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This document is a compilation of recent research articles, reports, and resources related to Jewish studies. It covers a wide range of topics including Canadian Jewish populations, racial and ethnic consciousness, Jewish education, political cleavages, Jewish migration, Jewish-Muslim relations, sexual misconduct, Jewish diversity in Israel, Jewish orthodoxy, and Jewish community studies. The reports focus on specific Jewish communities such as San Diego, Greater Portland, and the Long Beach area, as well as topics like experiencing Israel through sport and antisemitism on US college campuses. The resources provided include journal articles, opinion pieces, a podcast, research resources, reports from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, and tables of contents from edited volumes and other journals. The document aims to offer library patrons a diverse range of perspectives and information for their research on Jewish studies. [Extracted from the article]

This document, authored by Ira M. Sheskin, provides a comprehensive list of research updates in the field of Jewish studies. It includes a wide range of topics such as LGBT activism and Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel, the impact of Jewish culture on cultural identity, Jewish engagement in Canada and Australia, community studies in different regions, child custody struggles in a Hasidic court, the use of digital media in religious communities, Jewish migration to Germany, and more. [Extracted from the article]

Max Czollek's book, "De-Integrate! A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century," explores the experiences of Jews living in Germany after World War II. Czollek challenges the dominant German memory culture that excludes descendants of migrants and historical minorities, including Jews. He argues for a radical diversity and an inclusive society that accepts difference rather than assimilating everyone into one culture. The book provides new insights into the lives of Jews in Germany and their quest for empowerment in a polarized society. [Extracted from the article]

"Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation between Jews" by Omri Asscher explores the complex relationship between Israeli and American Jews through the lens of translation. Asscher argues that translation is a political activity that transcends cultural boundaries and has implications for identity. The book examines how Israeli literature is translated for an American audience and how American Jewish literature is framed for an Israeli readership. Asscher suggests that translation can shape the perception of Israeli and American Jewish identity and highlights the changes in translation approaches over time. While the book has some repetitive passages and factual errors, it is a valuable contribution to understanding the dynamics of translation and its impact on literature and society. [Extracted from the article]

Aviad Tabory's book, "State of Halakha: Israel's History in Jewish Law," provides a comprehensive survey of the halakhic (Jewish legal) issues that have arisen in Orthodox Judaism since Israel's independence in 1948. The book covers a wide range of topics, including the 1948 Declaration of Independence, wars and military operations, peace treaties, immigration, and political events. Tabory explores how these issues challenged Jewish legal scholars to develop appropriate halakhic responses without the benefit of earlier precedents. The book also discusses the integration of Jewish law into the Israeli legal system, particularly in the areas of rabbinical courts and family law. The author suggests that halakha (Jewish law) will continue to play a role in addressing ongoing issues in Israeli society, such as gender equality and the nature of democracy. [Extracted from the article]

I do not want to commit the Neubauers and Cooperman too much, but I hope we can look forward to the next one, ten, thousand Pew surveys of the Jews in the US, in Israel, and maybe across the rest of the world. More specifically we can pit - one against the other - Israel as Utopia, and America as Utopia: on the one hand, the ideal State of an ideal Jewish People, harmonious and all-inclusive, and on the other hand the ideal Greatest Society, with all Peoples living together and thriving, including those ideal Jews. I am sincerely pleased and honored to pay tribute to Joe and Jeannette Neubauer and to Alan Cooperman on their receiving the Mandell Berman award on behalf of the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry. [Extracted from the article]

Keywords: Research; Social relevance; Epistemological challenges; Academia and community; Diversity; Jewish identities EN Research Social relevance Epistemological challenges Academia and community Diversity Jewish identities 241 244 4 10/31/22 20220601 NES 220601 After a long-lasting period, we have gathered to celebrate science and knowledge and the many sources and inputs that converge in advancing the routes of reason. The ASSJ is honored to present the Berman Service Award 2020-2021 to Joseph Neubauer and Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer and Allan Cooperman to acknowledge the seminal contributions made to our field through the Pew Research Center's studies of Jewish Americans in 2013 and 2020 and Israeli Jews in 2015. [Extracted from the article]

This document provides a list of books that have been received by the journal "Contemporary Jewry." The books cover a wide range of topics related to Jewish culture, history, literature, and cuisine. Some of the titles include "Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt, the war years, 1939–1945," "The no-state solution: A Jewish manifesto," "I could nosh: Classic Jew-ish recipes revamped for everyday life," and "God's country: Christian Zionism in America." The list includes books from various publishers and covers different aspects of Jewish identity and experience. [Extracted from the article]

Shaul draws on her own observations of Kiddush clubs in Australia, as well as information about Kiddush clubs in Israel from a student questionnaire and internet information about Kiddush clubs the world over available on social media and the internet. It is my privilege to introduce the Marshall Sklare Memorial Award honorees for 2022 in this issue of I Contemporary Jewry i , as well as the honorees of the Mandel (Bill) Berman Service Award. Michal Shaul studies a common phenomenon in many Modern Orthodox synagogues, the "Kiddush club", who often leave prayer services early on Shabbat morning for a special "unofficial" gathering of comraderie for those "privileged" to be included. [Extracted from the article]

