Making Sense of Singular Gauge Transformations in 1+1 and 2+1 Fermion Models

We study the problem of decoupling fermion fields in 1+1 and 2+1 dimensions, in interaction with a gauge field, by performing local transformations of the fermions in the functional integral. This could always be done if singular (large) gauge transformations were allowed, since any gauge field configuration may be represented as a singular pure gauge field. However, the effect of a singular gauge transformation of the fermions is equivalent to the one of a regular transformation with a non-trivial action on the spinorial indices. For example, in the two dimensional case, singular gauge transformations lead naturally to chiral transformations, and hence to the usual decoupling mechanism based on Fujikawa Jacobians. In 2+1 dimensions, using the same procedure, different transformations emerge, which also give rise to Fujikawa Jacobians. We apply this idea to obtain the v.e.v of the fermionic current in a background field, in terms of the Jacobian for an infinitesimal decoupling transformation, finding the parity violating result.Comment: 14 pages, Late

Loop Representations of the Quark Determinant in Lattice QCD

The modelling of the ultraviolet contributions to the quark determinant in lattice QCD in terms of a small number of Wilson loops is examined. Complete Dirac spectra are obtained for sizeable ensembles of SU(3) gauge fields at $\beta$=5.7 on 6$^4$, 8$^4$, and 10$^4$ lattices allowing for the first time a detailed study of the volume dependence of the effective loop action generating the quark determinant. The connection to the hopping parameter expansion is examined in the heavy quark limit. We compare the efficiency and accuracy of various methods- specifically, Lanczos versus stochastic approaches- for extracting the quark determinant on an ensemble of configurations.Comment: 20 pages, LaTe

The Emancipation of Yiddish

The Nahman-Perl rivalry is an exemplum of the dialectic between continuity and change, integration and rebellion, that has structured the basic patterns of controversy in all forms of the Jewish spirit for the past two hundred years. It is the great debate on Emancipation and its discontents. The sudden access to modern life effected by Emancipation gave rise to an intoxicated embrace of the new and rejection of the old, but fears of the eventual consequences of this embrace in turn fostered a spirit of qualification that sought to preserve tradition in a modern age. Perhaps no area of Jewish life had so much invested in the promise of Emancipation, was so brutally crushed by its failure, and then revised its assumptions so profoundly, as Yiddish culture. It has been the particular fate of the study of Yiddish to continue after the loss of its cultural base. To examine the pattern of its rebirth against the backdrop of recent history is to discover how scholarship revived the essential debate after the culture itself was decimated, and to appreciate anew the relation of criticism to culture

The Treasures of Howe and Greenberg

In the first two decades of this century, when literary manifestos were very much in vogue, the burning issue was that of cultural renewal: Was it to come from within, by reappropriating the past, or from without, by celebrating the present and incorporating its chaotic norms? Neo-classicists and symbolists squared off against Futurists and Expressionists. The revival of folklore, myth and metaphysics was countered by the supremacy of the masses, the machine and the psyche. One rarely thinks of editors and translators, those workhorses of the literary establishment, venturing forth into such treacherous terrain, but as Dov Sadan was the first to note, the Jewish centers of Odessa and Warsaw with Bialik at the head of one and Frischman at the head of the other, were divided over this very issue, and much of their competing energies were channeled into the work of translation. Each was additionally in charge of the means of production—Bialik as editor-in-chief of the Dvir Publishing House and Frischman of Stiebel—so that policy was translated into the distribution of real books

The Task of the Jewish Translator: A Valedictory Address

There is nothing more tedious and thankless than the task of the Jewish translator. Since your average Jewish author was multilingual, possessing as many as three internal languages, the translator must be a polyglot, possessing at least one external language to boot. The author gets all the glory. The translator gets all the blame

