New Article: Golan & Stadler, The Dual Use of the Internet by Chabad

Golan, Oren, and Nurit Stadler. “Building the Sacred Community Online: The Dual Use of the Internet by Chabad.” Media, Culture & Society (early view; online first).

 
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0163443715615415
 
Abstract

Religious communities have ongoing concerns about Internet use, as it intensifies the clash between tradition and modernity, a clash often found in traditionally inclined societies. Nevertheless, as websites become more useful and widely accessible, religious and communal stakeholders have continuously worked at building and promoting them. This study focuses on Chabad, a Jewish ultra-Orthodox movement, and follows webmasters of three key websites to uncover how they distribute religious knowledge over the Internet. Through an ethnographic approach that included interviews with over 30 webmasters, discussions with key informants, and observations of the websites themselves, the study uncovered webmaster’s strategies to foster solidarity within their community, on one hand, while also proselytizing their outlook on Judaism, on the other. Hence, the study sheds light on how a fundamentalist society has strengthened its association with new media, thus facilitating negotiation between modernity and religious piety.

 

 

 

New Book: Campbell, Digital Judaism

Campbell, Heidi A., ed. Digital Judaism: Jewish Negotiations with Digital Media and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2015.

 

In this volume, contributors consider the ways that Jewish communities and users of new media negotiate their uses of digital technologies in light of issues related to religious identity, community and authority. Digital Judaism presents a broad analysis of how and why various Jewish groups negotiate with digital culture in particular ways, situating such observations within a wider discourse of how Jewish groups throughout history have utilized communication technologies to maintain their Jewish identities across time and space. Chapters address issues related to the negotiation of authority between online users and offline religious leaders and institutions not only within ultra-Orthodox communities, but also within the broader Jewish religious culture, taking into account how Jewish engagement with media in Israel and the diaspora raises a number of important issues related to Jewish community and identity. Featuring recent scholarship by leading and emerging scholars of Judaism and media, Digital Judaism is an invaluable resource for researchers in new media, religion and digital culture.

 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

• 1. Introduction: Studying Jewish Engagement with Digital Media and Culture Heidi A. Campbell
• 1. Ethnography and social movement studies
• 2. The Jewish Communication Tradition and its Encounters with (the) New Media Menahem Blondheim
• 3. Appropriation & Innovation: Pop-up Communities: Facebook, Grassroots Jews and Offline Post-Denominational Judaism Nathan Abrams
• 4. Yoatzot Halacha: Ruling the Internet, One Question at a Time Michal Raucher
• 5. Sanctifying the Internet: Aish HaTorah’s use of the Internet for Digital Outreach Heidi A. Campbell and Wendi Bellar
• 6. Jewish Games for Learning: Renewing Heritage Traditions in the Digital Age Owen Gottlieb
• 7. Communicating Identity through Religious Internet Memes on “Tweeting Orthodoxies” Facebook Page Aya Yadlin-Segal
• 8. Resistance & Reconstruction: Legitimation of New Media and Community Building amongst Jewish Denominations in the USA Oren Golan
• 9. On Pomegranates and Etrogs: Internet Filters as Practices of Media Ambivalence among National Religious Jews in Israel Michele Rosenthal and Rivki Ribak
• 10. Pashkevilim in Campaigns Against New Media: What Can Pashkevillim Accomplish that Newspapers Cannot? Hananel Rosenburg and Tsuriel Rashi
• 11. The Israeli Rabbi and the Internet Yoel Cohen

Contributors
Index

 

HEIDI A. CAMPBELL is Associate Professor of Communication at Texas A&M University and Director of the Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies. She is author of Exploring Religious Community Online (2005) and When Religion Meets New Media (2010) and editor of Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media World (2013).

