What makes for a meaningful life? In the Japanese context, the concept of ikigai provides a clue. Translated as «that which makes one's life worth living,» ikigai has also come to mean that which gives a person happiness. In Japan, where the demographic cohort of elderly citizens is growing, and new modes of living and relationships are revising traditional multigenerational family structures, the elderly experience of ikigai is consi ...
In Fighting for Dignity , Sarah S. Willen explores what happened when the Israeli government launched an aggressive deportation campaign targeting newly arrived migrants from countries as varied as Ghana and the Philippines, Nigeria, Colombia, and Ukraine. Although the campaign was billed as a solution to high unemployment, it had another goal as well: to promote an exclusionary vision of Israel as a Jewish state in which non-Jews have no place ...
In The Israeli Radical Left , Fiona Wright traces the dramatic as well as the mundane paths taken by radical Jewish Israeli leftwing activists, whose critique of the Israeli state has left them uneasily navigating an increasingly polarized public atmosphere. This activism is manifested in direct action solidarity movements, the critical stances of some Israeli human rights and humanitarian NGOs, and less well-known initiatives that promote soci ...
Tourists to Ouidah, a city on the coast of the Republic of Bénin, in West Africa, typically visit a few well-known sites of significance to the Vodún religion—the Python Temple, where Dangbé, the python spirit, is worshipped, and King Kpasse's sacred forest, which is the seat of the Vodún deity known as Lokò. However, other, less familiar places, such as the palace of the so-c ...
Human rights are increasingly described as being in crisis. But are human rights really on the verge of disappearing? Human Rights Transformation in Practice argues that it is certainly the case that human rights organizations in many parts of the world are under threat, but that the ideals of justice, fairness, and equality inherent in human rights remain appealing globally—and that recognizing the continuing importance and strength ...
One evening in 1980, a group of white friends, drinking at the Duke of Edinburgh pub on East Ham High Street, made a monstrous five-pound wager. The first person to kill a «Paki» would win the bet. Ali Akhtar Baig, a young Pakistani student who lived in the east London borough of Newham, was their chosen victim. Baig's murder was but one incident in a wave of antiblack racial attacks that were commonplace during the crisis of race relations ...
The last decade has been a transformative period in Kashmir, the hotly contested and densely militarized border territory located high in the Himalayan mountains between India and Pakistan. Suppressed and unheard, Kashmiri political aspirations were subordinated to larger geopolitical concerns—by opposing governments laying claim to Kashmir, by security experts promoting bilateral peace settlements in the region, and by academic resear ...