The Story's the Thing: Afterword

The Beleaguered South Bronx is not the only ground where the ancient and medieval traditions of Jewish storytelling flourished. As the articles in this issue point to some of the stopping places along the way—thirteenth-century Ashkenaz and sixteenth-century Safed—so in the modern period the map became global in scope. The eastern European heartland gave rise to a modern school of folktale writing in both Hebrew and Yiddish and when the Jews of this community dispersed—to Western Europe, America and Palestine—so too did their storytellers. Agnon, foremost among them, bridged the languages and the lands of the Jewish dispersion. In North Africa, meanwhile, the first French-speaking writers recaptured the indigenous storytelling traditions in Judeo-Arabic even as they adapted the fictional forms of modern Europe. When American Jewish writing came into its own after World War II, storytellers such as Malamud and Ozick assumed a prominent place alongside the novelists

Unfinished Business: Sholem Aleichem's From the Fair

Looking at Sholem Aleichem’s unfinished autobiography Funem yarid (From the Fair) might help us resolve some of the longstanding debates as to the author’s major strengths and weaknesses. Since 1908, for example, critics have been divided as to whether Sholem Aleichem’s real subject was the life of the Jewish collective which he captured through national types (Ba’al-Makhshoves) or the life of the individual Jew caught in a web of madness (Nokhem Oyslender). Later, as critical methodologies hardened along party lines, a debate arose over Tevye and Menakhem-Mendl as paradigms of the petty bourgeoisie (Max Erik) or of the Jewish collective unconscious (I. J. Trunk). It would seem that the existence of an autobiography might settle the matter one way or the other, for autobiography is the one genre designed to probe the inner life of the writer, the voyage of his soul, or, at the very least, the course of his education. Can it be that the critics who argued the collectivist position then ignored From the Fair in order to skew the evi dence in their favor

The Holocaust According to the Literary Critics

"Ask now and see, was there ever such a holocaust as this since the days of Adam?" The question posed by Eliezer bar Nathan in the breathing space between the First and Second Crusades has resurfaced with especial force in our own generation. For unlike our ancestors who expected so little from their neighbors, we had all our hopes invested in the promise of secular society, even turning in our God for other gods. Then, as now, the catastrophe has brought about an upsurge of mysticism, a turning to the demonic for explanation. Our thinkers reared on science and positivism convert to a kind of religious syncretism that brings together Kabbalah and Christianity, Midrash and Manicheism. No words seem to do justice to what our eyes have seen. We dare not even utter the designated word for the murder of our people and speak instead of the Event, something so ineffable that, like the name of God, it can be invoked only by a double euphemism. If our ancestors found the Akedah, multiplied a thousand fold, to signify their mass martyrdom, we grope with borrowed terms to express the sense of unprecedented horror: the Mysterium Tremendum, the mass crucifixion, the Gotterdammerung. Then, as now, new words were coined, only ours derive from concentration camp Esperanto and from Nazi-Deutsch, not from the Holy Tongue. Then, as now, the beloved cities of Europe became cities of slaughter, and a few place names were selected to represent the many. The landscape of our death is dotted with so many ghettos, camps and extermination sites that Warsaw, Auschwitz and Babi Yar have come to be used as mnemonics. Then, as now, history was transformed into liturgy and the victims assumed religious significance

The Maskil as Folk Hero

The august group of Jewish intellectuals and cultural activists who gathered in St. Petersburg on December 27, 1909 to honor S. Ansky's twenty-fifth anniversary as a writer had every reason to celebrate. If they belonged in the nationalist camp, they could point to Ansky, ne Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport, as the prodigal son par excellence. For here was a man who had left home at the age of seventeen to spread enlightenment among the benighted shtetl masses but soon took up the cause of the Russian masses instead; changed his name to Semyon Akimovitsh so as to share the miserable fate of Russian miners in the Don Basin; spent a heady year in St. Petersburg as a trusted member of the Russian Populist elite and then followed the lead of other radicals by emigrating to Paris where he worked for the cause in the cradle of the Revolution. But by the time the political amnesty of 1905 brought him back to Russia, this "Old Narodnik" was ready to assume a leadership role in the Jewish cultural and political arena

Introduction

It would now appear that there were at least two artistic breakthroughs in Isaac Bashevis Singer's career, and both were marked by the appearance of cultural manifestos