society – Schoemann

14/03/202613/03/2026

Democracy in Nepal

Nepal has witnessed a peaceful revolution in which the young generation of Nepalis has “out-smarted” the previous rulers of Nepal. With close to a 2/3 majority of seats in parliament (Nepali Times), the RSP as the party of a somehow charismatic musician and performer has a 5 year mandate to tackle the many challenges to bring real change for Nepali people. The hopes are running high that corruption will be contained and enough jobs inside Nepal can be created for the young. The positive sign, that many Nepalis migrant workers who had left the country now return to Nepal, encourages further support by international donors and investors.
Running a democratic election in a country that comprises the Himalayan mountainous region is confronted with a particular challenge to make every vote count as communication with remote areas takes additional time and effort. Campaigning through social media can be more effective only if even remote areas have reliable access to the internet. Inter-generational assistance is often a precondition of timely access to information. The Himalayan region experiences already the effects of global warming as melting of glaciers. It is the youngest generation that will have to confront the consequences. Time to take government in their own hands, and beyond a one man show. (Image: ESA Himalayan Mountains, ESA Standard Licence)

11/03/202610/03/2026

Retrieval-augmented AI

As a scientist it is in our DNA to cite other scholar’s work with precision. As a university professor your job is to check the quality of citations, kinds of citations and accuracy as a regular part of your job, also as supervisor of junior scientists. In 2026, the use of up-to-date AI (Asai et al. 2026, OpenScholar AI) allows not only to summarise large bodies of scientific literature, but also to cite references and even quotes from the paper(s). Literature reviews used to take months to compile. AI can speed up the process enormously. The citations can be ordered following an own logic or an AI-suggested logic.
It has become much harder to evaluate the degree of innovation of a candidate for a scientific degree. Tools like retrieval-augmented Language Models enhance the scientific potential of generative AI since they extract more or less short citations directly from the original source just next to the original based on a simple query of author and approximate subject (see screenshot below of own previous publication).
The good news is: (1) referral to previous research and citations should become faster with improved tools for verification. (2) You will find papers written by yourself that you no longer have in your own archive.
The bad news is: (1)self-citations of researchers might become more feasible, although this problem is conditional on a researcher’s seniority. (2) so far, Language models prioritise specific languages (although not necessarily) and differentiate names with “foreign” characters e.g. “ö,ä,é” and do not double check “close neighbours” of them like “o, oe, a, ae, ue, e, ê, è” leading to a “character based normalisation bias“.
It is, of course, rather easy to point out deficiencies of the search, sorting and inclusion algorithm if you know already about the complete picture of a data set.

10/03/202609/03/2026

Trust or not to trust

… that is the question. The social science research on trust, distrust or corruption is expanding rapidly. As in some other fields of research the increase in research itself becomes an issue of trust in science as the uncontrolled use of AI has produced an inflation of pseudo-scientific papers as well (Link). However, the finding by Spadaro et al. (2020) that interpersonal trust (trusting beliefs and behavior) is influenced by a general feeling of security as well as trust in institutions is supported by experimental and interview-based research.
There are still many challenges to the research in this field. The “feeling of security” has an overall component, but also several subcategories like the objective or subjective feeling of job security, which is dependent on national and collective systems of employment protection legislation. Economic security or security of a sufficient retirement income might be at times considered more important than (in-)security in cities or the countryside. Differences of the mechanisms by gender and age have to be studied in detail as well, which necessitates large data collections on the issues. Churches that used to be considered as trustworthy institutions or the police forces have been accused of abuses of the high trust placed in them in the last few years. These 2 examples demonstrate that trust itself is a dynamic issue with ups and downs over time, rarely constant over time. Game theoretical considerations add further to the view that trust might be used as a strategy just like economic power. (Image: Cathedrale de Meaux)

09/03/202607/03/2026

1000+ entries

From time to time it is useful to review whether a project is still on track or has developed biases, which may run for some time without reviews. Just like the United Nations Strategic Development Goals (SDGs) have been set 1bout 10 years ago, I do scan my own publishing project whether I still cover the SDGs in a larger spread. The goals need monitoring and I shall redo my own review as well.
As the number of blog entries on a daily basis has reached 1000+ entries, a review becomes a bit of a statistical exercise. As a kind of anniversary reward, a publication of more collections beyond the AI-reader or the Paris Olympics 2024 reader should be fun. However, there is so much work with checking and updating links, that the e-book, pdf and epub publications have become a time-consuming effort.
The search function implemented on this digital publication format is so fast and powerful that I am myself delighted again and again about the digging up of previous entries, concepts and evidence retained.
Time is a treasure and a value in its own right. Test it!