 

Reviews: Ben-Porat, Between State and Synagogue

Ben-Porat, Guy. Between State and Synagogue: The Secularization of Contemporary Israel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

 

Reviews

• Lassen, Amos. “The Times They Are A-Changing.” Reviews by Amos Lassen, April 7, 2013.
• Tabory, Ephraim. “Review.” Middle East Journal 67.4 (2013): 646-7.
• Omer, Atalia. “Review.” American Journal of Sociology 119.5 (2014): 1518-1520.
• Sorek, Tamir. “Review.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 46.2 (2015): 421-2.
• Weiss, Shayna. “Review.” Journal of Church and State 57.3 (2015): 565-7.
• Hollander, Philip. “Judaism in Israel.” VCU Menorah Review 82 (Winter/Spring 2015).

 

 

 

Podcast: Stav and Farber on Marriage and Conversion in Israel

David Stav and Seth Farber: Marriage and Conversion in Israel

As part of its ongoing series on “Jewish Ideals & Current Dilemmas in Contemporary Zionism,” the Tikvah Overseas Seminars hosted two of Israel’s leading rabbinic activists, David Stav and Seth Farber to discuss recent legislation regarding marriage and conversion in Israel.

 

 

They have worked together to promote bills that will allow greater numbers of municipal rabbis to register couples for marriage and perform conversions under the auspices of Israel’s Chief Rabbinate. While heralded by some as an opportunity to prevent intermarriage by increasing the number of Israelis recognized as Jews, these initiatives have been criticized by others as further entrenchment of the Chief Rabbinate’s monopoly over marriage and conversion. Their conversation highlights disagreements regarding civil marriage in Israel, conversion standards, and the ability of Jewish law to evolve. More broadly, their positions reflect different approaches toward reducing the tensions between the Jewish and democratic characters of the State of Israel.

The event was recorded on February 6, 2015. It is also available as a podcast via iTunes or Stitcher.

 

New Article: Edrei, Identity, Politics and Halakhah in Modern Israel

Edrei, Arye. “Identity, Politics and Halakhah in Modern Israel.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 14.1 (2015): 109-25.

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14725886.2015.1007608

 

Abstract

The fierce debate over conversion to Judaism raging in Israel today has been fuelled by the Israeli Law of Return and the resulting immigration of large numbers of non-Jews to Israel from the Soviet Union. It has precedents, however, in earlier rabbinic literature. This paper traces the conversion debate from its Talmudic origins, through the nineteenth century halakhic polemic, to the present day. It demonstrates how the processes of secularization and nationalism that have affected the Jewish community have impacted on a changing balance in the roles of religion and nationalism in the definition of “who is a Jew” and “who is a convert?” It also shows how halakhic rulings are affected by social changes and how the ideologies of halakhic authorities impact their decisions.

New Article: Kaplan, Integrating Academic Talmudic Scholarship into Israeli Religious Zionist Yeshivas

Kaplan, Lawrence. “Back to Zechariah Frankel and Louis Jacobs? On Integrating Academic Talmudic Scholarship into Israeli Religious Zionist Yeshivas and the Spectre of the Historical Development of the Halakhah.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 14.1 (2015): 89-108.

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14725886.2015.1008730

 

Abstract

This paper will discuss three new methods of teaching Talmud that Israeli Religious Zionist Yeshivas have adopted over the past two decades against the backdrop of the hitherto and perhaps still dominant approach to teaching Talmud in these Yeshivas, namely, the classical conceptual, ahistorical, highly abstract “Brisker” approach: (1) a modified Brisker approach; (2) the “Torat Eretz Yisrael,” “the Torah of the Land of Israel” approach; and (3) what I would call the “shiluv” approach, a term that implies forming a new and harmonious whole. What these three approaches have in common is the desire to retain the conceptual analysis of the Brisker approach, but to abandon its strict formalism and combine it with the search for religious meaning and significance. However, while the first two approaches in their search for the religious significance of the text generally eschew the use of the critical methodologies employed by academic Talmudic scholarship, the third approach embraces the use of those methodologies and seeks to integrate them into the world of traditional Talmud study. I will focus on the theological challenges raised by this attempted integration and on how the exponents of the “shiluv” approach have sought to deal with them.

