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Featured Article: Vladimir Propp

Vladimir Propp in 1928

Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp (April 29, 1895 – August 22, 1970) was a Soviet folklorist and scholar who analyzed the basic structural elements of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irreducible structural units. Propp's work broke folktales down into a series of functions undertaken by actants. He identified 31 separate functions undertaken by actants fulfilling seven different roles. His syntagmatic approach was a form of semiotic literary analysis but differed from that of Claude Levi-Strauss, who disregarded the syntagmatic approach in favor of a paradigmatic one.

Popular Article: Hasidism

A tish of the Boyan Hasidic dynasty in Jerusalem, holiday of Sukkot

Hasidic Judaism (from the Hebrew: חסידות Chassidus, meaning "piety") is a Haredi Jewish religious movement that originated in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century. Founded by Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer (1698–1760), also known as the Ba'al Shem Tov, Hasidism emerged when European Jews had grown disillusioned as a result of the failed messianism of the past century and the dryness of contemporary rabbinic Judaism, which focused on strictly limited Talmudic studies. The hasidic tradition represents a constant striving for an intimate give-and-take relationship with God in every moment of human life.

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Many early societies attributed abnormal behavior to the influence of evil spirits. (source: Abnormal psychology)

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