Search

Modern Orthodoxy is a sect of Judaism which aims to combine a high level of commitment to Jewish observance with immersion in modern society. Alumni of Modern Orthodox parochial high schools have varying degrees of commitment towards religion. This study was designed to better understand the factors that lead adolescents towards internalizing traditional Orthodox beliefs. Previous studies on religion in general are lacking in quality and depth, using superficial factors such as church attendance to attest to religious commitment. Studies on Modern Orthodox Jewish teens are limited in quantity, with very few studies published on this population. This study focused on 1341 students from 18 Modern Orthodox high schools in the United States using the JewBALE 2.0 to collect the data. The design evaluated the relationship between spirituality and self-esteem, spiritual struggle, religious homogeny between parents and adolescents, and gender. Factors such as mental health, positive Judaic studies experience, and relationships with Judaic studies teachers were examined as potential mediators. The data indicated that students with high levels of spirituality would also have high levels of self-esteem and religious homogeny with their parents, as well as high levels of agreement with the Orthodox communal norms. Positive relationships with teachers and experiences in Jewish studies classes mediated the otherwise negative relationship between spirituality and disagreement with communal norms. Females were more likely to have high levels of spirituality than males. This study is important for those who want to better understand the factors involved in helping students enrolled in Jewish Modern Orthodox high schools achieve high levels of spirituality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, titled "Dynamics of Identities: Jewish Communities in Africa and Their Diaspora," explores the Jewish communities in Africa and their diaspora. It discusses the ancient Jewish traditions and rich cultural heritage of these communities, as well as their integration into the broader Jewish and general history of Africa. The research presented in the article focuses on various aspects of Jewish identity, including tradition and modernity, education, holidays and customs, religious organizations, and more. The article also includes specific case studies on Jewish communities in Ethiopia, Algeria, Morocco, South Africa, and Israel. [Extracted from the article]

The Haredi community in Israel is the youngest community. It grows at a higher rate than that of the Arab population in Israel. The calls to introduce more secular education are motivated by both a desire to acculturate the Haredi population and bring it closer to the norms and values of the Israeli discourse and from a wish to integrate more people from this community into the job market. Calls to introduce more secular education in the Haredi system have seen constant resistance that has been documented in scholarship. In the U.S., the discussion on the correct role of general education started with a different frame of reference. The existence of meaningful religious education was put into question, and only after the holocaust did American Orthodoxy significantly expand its educational options. This text will describe the diverse spectrum of Haredi educational institutions and their approaches to secular education. I am using Monsey as a test case since it is a good representation of the kaleidoscope of Orthodoxy in the U.S., as far as the different communities are concerned. It is also a very decentralized community, since there is no dominant group in Monsey. This fact allows for more initiatives, including educational initiatives, to be undertaken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past few decades have witnessed significant increases in levels of education among women members of conservative religions. Contrary to the expectations of both researchers and policymakers, this trend has not been accompanied by decreases in levels of piety. The purpose of this article is to explore what it means to educated religious women to belong to conservative religious communities that embody values and practices that do not conform to the values of modernity associated with exposure to higher education. On the basis of a series of group interviews with educated Jewish Haredi women in Israel, we examined this very question. We found that the women we interviewed demonstrated a deep pride in their religious identity and an ongoing and strong commitment to their community. At the same time, they regarded membership in their community as a form of social capital enabling them to secure a wide array of benefits, which provided compensation for the demand to conform to conservative practices. We conclude that through a process of exchange (social capital against the price of conforming), the women challenge existing norms while maintaining strong religious identities, taking part in democratic processes, and, together, forging articulated bonds of membership and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study examines how the agency of religious Druze women in Israel affects professional identity and religious affiliation and how these, in turn, shape the gender religious perception in their community, especially in the fields of education and employment. Through semi-structured interviews with twenty women, the study identifies the factors that promote or inhibit the increasing legitimacy in community religious discourse for the integration of religious women in higher education and quality employment. The main finding of the study is that religious, professionally educated Druze women in Israel direct their agency to a complex and challenging interaction with the modern world. By doing so, these women challenge the boundaries of their ultra-religious community, thereby expanding them. The