06/03/202606/03/2026

Being On Time

“Being on time” has a different meaning, depending on the society and culture you are living in. Of course, this tends to reinforce stereotypes and raises expectations about the punctuality, the respect of time as a means to effectively synchronize human behavior and its interaction with technology. Train or bus services are commonly referred to in this context. However, our interest here is with the wider margins or, statistically speaking, the normal or not so normal distribution around a specific point in time.
Colloquially we refer to these time periods as being late (more common) or as being early (less common). Add to this perspective that you may be very late (early) or too late (early) and we are going to really deal with the spice of life. Just think of the last instances when you were late, very late or too late.
The same rationale of a “statistical view of time” can inform the sociology of technology. Some innovations can come too early for society to be ready to deal with it, or they may come too late to save us from disaster.
Genetic engineering of human cells is an issue in this regard, both too early for wider applications, but too late for persons in need of curing a specific diagnosis. There is an additional social-psychological aspect to the cognitive process of being on time. It is the cognitive dissonance of what you expect from yourself or somebody else and the actual experience of not being on time which causes stress. Societal norms of being on time can contribute substantially as well to the overall mental load associated with time. Take it easy.

02/03/202601/03/2026

Holistic public health

Based on case study in Queensland Australia, Boocock et al. (2026) propose the wider application of holistic public health laws. Due to effects of global warming the local burden of disease may rise due to larger scale floods and subsequent growth of for example mosquito populations that transmit infectious diseases. It will be necessary for societies to understand the processes behind the growth of mosquito populations and what can be done to prevent and protect oneself from the consequences. This is not only an environmental issue, but also an issue of continuous learning across all strata of society. Neighborhoods tend to suffer the same impact of chemicals used or the spreading of diseases like Dengue or malaria. The case study makes a convincing argument about the intrinsic relationship between the social and environmental processes at work.

28/02/202627/02/2026

Silence revisited

In most cultures, particularly western ones, we are less and less used to silence. Keeping silent for 1 hour is almost framed as an exercise of meditation. In the presence of other persons silence is often misinterpreted as not being interested or even intelligent enough to contribute to the conversation or discussion. Therefore, the title of the exhibition “Seeing silence”, which rediscovers and honors the paintings of Helen Schjerfbeck. Her Finish, Swedish speaking roots, with a broad European training in the arts, made her an accomplished painter in the impressionist’s tradition with a focus on painting portraits. The catalog from the exhibition (THE MET 2025) gives a great overview of her paintings when silence of her models tell stories. Portraits of women are particularly powerful examples of tranquility, and reading, but also uneasy silence in rocking chairs. The biographical sketch of Helen Schjerfbeck by Dita Amory sums up the vocation as “All I desire to do is paint” (p. 15). Towards the end of the 19th century and the 1st half of the 20th century this meant work in silence and she chose to work on silence as well. (Image: catalog in library Brussels 2026-2)

18/02/202617/02/2026

Rule and divide leadership

We have known the leadership style, which has been coined as “rule and divide”, at least since the Roman imperial period. In conquered countries it was a strategy to rule by way of creating divides between peoples or regions within a conquered country. The struggle for power within a country is likely to avoid that a powerful opposition to the occupant can build up. What is well researched in the history of international politics, has also been applied to the realm of management strategies. Anthony Galluzzo demonstrates that the strategies of management often attempt to split the workforce in at least 2 different camps in order to better keep employees and their trade unions under some sort of control. For society as a whole, so-called dual labor market theories have hypothesized the existence of such management strategies since the 1980s. With the labor practices in food and grocery deliveries as well as in taxi services such management strategies are applied again. “Old wine in new bottles”, but still seems to sell and catch on. (Image: extract from Butler Charles, 1637, Monarchia faeminina)

