Rassenschande, genocide and the reproductive Jewish body: examining the use of rape and sexualized violence against Jewish women during the Holocaust

Rape and sexual violence against Jewish women is a relatively unexplored area of investigation. This article adds to the scant literature on this topic. It asks: how and why did women's reproductive bodies (gender), combined with their status as Jews (race), make them particularly vulnerable during the Holocaust? The law against Rassenschande (racial defilement) prohibited sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans. Yet, Jewish women were raped by German men. Providing a more nuanced account than is provided by the dehumanization thesis, this article argues that women were targeted precisely because of their Jewishness and their reproductive capabilities. In addition, this piece proposes that the genocidal attack on women's bodies in the form of rape (subsequently leading to the murder of impregnated women) and sexualized violence (forced abortions and forced sterilizations) must be interpreted as an attack on an essentialized group: woman-as-Jew

Does democracy promote equality?

The linkage between liberal democracy and income inequality has been the subject of considerable empirical research. However, the literature has largely ignored advances in the techniques for measuring income distribution which help to improve and strengthen the robustness of research findings in this field. by drawing upon recent developments in data collection and formal analyses, this paper explores inequality trends in selected Western democracies over the 1970s and 1980s. The results indicate that the gap between rich and poor is widening in some countries but not in all, thus pointing to the role of national policies in the redistribution of income. Conventional models grounded on demand driven policies persuasively explain declining income inequality, yet fail to account for the rising trends in the 1980s. Reasons for this failure are the omission of political 'slack' as a key dimension in redistributive options and the fallacy of linearity. The paper shows that despite significant progress, we are still not in a position to be confident of our theories and methods

The origins of backwardness in Eastern Europe: economics and politics from the Middle Ages until the early twentieth century

Reaching back centuries, this study makes a convincing case for very deep roots of current Eastern European backwardness. Its conclusions are suggestive for comparativists studying other parts of the world, and useful to those who want to understand contemporary Eastern Europe's past. Like the rest of the world except for that unique part of the West which has given us a false model of what was "normal," Eastern Europe developed slowly. The weight of established class relations, geography, lack of technological innovation, and wars kept the area from growing richer.In the nineteenth century the West exerted a powerful influence, but it was political more than economic. Nationalism and the creation of newly independent aspiring nation-states then began to shape national economies, often in unfavorable ways.One of this book's most important lessons is that while economics may limit the freedom of action of political players, it does not determine political outcomes. The authors offer no simple explanations but rather a theoretically complex synthesis that demonstrates the interaction of politics and economics