findings show that educated religious Druze women in Israel reject the binary division between "conservative religious" and "modern" and replace it with different definitions of what is considered religious, conservative, and modern. One of the main insights that emerged from the study is that the women are able to act autonomously to make their choices, acquire education, integrate into the poor local labor market in professional positions, accumulate economic and social resources through their professional and religious status, and negotiate their status in the religious community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As if by design, crisis reveals basic structural fault lines. In the middle of the COVID-19 crisis, non-Haredi Jews expressed surprise and even outrage about the ultra-orthodox Haredi response to the pandemic. It was not understood how large-scale violations of public health protocols comported with the legal-halakhic principle of Pikuaḥ Nefesh (saving human life). In this essay, I explore Hasidic response to COVID-19 as reported in the secular and Haredi press and in emergent social science literature about this crisis. I place Haredi response to crisis in relation to the clash between two sets of values: the value of saving human life and the value of intensive Talmud study (talmud Torah) and ritual-communal practice. In what Robert Cover called a paideic nomos, there are more important things than human life. What we see already in the Babylonian Talmud is the profound ambiguity of paideic norms vis-à-vis the larger public good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of studying the context in which churches were built in honour of the Theotokos or dedicated to her in North Africa, as well as in the rest of the Empire, during the sixth century, is to gain a more thorough understanding of Justinian I's political programme, the utility of unifying dogma and the religious conversion of dissident elements, such as pagans, Jews, Samaritans etc. These issues are addressed by analysing the spatial—principally architectural—and rhetorical superposition of Orthodox Christianity on the places of worship of other communities. It is held here that it is possible to demonstrate that this redefinition of space went a long way towards reinforcing the identity of provincial populations, especially in conflictive or border areas, which had to be secured within the territories that the Byzantine Empire had recently recovered so as to guarantee their political loyalty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pashkevilim, printed wall notices posted around Jewish ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, serve as one of the religious community's popular communication channels. The Pashkevilim mostly deal with controversial intra-community issues and feature a unique style, extremist rhetoric, and vocabulary derived from the religious literature. Humorous imitations of the genre arose over the years, which circulated in the community and outside of it, posing a challenge to the rabbinic hegemony. Although humorous Pashkevilim have likely been present for as long as Pashkevilim themselves, there is currently a lack of research investigating them. By adopting a critical discourse analysis approach, the current study aims to address this gap by identifying the predominant types of humorous Pashkevilim and analyzing the discursive practices they employ. The findings indicate three main discursive practices that characterize humorous Pashkevilim: parody, satire, and irony. While parody exaggerates the formal characteristics of the genre and mocks them, satire and irony criticize the content and topics discussed in traditional Pashkevilim, especially on the subject of Jewish law and religious stringency. These practices express an oppositional reading of the genre, which challenges its function as well as its socio-cultural, political, and religious significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christian communities in Palestine and Al-Andalus faced similar challenges during the ninth century. Although Muslim authorities tolerated Christianity and enshrined a certain degree of religious freedom, they downgraded these communities and encouraged conversion to Islam. In the long span, Christian communities decreased because many of their leading members emigrated or converted. Moreover, many of those that remained adopted the Arabic language, dressed like Muslims, and became increasingly assimilated into the ruling elite Muslim culture. This article suggests that the contacts and reciprocal influence between Christian communities from Palestine and Spain during this period were more substantial than hitherto perceived. Thus, they used the same methods with some local adaptations to tackle their critical situation. They introduced a growing use of Arabic in religious life, established and upgraded important pilgrimage shrines, and some extremist monastic communities fostered and encouraged martyrdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many studies that deal with the role of media and the motives for their creation. The present article explores the background behind the development of Ultra-Orthodox journalism. It examines the establishment of Ultra-Orthodox daily newspapers in Israel at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first by analyzing semistructured texts and ideas. The historical background and the way this journalism developed in general and specifically during those years reflect a strong social and censorial orientation. This study concludes that these newspapers can be seen as social definers that help preserve a community through censorship aimed at the general and other Ultra-Orthodox media. It helps communities and individuals self-define and can delineate an additional role for mass media as a social definer. The contention herein is that the establishment of Ultra-Orthodox newspapers in Israel serves as a mode for social definition; a definition that is arrived at by being part of the circle of the newspaper's readers, and the newspaper, in turn, defines itself by its censor board. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Muslim–Jewish relations have a long and complex history. However, notions that all Jews and Muslims are eternal enemies are proven wrong both historically and by today's survey data. A comprehensive review of the available survey data from the last two decades provides a glimpse into the views of Muslims and Jews of each other in countries where both communities are a minority. It is based on surveys from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, the U.K., and the U.S., including more than 91,000 respondents, comprising almost 27,000 Muslims and, in additional surveys, more than 52,000 Jewish respondents. Many Muslims and Jews acknowledge that the other community suffers from discrimination, albeit to varying degrees. Jews often see Islam and Muslim extremists as a threat to Jews, but most Jews, more than society in general, seem to distinguish between Muslim extremists and Muslims in general. Antisemitic attitudes are significantly higher among Muslims than among the general population in all surveys, even though the majority of Muslims in most European countries and in the United States do not exhibit antisemitic attitudes. The differences in anti-Jewish attitudes between Muslims and non-Muslims do not disappear when controlling for sociodemographic factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious disaffiliation has been found to occur at higher rates in LGBTQ+ individuals than in heterosexual individuals and in the general population. In this brief report, we explore whether LGBTQ+ people who disaffiliated from Orthodox Judaism attributed sexual identity and/or Orthodox Judaism's lack of acceptance of homosexuality to their disaffiliation. This analysis focuses on 117 individuals who identified as LGBTQ+ who were drawn from a larger study that included 387 participants across all sexual orientations who disaffiliated from Orthodox Judaism. Unexpectedly, only 18 of the respondents reported that their sexual identity and/or religious views on homosexuality were causes for their disaffiliation. A lack of education and language around LGBTQ+ concepts in ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities may have contributed to this finding. We suggest that additional research be conducted to explore the complex relationship between LGBTQ+ identity and disaffiliation from Orthodox Judaism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The socialization of the Ethiopian Jewish community, known as Beta Israel in Israeli society, is marked by performing cultural customs and rituals to establish its unique tradition and collective ethnic narrative. The Sigd is a holiday that is celebrated on the 29th of the Hebrew month of Heshvan, when the community marks its devotion to Zion by renewing the covenant between the Jewish people, God, and the Torah. This narrative of return to the homeland is also expressed and framed in a tragic context by observing a Memorial Day for the members of the Ethiopian Jewish community who perished during their journey to Israel from Sudan. These two commemorative dates support the narrative of Beta Israel and advance its public recognition. This ethnographic study examines why and how these practices were mentioned and performed in an Israeli Reform Jewish congregation, a community that does not include Ethiopians members, and has a religious and cultural character that is different from the traditions of Beta Israel. Both the Reform community and the Ethiopian community deal with stereotypes and institutional and public inequality in Israel. I argue that their solidarity is constructed and based on social perceptions and experiences of social alienation and immigration traumas. This political motivation to mark the narrative of the 'other', particularly as an excluded religious group that fights against the Orthodox Jewish monopoly in Israel, marks the Reform community as an egalitarian agent that gives voice to the marginalized. The fact that most Reform congregants are 'sabras' (native) Israelis sheds light on how their perception as a majority, and not only as a minority, produces a critical statement about Zionist immigration and acclimatization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few decades the Haredi community has been expanding and it includes a diversity of groups characterized by wide margins, therefore it may be considered an imagined community. On Lag Ba'Omer 2021, 45 people died, and over 150 were injured in the Meron Crowd Crush, most of them from the diverse Haredi community in Israel. Coping with disasters in a religious community includes a religious-faith level, and a social level. In this study, we will examine the response styles to a disaster in the Haredi community, as a case study of religious communities coping with a civilian disaster. This study will assist in understanding the community's narrative, and the place of the community in coping with a disaster. The study uses the qualitative-constructivist method and applies a categorical analysis of 1146 verbal responses to an internet survey that was conducted subsequent to the disaster. We propose a theoretical-categorical model that divides the responses into five pairs of categories: Emotional, Religious, Spiritual-Transcendental, Social, and Civil responses, each pair divided into past and future. Emotional responses: expressing grief and mourning (past), or paralysis, anxiety, and instability, (future); Religious responses: search for a religious reason (past), or a call for religious strengthening (future); Spiritual-Transcendent responses: dealing with questions of faith (past), or viewing the disaster