10/02/202609/02/2026

Regulation and bureaucracy

Economists will celebrate 55 years of the theory of regulation pioneered by George Stigler, which was published in 1971 in 2026. The basic question asked at the time and today is: why do we have regulation? The pubic choice and political economy answer of Stigler (1971) and many scholars after him, is that the industry of a specific sector will acquire the regulation or the public interest in this regulation and, subsequently, the industry will design and operate it to its benefits. At least, this is in a nutshell my summary of the literature inspired by Sam Peltzman (2021, p.20). If we add to this the perspectives of theories of bureaucracy (Sharma, 2020), we become skeptic of an efficient implementation of regulations by governments or governmental agencies.
In the field of pharmaceutical applications, it is the “European Diabetes Forum” which calls for a regulation on reliable “glucose monitoring devices” with industry and user backing. Of course, this asks for bureaucratic control of the regulation, imports and markets of such devices later on. The one (regulation) is rarely coming without the other (bureaucracy). It is about time to acknowledge this for societies as a whole as well.

08/02/202606/02/2026

Time and power

Who commands our time? Who commands your time? Both macro- and micro-level analyses of power relationships related to time need to be investigated. Time policies are most obvious when it comes to regulations of working time, permissions of business hours or so-called bank holidays. On the micro or individual level, it is often the question of who spends more time on work, care and repair. Hourly wage rates have been claimed by economists to guide or decide societal time spent on one or the other activity. An extension of this rationale with an overriding objective of happiness might considerably change the impact of power relationships on time. Longer time perspectives on health shall also shift the view of how power impacts the time spent on various activities. Time sovereignty is a precious value in its own right.
The power play between employers and employees keeps shifting the balance, albeit the overall trend over the last 100 years has been towards a reduction of working time and increased time sovereignty of employees as a form of democratization of working life. This constitutes one form to share the benefits of productivity gains over decades as well. (Image clock on Berlin City Council building on labor day 2025).

05/02/202604/02/2026

Democracy in art

The depiction and imagery about democracy in the history of art is according to my own anecdotal evidence and visits across Europe much less frequent than depictions of royalty, mystery like religion or autocratic rulers. Therefore, visits of museums on art history, let us say prior to the impressionists, have to be approached with an obvious skepticism. The impressionist art movement rebelled against the official art academy and started their own salon and are still much acclaimed for this as well as the fight for their own vision of art. The worst authoritarian backlash came from the Nazi-terror, which annihilated large parts of democratic ideas in and about art. A second major issue is about who visits the museums in contemporary societies. Democratizing the crowd who visits art museums is a steep task. Ease of access also beyond costs of entry, they still pose barriers of access to reach a representative sample of a population to participate in art. (Image Kunstforum new barn in construction).

04/02/202603/02/2026

Democracy in Energy

Can there be democracy in energy? Power supply and power distribution are core topics in the theory of democracy as well. One of the foundations of democracy is the separation of power into a legislative, executive and a judicial power. A resilient democracy can assure a sufficient functioning of this fragile “balance of power”. In an energy market or a nation’s energy distribution a comparable balance of (electric or gas) power provision might be envisaged. The costs of parallel infrastructures of power distribution are high, but the resilience of overall power distribution will benefit. Also from a redundancy perspective, more than one distribution system may step in if there are failures or delivery problems with one of the distribution networks. The democracy in energy perspective goes beyond this simple analogy. Power supply as well as power distribution have been concentrated in large public or private enterprises, which might care little in terms of security or reliability of the overall system, not only during armed conflicts. Independent energy production and use, for example through wind and solar energy including batteries have pushed the feasibility of more democracy in energy to new boundaries. These technologies have enabled a new bifurcation and make room for more democracy in energy. It is a rather realistic version of a previously rather utopian vision.

22/01/202621/01/2026

Time Concatenated

As a measure of the psychological and social pressure time may convey on people, it is useful to look into how time is concatenated. In a calendar we often make appointments in a form where time is concatenated in ever smaller time slots and condensed time sequences. The organisation of appointments into slots of 15 minutes, with or without a break in between, might be a dense schedule, but we have come to think in time as linked to dates, space and precise timing. We shall experience time as rushed or forcing us into concatenated sequences in our professional life more than in our private life. In IT we even integrate these separate columns into just a single column for computing efficiency. Our calendars allow to structure time in ever smaller sequences. We tend to organise our lives more and more according to these shorter concatenated time.