New Article: Zion-Waldoks, Agency, Feminism, and Religion among Orthodox Agunah Activists

Zion-Waldoks, Tanya. “Politics of Devoted Resistance. Agency, Feminism, and Religion among Orthodox Agunah Activists in Israel.” Gender & Society 29.1 (2015): 73-97.

 

URL: http://gas.sagepub.com/content/29/1/73

 

Abstract

 This study explores how religious women become legitimate actors in the public sphere and analyzes their agency—its meanings, capacities, and transformative aims. It presents a novel case study of Israeli Modern-Orthodox Agunah activists who engage in highly politicized collective feminist resistance as religious actors working for religious ends. Embedded in and activated by Orthodoxy, they advocate women’s rights to divorce, voicing a moral critique of tradition and its agents precisely because they are devoutly devoted to them. Such political agency is innovatively conceptualized as “devoted resistance”: critique within relationship, enabled by cultural schema, and comprising both interpretive skills and “relational-autonomy” capacities. This study contends that understanding agency within religious grammars reveals its underlying logics, highlighting how structures shape the meanings and realization of women’s varied “agentive capacities.” It challenges current dichotomies like feminism/religion, resistance/submission, and autonomy/dependence. Overall, the author argues for a nuanced, culturally specific, capacity-based, relational approach to analyzing religious women’s agency.

New Article: Hollander, Rulings of Official Religious Authorities in Israel Concerning Women’s Singing

Hollander, Aviad Yehiel. “Halachic Multiculturalism in the IDF: Rulings of Official Religious Authorities in Israel Concerning ‘Women’s Singing’.” Modern Judaism 34.3 (2014): 271-86.

URL: http://mj.oxfordjournals.org/content/34/3/271

Excerpt

In the summer of 2011, a number of soldiers walked out of an auditorium in which a musical performance was taking place. The men, cadets in an officer’s course, explained that they walked out of the performance because there were female vocalists, and the halacha prohibits men from listening to females sing.

As a result of this incident, representatives of the army chief rabbinate as well as the Matka’l, or Israeli General Staff, convened to discuss and ultimately publish new guidelines addressing the participation of religious soldiers in military ceremonies featuring female vocalists. These new guidelines were in turn criticized by a group of army chaplains united under the name “Keren Lahav—for the strengthening of Judaism in the IDF.” The group published a joint document in which they stated that the army’s decisions had undermined the trust of religious soldiers in the system. They claimed that the new guidelines—which were approved by the IDF’s Chief Rabbi Rafi Peretz—demonstrated Peretz’s ignorance of the inner workings of the army system. One criticism against Rabbi Peretz was that he had not risen to his position from within the military but rather was an outside candidate placed directly at the top of the pyramid.

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New Article: Kaye, Eliezer Goldman and the Origins of Meta-Halacha

Kaye, Alexander. “Eliezer Goldman and the Origins of Meta-Halacha.” Modern Judaism 34.3 (2014): 309-333.

URL: http://mj.oxfordjournals.org/content/34/3/309

Excerpt

Eliezer Goldman (1918–2002) had a significant, though seldom recognized, impact on the way that contemporary religious Jews deal with the implications of modernity. Perhaps his most far-reaching contribution was his philosophy of halacha. Goldman was hardly alone among religious thinkers in proposing halachic responses to the constitutional, technological, and ethical dilemmas posed by the establishment of the State of Israel. He was, however, distinctive in two respects. First, he was one of the few Jewish thinkers in the mid-twentieth century who mapped out the basics of a halachic jurisprudence in a Western idiom. To be sure, others had described certain aspects of Jewish law in Western terms. However, Goldman was rare in that he articulated a broad philosophy of halacha in an attempt to explain the mechanisms of halachic change. To do so, he showed that halacha is made up not only of concrete rules but of abstract principles that guide its development. To describe these principles, he invented the term “meta-halacha,” that continues to enjoy great currency among contemporary Jewish thinkers.² Second, Goldman was unusual among religious Zionists in that his thought was deeply influenced by streams in twentieth-century American thought. In particular, his theology and his halachic jurisprudence drew heavily on American philosophical pragmatism and legal realism. This gave Goldman’s writing an idiosyncratic twist and contributes to its ongoing resonance with the contemporary reader.