as a transcendent message, and seeking spiritual comfort (future); Social-Spiritual responses: attributing the disaster to collective punishment due to 'corruption' (past), or recommendations for 'correction' of the social world (future); Civil responses: including searching for deficiencies, blaming entities (past), or suggestions for improvements and correction of deficiencies (future). We discussed a spectrum of response styles, while distinguishing between responses that are concerned with finding a reason or explanation for the disaster (past), and those who wish to draw a conclusion (future). Furthermore, social injustices are seen as religious offenses that led to the disaster. That is, it is a religious soul-searching that deals, less with traditional offenses and more with social injustices. We also discussed the volume of the different responses: In the emotional reactions and civil reactions, the Past Category is larger than the Future, whereas in the religious and spiritual responses, the Future categories are larger. This finding may symbolize a tendency to channel the pain in a positive way to a practical and active direction. Religious actions provide a sense of agency and self-efficacy. At last, we noticed that the disaster led to the strengthening of the community and sense of community, despite its size and diversity; as well, we suggested that the findings regarding religious-orthodox communities and their coping with disasters can be inferred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the public discourse and the research literature, the signifier "religious-Zionism" is usually viewed as denoting a specific group located midway between secular and ultra-Orthodox Jews. This location does not turn religious-Zionism into a residual category including whoever is not part of the two others. Quite the contrary. Religious-Zionism used to be a group with unique characteristics, including values and a normative fullness of its own. I argue in this article that, at present, the category "religious-Zionism" no longer signifies a specific group due to a series of centrifugal processes affecting it. Its ethos, myth, textual web, and authority principle have collapsed and the signifier reflects no more than a political and rabbinic discourse attempting to control the breakdown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online social networks can be considered harbingers of modernity and are claimed to encourage individualization in religious practices. Nevertheless, religious minority groups, including reclusive communities, legitimize their use for religious and communal purposes. Accordingly, social networks are emerging as dynamic third spaces of identity reflections on key issues of lived religion. This study examined how members of a religious group negotiate their identity over online social networks. Accordingly, we conducted a content analysis of 70 ultra-Orthodox Jewish public (Haredi) WhatsApp groups and 40 semi-structured interviews with participants. Findings revealed three primary facets of identity performance: communal affinity; proclaimed conformism and practiced agency; and contesting dogmatism and pragmatism. Through these facets, a new social identity is crystallized within the Haredi sector in Israel. Thus, the secluded spaces of WhatsApp groups enable a marginalized grassroots religious public to promote incremental social change without shattering communal boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rebbetzin Batsheva Kanievsky (1932–2011) served as a spiritual guide for many; her prominence and influence were a unique phenomenon in the Haredi (Jewish ultra-Orthodox) community in which she grew up, where women, lacking Talmudic knowledge or other sources of authority, are generally found only at the margins of the public sphere. Her multi-faceted activity was focused on offering blessings and advice. She also innovated a few segulot (magical techniques) and religious rituals. Her leadership is characterized, on the one hand, by the preservation and even strengthening of the existing Lithuanian Haredi ethos, particularly in the context of the wife's complete self-abnegation for her husband's Torah study. On the other hand, it fostered emotional and experiential elements that are closer to the ethos of the Hasidic and Sephardi communities and are associated with folk piety and a quasi-magical orientation. Rebbetzin Kanievsky thus created a type of female religious leadership that can be characterized as anti-leadership, in which she embodied the Haredi conception of ideal womanhood. Consequently, she was not perceived as a threat to Haredi values but rather as their promoter. However, this model of leadership enabled her to break, almost despite herself, the limitations of the gender hierarchy of the Haredi community and serve as an almost singular female role model in that community's pantheon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study reports on analyses of Jewish respondents (N = 6,056) from the 2009 Israel Social Survey. Multivariable methods were used to investigate whether religiously observant Jews have greater physical and psychological well-being. After adjustment for age and other sociodemographic correlates of religion and well-being and for a measure of Israeli Jewish religious identity (i.e., secular, traditional, religious, ultra-Orthodox), two findings stand out. First, greater Jewish religious observance is significantly associated with higher scores on indicators of self-rated health, functional health, and life satisfaction. Second, there is a gradient-like trend such that greater religiousness and life satisfaction are observed as one moves "rightward" across religious identity categories. These findings withstand adjustment for effects of all covariates, including Israeli nativity and Jewish religious identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]