Israel has unified American Jewish communal life for much of the 20th century. However, early in the 21st century, Israel may no longer serve as a source for Jewish unity but of division, and American Jews are increasingly having a difficult time talking about Israel inside of their institutions. This phenomenon has become something of a truism, yet there has been no in-depth case study that explores why this is the case. This article seeks to fill this gap. Over the course of 46 interviews with 55 members of a non-Orthodox congregation in the San Francisco Bay Area, we explored why this community found it so difficult to talk about Israel. Contrary to popular perception that would have predicted that Israel would play a central role in this community, it played hardly any role at all. Using Erving Goffman's theory of frame analysis, we identified three frames that explain the relative absence of Israel talk. Congregants have absorbed the "problem frame," which holds that talking about Israel would be potentially divisive and toxic, despite the fact that none of the congregants experienced conflict. They mobilized two other frames – the "resource frame" and the "local frame" – which are in conflict with one another. The "resource frame" holds that Israel is an important and beloved resource for identity, community, and practice. Yet, the "local frame" prioritizes more immediate issues or concerns above the more abstract commitment to Israel. The resultant tension between Israel as an abstract resource for Jewish identity and the more immediate ways in which people operationalized their commitments, suggests that beneath the problem frame lies a tension that is less communal than personal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have spent considerable effort to uncover and explain the unique ways that contemporary American Jews think and feel about Israel, yet the voices of American Jewish children have been conspicuously absent from most research. American Jewish children—like the adults in their lives—have beliefs, opinions, and thoughts about Israel and its role in American Jewish life. This article makes two distinct yet interrelated arguments about the role of children in research on contemporary American Jews. The first is that children ought to be included in research about American Judaism. Second, the inclusion of children in research both widens the scope and shifts the focus of understanding American Jewish relationships to Israel. Children's participation in research demonstrates how American Jews develop relationships with Israel over the course of a lifetime. In addition, the methodological approaches that allow for the inclusion of children in research shift the focus of understanding away from a "deficit model" that measures participants' knowledge and connection against an existing ledger, and towards an "inventory model" that takes stock of participants' cognitive and emotional warehouses. This shift is essential for understanding what Israel means in the lives of American Jews of all ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of the complex nature of Jewish identification and its reliance on a variety of measurable concepts, studies of identification patterns and trends should rely on an assessment of several aspects simultaneously rather than a single aspect at a time. This paper demonstrates the use of Similarity Structure Analysis (SSA) in developing an integrated approach to the study of Jewish identification. Rather than relying on reported frequencies of behaviors and attitudes, SSA focuses on the underlying structure and meaning of the several variables simultaneously involved in a given phenomenology. In this study we address 28 Jewish identification variables in the US and Israel using a unified database specially created from two Pew Research Center surveys: Portrait of Jewish Americans conducted in 2013 and Israel's Religiously Divided Society conducted in 2015. Identical sets of questions were selected and compared for the two countries – comprising together nearly 85% of world Jewry – and for five age groups within each country SSA maps synthesize and compress huge amounts of information – which would not be possible with conventional techniques. By demonstrating similarities and dissimilarities by country of residence and generation, we unveil rich and unexpected textures and tensions in contemporary Jewish identification nationally and transnationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collective memory of the Holocaust among Israeli Jews has featured competition among four related but distinct constructions: Zionist Proof-text; Wasting Asset; Object Lesson for safeguarding human rights; and Template for Jewish life. This paper will analyze this competition and the implications of the apparent victory of the Template. While there is a sequence to the changing prominence of these different versions of the Holocaust, each version has enjoyed periods of relative success since World War II. In recent decades, however, the Holocaust as a Template for Jewish Life has emerged as ascendant. Throughout, competition among the four constructions was driven by parochial and temporary political interests and by the unintended consequences of dissatisfactions associated with any one of them. My analysis will trace this competition and those consequences, using them to explain the extreme and highly particular features of current Israeli Jewish collective memory of the Holocaust. The paper concludes with an assessment of the implications of the hegemonic status of this version of the Holocaust for appreciating Israel's contemporary political predicament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introductory essay is presented to a series of articles on Jewish demography. It discusses topics such as post-Holocaust identity narratives in the U.S. and Israel, the social scientific study of identity in the 21st century, and the relationship between ethnicity and religion in contemporary Jewish identity research.

