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This special thematic section of Judaica: Neue digitale Folge brings together five articles first presented as papers at an online workshop at the University of Bern in June 2021. The workshop “Jewish authors and power in the Graeco-Roman period was dedicated to the complex relationships, both experienced and imagined, between ancient Jewish authors and power systems and structures throughout the Hellenistic and Roman periods. It did so by exploring these and related themes while relying on diverse sources and questions, such as the analysis of texts from the Hebrew Bible and questions regarding calendar reforms during the rule of Seleucid kings. Implementing the ideas of post-colonial studies on power and power relations, the papers focused on the different fields where power structures and relations played a role in antiquity and put forward and understanding of power not only as physical dominance in various forms, but also as soft powers that emerges from sociocultural structures.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate transfer of training from a virtual reality environment that captures visual and temporal-spatial aspects of juggling, but not the motor demands of juggling. Transfer of skill to real juggling was examined by comparing juggling performance of novices that either experienced both the virtual training protocol and real juggling practice, or only practiced real juggling. After ten days of training, participants who have alternated between real and virtual training demonstrated comparable performance to those who only practiced real juggling. Moreover, they adapted better to instructed changes in temporal-spatial constraints. These results imply that juggling relevant skill subcomponents can be trained in the virtual environment, and support the notion that cognitive aspects of a skill can be separately trained to enhance the acquisition of a complex perceptual-motor task. This study was performed within the SKILLS integrated project of the EC 6th framework.

This article provides a typology of rebel groups in the Middle East from the perspective of political science and situates them in a broader context of rebellion around the world.

This paper presents the training of juggling skills, a highly complex problem of coordination, under tight time and space constraints. This training is achieved with a simple training platform, a light weight juggling platform (LWJ), and is compared to training with real balls. The principle directing the design of the platform is to obtain a simple tool. The simplification, in comparison to real world juggling, is based on the identification of invariant properties in the spatiotemporal coordination of intermediate and expert jugglers. Two classes training solutions were added to the LWJ: An audio-tactile pacing or augmented multimodal environment, and the manipulation of cognitive components of the juggling skills. The transfer to juggling with real balls was evaluated in four different experiments.