20/01/202619/01/2026

Time as surprise

Sometimes, time comes as surprise. Time seems to run faster as we perceive it, or time might pass more slowly in actual terms than we perceive or think it does. What makes the difference? There is the objective measure of time with various types of clocks and watches versus the subjective or perceived lapse of time. The discrepancy between the two constitutes an interesting case for further study. Marketing strategies will try to make us believe that a specific kind of product will shorten or lengthen the difference between objective and subjective time. The entertainment industry works very hard on our perception of time relative to one or the other form of entertainment. The best result seems to be that objective time has been much longer than perceived time so that we “lost” our reference to time while being entertained. The so-called social media interaction is rather successful in this form of entertainment, infotainment or edutainment. The moments in life when time comes as a surprise might be great ones in our lives. Particular deviations between objective and subjective time make strong impressions on our memories, too.

19/01/202618/01/2026

Time and Emotions

In psychology, time and emotions are a matter of milli- or even nanoseconds. Showing emotions, intrinsic ones or controlled ones is passing rapidly through our brain and, for example, facial muscles. Hence, time plays a role in how we react emotionally to an image or any event. The author Rüdiger Safranski starts his history of the concept of time with the emotional experience that time appears lengthy or tedious. In his view the emotional understanding of the concept of time is key to a better grasp of the philosophical roots of the concept of time. Starting with Greek philosophers, the Stoic tradition, Augustinus, the history of ideas is full of reflections on time, what it does to us, and how we best deal with the effects time has on us. In famous literature from Marcel Proust or Samuel Becket, we were reminded of the creative power of lengthy periods of time and the importance or futility to ask fundamental questions about time and our destiny. Beyond the rational thinking about time, the emotional experience of time makes up much of the spice of life.

18/01/202617/01/2026

Time and money

In the English-speaking world, most people will be familiar with the expression “time is money”. In times of working for money as pay, rather than growing your own crops, we calculate hourly, monthly or yearly salaries. Time is a habitual point of reference in production systems and calculations of economic growth. Inflation and depreciation speak to value over time, just as investment and returns accrue over time. For comparisons of different investments the chosen horizon becomes a decisive factor. Of course, in the long run we are all dead, but in the meantime time matters a lot, doesn’t it? Take out a loan and you realize how much time will matter, suddenly. Now, let’s turn around the causality, Money is time or can be buy time with money? For many processes this seems to be the case. With money you can buy time off working, or pay somebody to do work instead of doing the work yourself. You can “win time” or gain more free time this way. However, towards the end of your life, money might no longer suffice to buy you time before death even with lots of disposable income or cash. From a philosophy of science perspective, we might even question the concept of time-linked causality altogether. The relationship between time and money gets even more interesting if. we take intergenerational considerations into account like inheritance and environmental heritage. … and “the times are a changing”.

16/01/202617/01/2026

Social time

What does the „social“ have to do with time. Well, time is a perfect case of a social construction or a fundamentally social construct. The definition of time as „Greenwich mean time“ is nothing but a useful socio-political statement to synchronize time across the world, or previously an imperium. Points in time, as shown on a clock(s), can be helpful to synchronize human behavior. We might want to show up on the same point in time to start or end work. Of course there are thousands of ways in which such synchronization might go awfully wrong. This makes for splendid drama and movies have a long history to capture our attention on this matter. Social expectations, a social, psychological, and even a biological concept in extreme cases (Pavlov effect) make many of us to get a bit itchy, if time is getting short to meet other persons or an expected event is going to happen. A lot of social pressure is transmitted through the ticking away of time. The mechanism to internalize social patterns (for example prayer), via time and the clock, is quite powerful and has been used in movies throughout the history of the cinema. Even the individual endpoint in time is in almost all cases a shared social experience and turns into a kind of socially relevant time. (Take your time to watch The Clock by Christian Marclay).

11/01/202613/01/2026

Time – The Clock

Time keeps puzzling us. The 24 hours of concatenated clips from well-known cinema films are a bit overwhelming or even lengthy. However, this spurs lots of time to reflect on time, on a kind of meta level. We see the clock or clocks ticking in all sorts of situations and environments. Nearly all emotional states can be interpreted relative to a time stamp provided by a clock. Christian Marclay’s oeuvre is screened at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin at a time when we feel multiple clocks ticking at the same time. For the sociologist, there is time on the macro-societal level, like overall socioeconomic development, but also individual time. A single person or a single moment in time may have very different macro-social implications. The possibility to live through the cineastic interpretations of ten to, as opposed to, ten past the hour, are interpreted by us with very different meanings. In a longer or historical sense, the timing of time does not matter that much. Point in time or time as duration, that is the question. Art in cinema can play with this like rock around The Clock. Don’t ask me how much time I spent watching, thinking and feeling through time in this movie exhibition, Should we always measure time with a clock. Want it or not, we measured by our smartphones all the time and on multiple timelines.

