had decreased in 1962–1964 by only 35% compared to their maximum extents, whereas surface area changes across 12 time intervals spanning from 1962 to 2019 from aerial and satellite imagery reveal a cumulative reduction of 43.5%. Additionally, we modelled changes in glacier thickness and equilibrium-line altitude for the key glaciers at three distinct stages: 1) their maximum extent before 1962, 2) the early 1960s and 3) 2019. This multifaceted analysis contributes valuable insights into the dynamics of Kerguelen's glaciers and the broader implications for understanding past and ongoing climate dynamics in the Southern Hemisphere.