Loving parents characterized by a strong religious orientation may feel ambivalence when their children completely reject their religious identity. The parents might find it difficult to accommodate to their children’s different identity, but at the same time, not want to drive their children away. We examine how this potential conflict situation is managed by focusing on Jews in Israel who take on a nonreligious identity after having been brought up by parents who were religiously observant. Our study is based on personal interviews with 20 religious (Orthodox) Jewish parents and 13 children who are no longer religious (representing a total of 18 households). Our findings emphasize the importance of silencing and self-silencing in managing conflict, as the sides are careful to refrain from making demands that might lead to a break in their relationships. Children often cover or mask their non-religious behavior in the presence of their parents, in order to help them maintain face and avoid embarrassment and shame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that the passive resistance paradigm which has dominated the literature on women in conservative religion is limited and that traces of more active resistance can be found. Based on interviews with Israeli modern Orthodox women who are challenging their exclusion from synagogue ritual, I draw attention to the harsh criticism that they raise and their mobilization to change the status-quo, despite the disapproval of communal rabbis. Reflecting such activism on a wider scale, I also consider the case of Shira Hadasha, an Orthodox feminist congregation in Jerusalem known for its radical departure from mainstream modern Orthodoxy regarding its approach to women's participation in Torah services. Through this study, I seek to contribute both to a better understanding of some of the feminist changes taking hold within modern Orthodoxy in Israel and to a wider perspective of the web of resistance among women in conservative religious traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade, one can note among secular Israelis the growing interest in Jewish texts and non-orthodox Jewish ritual. This interest is manifested in the increasing numbers of secular Batei- Midrash (Houses of Learning), Batei-Tfila (Houses of Prayer), and Jewish secular mass events taking place seasonally. Common to these grassroots activities is the attempt to reconstruct the Jewish secular identity and include new Jewish dimensions within it. These activities have been named by scholars, media and activists as the Jewish Renewal phenomenon: Hitchadshut Yehudit. In this paper, we propose that the various Jewish renewal activities lead to collective action that alters the conception of secular Jewish identity. Using the prism of the 'New Social Movements'(NSM) theory we argue that the Jewish Renewal Movement is a NSM with a shared narrative and vision. The paper will present the characteristics of the various Jewish Renewal organizations that identify them as a New Social Movement and the movement's historical development from the 1960's to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores some of the methodological and theoretical critiques concerning the meaning and measure of secularity and religiosity in contemporary Jewish identity research and compares them to critiques of secularization theory. Data from an ongoing study of contemporary post-Holocaust identity narratives of seventy American and twenty Israeli young adults between the ages of twenty and thirty are used as descriptive examples of the fluid and creative ways in which secularity and religiosity are invented and reinvented. These data offer glimpses of the ways in which young people reposition themselves within the institutional and linguistic spaces of the secular and the sacred. For many, their concerns begin with their own particular Jewishness and then often circle back to a “secular” and/or more universal expression of that particularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Israel’s migration patterns have been conducive in several ways to the demographic success of Zionism and Israel since 1947. In addition to the decisive success with respect to the growth in the number of Jews in Israel, their proportion in the Israeli population, and the proportion of world Jewry residing in Israel, following the 1967 war Israel attracted immigrants of higher educational level than those arriving during the 1950s and 1960s. In addition, Israel has been successful in keeping emigration rates of Jews relatively low during most years, including the last decade. Moreover, the rate of return migration among Israeli-born Jewish emigrants has been relatively high and the returnees highly educated compared to non-returning emigrants. Finally, it seems that Israel has been quite successful in integrating into Israeli society non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Republics. However, this cannot be said about the non-Jewish labor migrants who arrived in Israel since the early 1990. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Of all the intergroup conflicts in Israeli Jewish society, the most acute social problem is constituted by relationships between religious and non-religious Jews. At the same time, the findings of comprehensive research carried out in the early 1990s into the religious behavior of the Jewish population in Israel indicate that Israeli Jews do feel a commitment to Jewish continuity and to the Jewish character of Israeli society, even if they selectively-but systematically-orient their patterns of observing tradition. Thus some traditions are kept or marked by many, while others-in particular those relating to the "proscriptive" precepts of the Sabbath-are not observed by the majority and produce a rift among Israeli Jews. This article discusses and analyzes the nature of the selective observance of tradition in Israel as a component of the Jewish identity of Israeli Jews, and in particular of those Jews who are not religious. Although there is a general consensus that Israel should have a Jewish character, on the one hand there is resistance to religious coercion, and on the other hand, formulation has not yet occurred of Jewish attributes of a "Jewish State" which is not necessarily religious, apart from selective secularization of religious symbols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to analyze the impact of religiosity on the standard of living and the quality of life of Jews in Israel as well as on the efficiency with which they are able to transform resources (their standard of living) into quality of life. The data sources are a time-budget survey conducted around 1992 in Israel. The methodology is based on the use of the concept of distance function that has appeared in the literature on duality in production and consumption and has been widely applied in efficiency analysis. The statistical procedure is based on both the so-called corrected ordinary least squares method (COLS) and on the stochastic production frontier analysis (FRONTIER). The results of this empirical investigation indicate that whereas the gender has no effect on the standard of living or the quality of life, the standard of living increases with education and age, is higher among individuals who are single and lower among the most recent immigrants (those who came after 1971 from Europe or America) as well as among the very religious (the haredi). The quality of life is found to be higher among single, more educated individuals and lower among the most recent immigrants. But it is also higher among religious (those who define themselves as being religious or very religious) than among the non religious people. It appears therefore that the very religious (the "haredim") are more efficient in transforming resources (their standard of living) into quality of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]