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Reviews: Israel-Cohen, Between Feminism and Orthodox Judaism

Israel-Cohen, Yael. Between Feminism and Orthodox Judaism. Resistance, Identity, and Religious Change in Israel. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012.

 

 

 

Reviews

 

• Bahreini, Faezeh. “Review.” Gender and Society 27.4 (2013): 590-592.
• Bar-Ilan, Margalit Shilo. “Review.” Shofar 32.2 (2014): 144-146.
• Millen, Rochelle L. “Review.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 13.2 (2014): 311-312.

New Book: Fuchs, Israeli Feminist Scholarship

Fuchs, Esther, ed. Israeli Feminist Scholarship. Gender, Zionism, and Difference. Austin, TX : University of Texas Press, 2014.

More than a dozen scholars give voice to cutting-edge postcolonial trends (from ecofeminism to gender identity in family life) that question traditional approaches to Zionism while highlighting nationalism as the core issue of Israeli feminist scholarship today.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction. Israeli Feminist Scholarship: Gender, Zionism, and Difference

Esther Fuchs

Chapter One. The Evolution of Critical Paradigms in Israeli Feminist Scholarship: A Theoretical Model

Esther Fuchs

Chapter Two. Politicizing Masculinities: Shahada and Haganah

Sheila H. Katz

Chapter Three. The Double or Multiple Image of the New Hebrew Woman

Margalit Shilo

Chapter Four. The Heroism of Hannah Senesz: An Exercise in Creating Collective National Memory in the State of Israel

Judith T. Baumel

Chapter Five. The Feminisation of Stigma in the Relationship Between Israelis and Shoah Survivors

Ronit Lentin

Chapter Six. Gendering Military Service in the Israel Defense Forces

Dafna N. Izraeli

Chapter Seven. The Halachic Trap: Marriage and Family Life

Ruth Halperin-Kaddari

Chapter Eight. Motherhood as a National Mission: The Construction of Womanhood in the Legal Discourse in Israel

Nitza Berkovitch

Chapter Nine. No Home at Home: Women’s Fiction vs. Zionist Practice

Yaffah Berlovitz

Chapter Ten. Wasteland Revisited: An Ecofeminist Strategy

Hannah Naveh

Chapter Eleven. Tensions in Israeli Feminism: The Mizrahi-Ashkenazi Rift

Henriette Dahan-Kalev

Chapter Twelve. Scholarship, Identity, and Power: Mizrahi Women in Israel

Pnina Motzafi-Haller

Chapter Thirteen. Reexamining Femicide: Breaking the Silence and Crossing “Scientific” Borders

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

Chapter Fourteen. The Construction of Lesbianism as Nonissue in Israel

Erella Shadmi

Chapter Fifteen. From Gender to Genders: Feminists Read Women’s Locations in Israeli Society

Hanna Herzog

Acknowledgments

Contributors

Index

 

Purchase from publisher: https://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/fucisr

New Article: Taragin-Zeller, Modesty among Female Ultra-Orthodox Teenagers in Israel

Taragin-Zeller, Lea. “Modesty for Heaven’s Sake: Authority and Creativity among Female Ultra-Orthodox Teenagers in Israel.” Nashim 26 (2014): 75-96.

