East European Jews in Switzerland Tamar Lewinsky, Sandrine Mayoraz / Tamar Lewinsky, Sandrine Mayoraz
2013, 2013-10-14, Letnik:
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eBook
During the era of Jewish mass migration from Eastern Europe (from the 1880s until the First World War), Switzerland played an important role in absorbing immigrants. Though located at the periphery ...of the main migration routes, the federal state with its liberal policies on foreigners became a key destination for students, revolutionaries, and travelers. The micro-studies and more general papers of this volume approach the topic in its transnational, local, linguistic, gendered, and ideological dimensions and from various disciplinary angles. They interweave and facilitate a novel take on the transitory spatial history and the Lebenswelt of East European Jews in Switzerland. Topics of this volume range– among others– from the location of Switzerland on the map of East European Jewish politics (Bundism, Socialism, Yiddishism, Zionism), conflicting performative cultures of Jewish and Russian revolutionaries, the Swiss Lehr- and Wanderjahre of the Jewish public intellectual Meir Wiener, the impact of Geneva on the Zionist Hebrew writer Ben Ami, the Russian-Jewish students' colonies in Berne and Zurich and questions of individuals' integration and acculturation.
In Domestic Courts and the Interpretation of International Law, Odile Ammann examines the methodology and reasoning which domestic courts, including Swiss courts, use to interpret international law. ...She argues that interpretative methods must be taken more seriously in international law.
In this volume Sabina Widmer analyses neutral Switzerland’s foreign policy in Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Somalia during the armed conflicts and regime changes of the late 1960s and 1970s, in a ...context of global Cold War and decolonisation.; Readership: All interested in Swiss foreign policy after 1945, neutrality during the Cold War, Africa in the Cold War, and European politics towards Africa.
In steep, mountainous terrain, protection forests play a key role in rockfall risk prevention, because trees reduce the energy of falling blocks or even stop them. The simple but robust tool ...RockForNET (RFN) models the protective effect of forests in order to assess the residual rockfall hazard. It uses the energy line principle with a fixed energy line angle (ELA) to derive the rockfall energy that has to be dissipated by the forest. The objective of this study was firstly to empirically reconstruct the ELA and initial fall heights of field-mapped rockfall deposits on 16 forested slopes in Switzerland. The second objective was to assess to what extent RFN can be improved by estimating trajectory-specific ELAs as well as better representative initial fall height values for rock faces. The analysis showed that the prediction of the protective capacity of a forest could substantially be improved by using transect-specific ELAs and more specific initial fall height values, especially for block volumes between 0.2 and 1 m3. Furthermore, we found a strong relationship between the retro-calculated ELAs and the normalized area below the rockfall trajectories, indicating that the normalized area is a promising method for deriving trajectory specific ELAs.
•Topography specific energy lines improve the quality of the rockfall protection forest tool RockforNET.•The area under the profile is a promising variable for determining topography specific energy lines.•The definition of the height of the release area in a cliff is important but difficult to standardise.
Drowning unconformities are stratigraphic key surfaces in the history of carbonate platforms. They mostly consist in the deposition of deep marine facies on top of shallow marine limestones. Although ...large-scale depositional geometries mimic lowstand systems track architecture, these sedimentary turnovers are developed in relation with major sea level rise, inducing an increase in the rate of creation of accommodation space that outpaces the capacity of carbonate to keep up. This so-called paradox of carbonate platform drowning implies that parameters other than purely eustatic fluctuations are involved in the demise of shallow marine ecosystems. Worldwide and at different times during Earth history, in-depth studies of drowning unconformities revealed that changes in nutrient input, clastic delivery, temperature, or a combination of them may be responsible for a decrease in light penetration in the water column and the progressive suffocation and poisoning of photosynthetic carbonate producers. The examination of such case examples from various stratigraphic intervals and palaeogeographical settings thus helps in identifying and hierarchizing potential triggering mechanisms for drowning unconformities.
This is complemented by new data from Early Cretaceous successions from the Helvetic Alps. During this time period, the Helvetic carbonate platform developed along the northern Tethyan margin using both photozoan and heterozoan communities. Phases of healthy production were interrupted by several drowning episodes. The latter are marked in the sedimentary record by condensation and associated phosphogenesis and glauconitisation. From the earliest Valanginian to the early to late Barremian, three drowning unconformities reflect the intermittent installation of a more humid climate and subsequent enhanced trophic conditions, which first induced a switch from photozoan to heterozoan communities and then to long-lasting drowning phases. The latter encompass several sea level rise and fall cycles, and may be linked to strengthened upwelling currents. With the return to more oligotrophic conditions during the late Barremian, photozoan, Urgonian-type communities took up again. Their development has been abruptly stopped at the end of the early Aptian by a major emersion phase. The subsequent drowning is documented in various peritethyan areas. This initial crisis is followed by three other drowning phases that ultimately led to the replacement of shallow ecosystems by a deeper marine sedimentation in the Cenomanian. This long-term trend in the evolution of the Helvetic carbonate platform and of other peritethyan ecosystems may have been driven by more global phenomena. In particular, the progressive opening of the northern and equatorial Atlantic may have impacted sea level by creating new oceanic basins. The emplacement of submarine volcanic plateaus may have triggered sea level rise and fertilized deep oceanic waters through hydrothermal processes. Drowning unconformities thus record the interplay of local with long-term processes, and constitute regional sedimentary archives of global phenomena.
•The sequence stratigraphic significance of drowning unconformities is discussed.•Changes in palaeoenvironmental conditions often acted as triggering mechanisms.•The Helvetic platform experienced drowning unconformities during the Early Cretaceous.•A link between drowning episodes and global perturbations is postulated.
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