08/01/202607/01/2026

Premium for silence

People are willing to pay a premium on housing prices for a more silent environment. In the study Enrico Moretti & Harrison Wheeler (2025) estimate that the construction of a silencing wall near a noisy traffic junction or road will increase prices for every decibel of noise reduction by about 3%. Distances closer to the noise shields get higher increases and this mechanism works even up to 400 meters away from the isolation. The investment in decibel noise reductions (not statistical noise) meets a willingness to pay a premium on housing prices. Investment in positive environmental effects (silence) have an obvious marketable premium value. This is most likely just the obverse effect that noise nearby housing is penalized and part of the social mechanism of gentrification. Housing prices and rental costs are known to be powerful drivers of gentrification as well.

07/01/202606/01/2026

Metabolic harm

At the beginning of the 21st century the lack of physical activity for large parts of society has become a major risk of and cause of metabolic harm. We have become used to a sedentary lifestyle and the digital access to distractions and information have encouraged further immobility. Alex Broom et al. (2025) stress the importance to include social and governmental interventions into the many existing medical, pharmacological and technological interventions. The authors advocate a rather holistic approach to really make a difference. The obesity trends cause metabolic harm of an unprecedented size. We have to rethink mobility patterns and other behavioral changes into our daily routines to bring back more stimulation to our metabolic system.

04/01/202609/01/2026

Vaim and the sea

Vaim is not a person, it is an imaginary place, somewhere next to the sea, rather small in size, and in conventional terms nothing much is happening there, aging persons go about their daily routines in their more or less splendid isolation, speaking to someone is a rare act of achievement, most of the talk is speaking to yourself not even really thinking aloud, just ruminating on and on for days, sometimes weeks or maybe years in a person’s life

Okay, my exercise in “slow writing”, a wee bit attempting to copy Jon Fosse, kept me going for 10 lines before the end of my paragraph. Jon Fosse keeps going without the end of a sentence punctuation for 66 pages in the German translation by Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel. Reading the three phrases of Vaim, each as an extended poem and an “homage” to life from three intertwined perspectives, resembles a cubist painting and, maybe, at least for me, each one like the novella “The old man and the sea” by Ernest Hemingway. It is also a triptych in the religious tradition of paintings, just as much as “Vaim” follows in the footsteps of “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett. For all those who don’t care about any previous literature just read Jon Fosse as an endless love story of platonic relationships, silence and romance, next to the sea. Please, don’t pass on your copy of Vaim to school-aged children as they might become very creative about punctuation. The only allowed end of a sentence are occasional question marks, which is a nice philosophical twist in Jon Fosse‘s literal exploration of time and love.

01/01/202631/12/2025

Saint-Simon Utopia

Towards the end of the 18th century and during the early 19th century, the early signs of what the industrial revolution would mean for the working people became visible. Saint-Simon had lived through the ups and downs of the French revolution himself and had been to the Americas with La Fayette before he developed his utopian socialist vision of a unified class of working people, which for him included blue as well as white collar workers. At the advent of the 2nd industrial revolution through general and agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 2025, we shall most likely witness a renewed interest in utopian scenarios and grand ideas of what the future of technology, society and humanity might be like. In 2026 we shall re-read Saint-Simon quite a bit in order to learn about ways to make sense of arising trends and how to come up with a positive utopia that can motivate people to thrive again for more equality within and between societies.

29/12/202528/12/2025

Future of work

The beginning of the 3rd millennium has brought about several fundamental changes of work and employment. What had previously been thought of as utopian in the realm of work, has become a normal feature of work. Just like in the historically grounded, utopian perspective described by Bernard Gazier “Tous sublimes” (2003) we have a growing group of employees and self-employed persons who enjoy privileged positions on the labor market with sufficiently high salaries and access to mobility on the labor market at their own discretion. In addition to these examples described in Gazier’s utopian perspective, the 2020s added permission of remote work from anywhere and use of AI-assisted technology and robotics. A previously utopian view of the future of work has become a reality for many more people nowadays. The utopian element no longer is the how this world of work might look like, but how many people will enjoy the benefits of the technological progress. With a substantial increase of the efficiency and productivity of work, the distribution and sharing of the fruits shall become even more important. We have entered into a new phase of “the brave new world” of work as of 2025. (Image: Graffiti Berlin 2025-12).