 

URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nashim/v026/26.taragin-zeller.html

 

Abstract

The ethnographic research that I conducted at a Bais Yaakov seminary in Jerusalem demonstrates how ultra-Orthodox female teachers and their teenage pupils structure an ideology of modesty through the reinterpretation of canonical texts on modesty. In this study, I show that modesty is a creative sphere informed by two trends: the adoption of modern patterns of behavior, and religious innovation. The exegesis these women give to the texts upon which they base their practice redefines the field of modesty in two primary ways: (1) It transforms modesty from a rigid halachic dictate into a dynamic feminine “mission” that is connected to the sphere of virtues; and (2) it replaces the socio-masculine discourse upon which this observance is based with a divine imperative. This phenomenon bears witness to a shift in the types of authority that these ultra-Orthodox teenage girls are willing to accept, since the only justification they accept for their modesty practices is that of personal devotion to God.

Cite: Irshai, Dignity, Honor,and Equality: Torah Reading by Women in Israeli Modern Orthodoxy

Irshai, Ronit. “Dignity, Honor, and Equality in Contemporary Halachic Thinking: The Case of Torah Reading by Women in Israeli Modern Orthodoxy.” Modern Judaism 33.3 (2013): 332-56.

URL: mj.oxfordjournals.org/content/33/3/332.extract.html

Extract

The past few years have witnessed the halachic discussion, in Modern Orthodox circles, of various suggestions for radical changes in the structure of prayer in the synagogue.According to these suggestions, women would be permitted to perform the reading of the Torah in synagogue in the framework of a standard orthodox congregation, and not in separate women’s prayer groups.

[…]

Can we honestly say, even in this case, that the dignity of women is not impinged upon as a result of their being deprived of honor? In other words, we can see that in situations in which one must set an order of precedence, women’s inferior religious status (their lower level of “holiness”) becomes more prominent, and a wealth of such examples exists throughout halachic literature.

As a result of all that has been said thus far I would like to challenge the claim that an attitude of “different but equal” does not, in practice, constitute an injury to women’s religious status or their level of holiness.

Cite: Kaye, Democratic Themes in Religious Zionism

Kaye, Alexander. “Democratic Themes in Religious Zionism.” Shofar 31.2 (2013): 8-30.

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URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/shofar/v031/31.2.kaye.html

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Abstract

Religious Zionists who wanted to preserve their commitments to tradition and the Jewish state had to address the difficulties of applying tradition to new realities. The main challenge for them arose from the democratic nature of the new State of Israel. Between 1948 and the mid-1950s, Zionist leaders and thinkers contributed to the evolving dialectical relationship between a secular, modern democracy and traditional Jewish culture based on halakah. Religious Zionists were very much aware of the challenge that democratic principles posed to the Jewish tradition and were often reluctant to compromise their halakic commitments for the sake of the demands of a democratic state. Thus, scholarship has focused on the confrontation, compatibility, or compromise between religion and modernity in the Zionist context as if they are two distinct and opposing spheres. In these sketches of halakic argumentation among religious Zionists in the early years of Israel, I try to complicate this picture.

Cite: Stern, Jewish Law and Matters of State: Theory, Policy, and Practice

Stern, Yedidia. “Jewish Law and Matters of State: Theory, Policy, and Practice.” Journal of Law, Religion and State. Available online 2012.

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URL: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/ccst/2012/00000016/00000008/art00007

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Abstract

In recent years Jewish religious leaders have often expressed religious opinions in matters concerning the foreign and security policy of the State of Israel. The present article focuses on the internal religious legitimacy of halakhic rulings in these matters and reveals the prerequisites that decisors must satisfy before voicing a binding halakhic opinion on issues concerning the Israeli Arab conflict, peace agreements, Jewish settlements in Judah and Samaria, etc. The article is divided into three parts that answer the following questions: (a) are matters of State policy subject to halakhic norms or are they situated outside the realm of Halakha? (b) does Halakha have a judicial policy seeking to rule on these issues? (c) what are the practical difficulties that decisors face if they wish to rule on them? The article points out the diversity of internal halakhic opinions on the questions under investigation, and outlines an analytical method for a halakhic discussion aimed at answering them.