Portrayals of the internal God among Ashkenazi Jewish Orthodox lesbians in Israel

Abstract

Most of the existing literature on Ashkenazi Orthodox Jewish lesbians focuses on sociological aspects, mainly the negative attitudes held by religious communities towards their sexual identity and the various problems that arise from these. Less attention has been paid to lesbians’ psychological coping mechanisms with the tensions between their two central identities: the religious and the sexual. Ashkenazi Orthodox lesbians find themselves in a complicated situation where they remain on the margins of both their “natural” communities: the religious one and the homosexual one. As a result, they feel rejected, isolated, and even punished by society. As believers, God is their ultimate refuge. But there are different conceptions of God, ranging from benevolent to persecutory, accepting or highly judgmental and punishing. This variance has not been considered in regard to the dual identity of Ashkenazi Orthodox lesbians. This article focuses on this neglected issue, examining Ashkenazi Orthodox lesbians’ conception of God and its relation to their managing the conflict between their apparently conflicting identities.     

Art Criticism and its Power Over Women Artists - An Inquiry into the Sources of Gender Discrimination in Jewish Palestine/Israel, 1920-1960

Discrimination against women in the Western field of Visual Arts persists, even today. In this article I reflect upon the formative years of the field of Visual Arts in Jewish Palestine/Israel. I examine what role art critics took in the emergence of the systematic forms of artistic malestream domination. I also analyze which strategies allowed art critics to develop their position as the "knowers" of high art. While artistic malestream practices have not only held back female artists in the past, they also still affect women's artistic careers. Thus, the exposure of these concealed mechanisms can inform both academic scholarship and the artistic discourse.     

Robust tests for the common principal components model

When dealing with several populations, the common principal components (CPC) model assumes equal principal axes but different variances along them. In this paper, a robust log-likelihood ratio statistic allowing to test the null hypothesis of a CPC model versus no restrictions on the scatter matrices is introduced. The proposal plugs into the classical log-likelihood ratio statistic robust scatter estimators. Using the same idea, a robust log-likelihood ratio and a robust Wald-type statistic for testing proportionality against a CPC model are considered. Their asymptotic distributions under the null hypothesis and their partial influence functions are derived. A small simulation study allows to compare the behavior of the classical and robust tests, under normal and contaminated data.     

Robust nonparametric estimation with missing data

In this paper, under a nonparametric regression model, we introduce two families of robust procedures to estimate the regression function when missing data occur in the response. The first proposal is based on a local M$M$-functional applied to the conditional distribution function estimate adapted to the presence of missing data. The second proposal imputes the missing responses using the local M$M$-smoother based on the observed sample and then estimates the regression function with the completed sample. We show that the robust procedures considered are consistent and asymptotically normally distributed. A robust procedure to select the smoothing parameter is also discussed.     

Dynamic factor structure of team performances in Liga MX

Team performance of the Mexican Football League (Liga MX), measured as the percentage of the total points obtained during each short tournament, is analyzed using Dynamic Factor Models (DFMs). The estimation of the common components is carried out with Principal Components and the stochastic nature of the DFM is studied through Panel Analysis of Non-stationarity in Idiosyncratic and Common Components. The results reveal that there are two common factors, one being possibly non-stationary. These factors show an interesting dynamic behavior in the league and allow to split the teams into two groups, namely, top competitors and emerging or relegated teams. Some discussion is given in this direction.     

Topological aggregation of preferences: the case of a continuum of agents

 This paper studies the topological approach to social choice theory initiated by G. Chichilnisky (1980), extending it to the case of a continuum of agents. The social choice rules are continuous anonymous maps defined on preference spaces which respect unanimity. We establish that a social choice rule exists for a continuum of agents if and only if the space of preferences is contractible. We provide also a topological characterization of such rules as generalized means or mathematical expectations of individual preferences. Received: 30 November 1994/Accepted: 22 April 1996     

The Role of Religiousness and Gender in Sexuality Among Mexican Adolescents

This study examined the role of religiousness and gender in age at first intercourse, and sexual expectations and values in Mexico, a macrocontext where the majority is Mexican and Catholic (83%). Participants were Catholic and nonreligious adolescents (54% girls) attending middle (71%) or high school. Findings indicated that Catholic adolescents engaged in sexual intercourse at later ages than nonreligious adolescents. Both religious attendance and importance of religion and values in sexual decision making were associated with more conservative sexual values. Boys who were raised Catholic were more likely to endorse female virginity values and were less likely to expect to wait to have sex until married than nonreligious boys. These associations were not significant among girls. Catholic boys may be more likely to internalize sexual double standard beliefs regarding premarital sex than nonreligious boys. This study expands our understanding of the role of religiousness in Mexican adolescents’ sexuality.     

The geometry of implementation: a necessary and sufficient condition for straightforward games

 We characterize games which induce truthful revelation of the players’ preferences, either as dominant strategies (straightforward games) or in Nash equilibria. Strategies are statements of individual preferences on R ⁿ . Outcomes are social preferences. Preferences over outcomes are defined by a distance from a bliss point. We prove that g is straightforward if and only if g is locally constant or dictatorial (LCD), i.e., coordinate-wise either a constant or a projection map locally for almost all strategy profiles. We also establish that: (i) If a game is straightforward and respects unanimity, then the map g must be continuous, (ii) Straightforwardness is a nowhere dense property, (iii) There exist differentiable straightforward games which are non-dictatorial. (iv) If a social choice rule is Nash implementable, then it is straightforward and locally constant or dictatorial. Received: 30 December 1994/Accepted: 22 April 1996     

Social choice and the closed convergence topology

This paper revisits the aggregation theorem of Chichilnisky (1980), replacing the original smooth topology by the closed convergence topology and responding to several comments (N. Baigent (1984, 1985, 1987, 1989), N. Baigent and P. Huang (1990) and M. LeBreton and J. Uriarte (1990a, b). Theorems 1 and 2 establish the contractibility of three spaces of preferences: the space of strictly quasiconcave preferences P _SCO, its subspace of smooth preferences P _infSCO ^supS , and a space P ₁ of smooth (not necessarily convex) preferences with a unique interior critical point (a maximum). The results are proven using both the closed convergence topology and the smooth topology. Because of their contractibility, these spaces satisfy the necessary and sufficient conditions of Chichilnisky and Heal (1983) for aggregation rules satisfying my axioms, which are valid in all topologies. Theorem 4 constructs a family of aggregation rules satisfying my axioms for these three spaces. What these spaces have in common is a unique maximum (or peak). This rather special property makes them contractible, and thus amenable to aggregation. However, these aggregation rules cannot be extended to the whole space of preferences P which is not contractible and therefore does not admit continuous aggregation rules satisfying anonymity and unanimity, Chichilnisky (1980, 1982). The results presented here clarify an erroneous example in LeBreton and Uriarte (1990a, b) and respond to Baigent (1984, 1985, 1987) and Baigent and Huang (1990) on the relative advantages of continuous and discrete approaches to Social Choice.Comments from Geoffrey M. Heal, Andreu Mas Colell, Jean Francois Mertens and Maurice Salles are gratefully acknowledged. Research support was provided by NSF SES 8409857.