22/12/202521/12/2025

How could this have happened

The latest thorough reflection on how the Nazi-terror could have stopped or being prevented remains an important question in our time. The more we see countries descend into the authoritarian regime types, the more we have to know our lessons from previous historical experiences. Götz Aly made a great contribution to this literature. He points our attention to the collective euphoria the Nazis (NSDAP) managed to make people believe, by at the same time blaming others for the past crises. People just wanted to believe the fake narrative of a promising future (p. 175) for a society based on social exclusion. The pattern, unfortunately, seems to find its replication in other parts of the world nowadays. This is a very slippery road which often leads to disaster rather than relief. Easy or catchy answers are preferred by many people rather than the nuances of well-informed differentiated options. Patience in social development is a collective virtue, but often misunderstood as a form of conservatism, which is is something very different.

20/12/202519/12/2025

Documentation Inclusiveness

If we don’t measure it, it will not improve. Many public institutions and private organizations make great efforts to improve inclusiveness in day to day operations, but many barriers are still all around us. Both need monitoring in form of data bases and visual documentation. In a Berlin museum inclusiveness appears to be the most natural thing, nothing to worry about or to call out “wokeism”. Just small improvements in basics and everyone feels welcome.

19/12/202518/12/2025

Rilke’s Advice

One of the poems by Rainer Maria Rilke is entitled “You don’t have to understand life”.
And the first line of the first paragraph just repeats the programmatic sentence of the quite revolutionary romantic movement. Following a century of the enlightenment, which narrowly developed and focused on rationality and Kant’s “Critic of pure reasoning”, the authors of the romantic movement were eager to explore the world beyond reasoning again.
“Du mußt das Leben nicht verstehen,
dann wird es werden wie ein Fest.”
Rilke brings back the exuberant, Dionysian element into literature and captured the new spirit of his time. After a period of fast innovation in the sciences and applications of them in day-to-day life, Rilke revels in the innocent days and years during childhood, where youth is simply asking for more without hindsight. In doing so: “Life will be a like a feast”. So be it, we should like to add. (Rilke wrote a poem « Das Karussell » with subtitle Jardin du Luxembourg, Image below)

17/12/202516/12/2025

Generation Hope

The whole of Europe has good reasons to take a careful look at the stunning protests organized by the young generation in Bulgaria (Le Monde, 2025-12-13). With spectacular repeated demonstrations in the center of Sophia, the young people attempted to stop a government that is likely to sink further into corruption. It is this generation of young people that have experienced and/or lived in other European countries or in other Western-style democracies around the globe that have enough of corruption in politics and social systems more generally. The well-educated Bulgarian youth has managed to overthrow a government that had been subject to pressure from corrupt forced. It is not easy to get rid of corrupt politicians and powerful business interests as a system based on merits rather than ability to pay remain fragile in the first few years of such a transition. It needs a sizable “Generation Hope” as I would like to call these young enthusiasts of democracies. The message reaches well beyond Bulgaria and gives hope to all those whose political systems deteriorate into authoritarianism across the globe. It took 20 years to build this “Generation Hope” and mobile youth that takes home the messages and learnings from other democracies. Based on statistics from Eurostat we know about the strong in-migration from Turkey and Russia into Bulgaria. Youth is particularly likely to leave authoritarian regimes to seek a better future in democracies, for example as part of the Generation Hope” in Bulgaria. (Image: Cour constitutionel Paris)

15/12/202514/12/2025

Jewish book art in Berlin

One of the treasures of books in the collection of the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin is the Hebraica collection. It is currently presented in the museum space of the library. The curators Martini and Eichhorst have succeeded in the task to present the sanctuaries in a form that a larger public can better understand the skills needed to produce these fine pieces of art and worship. Similarly, great care has been taken to explain the formidable task to preserve and sometimes restore these precious pieces. The exhibition explains in an accessible manner what place each piece has in the Jewish tradition and regional varieties. Examples of annotations to assist interpretation of the texts or graphical annotations complement the original documents and sacred texts. These exhibits allow a for a starting point for a better understanding of the importance of the Hebrew Bible and the scrolls of the Book of Esther in the practice of Jewish rituals. A more permanent exhibition could greatly enhance inter religious understanding and respect of traditions.