Abstract: After an appellate court made circumcision of minors effectively illegal in the absence of a medical justification, the German Parliament passed a statute that restored, with some limitations, the right of parents to seek ritual circumcisions for their sons. Between these events, a fierce controversy broke out in Germany involving Jews, Muslims, and other Germans. Whereas circumcision without medical indication is rare among most Germans, it is a common religious practice in Jewish and Muslim communities in Germany. The debate tapped into ongoing discussions of German cultural norms, German secularization, and a long history of antiSemitism and a much shorter history of anti-Muslim sentiment in Germany. It also tapped into the religious and traditional practices –
sometimes converging, sometimes diverging – of Jews and Muslims. This Article discusses the range of opinions on religious circumcision among Germans and other Europeans. It disentangles the social factors at work in the debate and analyzes the court decision and the new statute. It also examines some recent decisions under the new statute and explores problems with the statute’s application. Given that roughly 700 million boys worldwide have undergone ritual circumcision, the German controversy has global implications.
This Article shows that at day’s end, the debate turns on issues of toleration and multiculturalism. It is scarcely possible to resolve this debate without asking, “What is a child?” If a child is a proto-member of his parents’ religious community and has only a weak right to bodily integrity, or if the risk-benefit ratio favors circumcision and the parents have a broad scope of consent, then circumcision without medical indication might be legally and morally permissible. Parents might then have discretion to place on his body a permanent physical symbol of his expected or hoped for religious affiliation as an adult. Yet if a child has a strong right to bodily integrity, and circumcision is not medically indicated, then the permanent physical modification of his body with a symbol of Jewish or Muslim identity might be problematic, and circumcising him for aesthetic or other nonreligious reasons might likewise
be problematic.
Abstract: In the Netherlands, religions are often positioned as opposite to secular ideals of women’s freedom. While women’s emancipation supposedly grants women their autonomy, religions are suspected of reaffirming gender inequality. In this religion-versus-emancipation dilemma, questions of the body are pertinent, since traditional religions are framed as restricting and regulating women’s bodies. Questions about modesty, sexual relations, clothing and food preparations often come up in such debates. There seems to be a particular tension for women who convert to religions that are often regarded as ‘gender conservative’, and this chapter sheds light on that field of tension. This expands the field of women’s conversion – which has typically focused on Islamic women – by employing a comparative analysis of interviews and participant observation with Jewish, Christian and Muslim Dutch women converts. Joining a religion that one was not raised in is a process of ethical self-fashioning through training and disciplining of both the body and mind. Converts have to learn how to eat, how to pray, how to dress and how to have sex in such a way that it permits them to give shape to their religious subjectivity and pious desires. What I found is that performing authenticity is a central and embodied characteristic of modern-day conversion stories in the ‘age of authenticity’. This performance is often played out through the sexual and gendered body and religious subject transformations were closely related to sexual self-fashioning. In order to understand these links between conversion, sexuality and the body, I focus on experiences and ideas about virginity and marriage, menstruation and homosexuality. In this chapter, I aim to show that sexual embodiments and ethics cannot be understood as either religious or secular, but rather as a new form of religious subjectivity within Europe as a space where authenticity has become the most important mode for selfhood.
Abstract: Most academic research on Jews in Germany addresses the past, culture, and religion. If the present is discussed, researchers mainly focus on antisemitism. Ina SCHAUM breaks this pattern. Her research needs to be located in a transdisciplinary framework. In her work, she introduces individual lives, and expressions of agency, indicating the divide between the diversity of Jews, and their experiences, and how they are perceived by non-Jews. Boldly, she uses case studies to depict what "doing being Jewish" means for young Jews in connection to their intimate love relationships. The outcome is refreshing; it does full justice to Jewish life-worlds in Germany. By way of presenting two young Jews in Germany in depth, SCHAUM lifts the lid on the underlying diversity of Germany's Jewish population. She contrasts constructions of Jews with real living Jews, revealing that Jewishness is but one aspect in their quest for love, and that the researcher of the bespoke Jew is indeed also an implicated subject. SCHAUM's work needs to be appreciated as a harbinger in the country where she is based. Informed by English-language anthropology and sociology, she pushes methodological boundaries, consistently questioning the line between researcher and researched from late 1960s onwards. Jews are her case study; yet her theoretical considerations and methodological reflections extend much further.
Abstract: Using an integrated archival and ethnographic approach, this study investigates how the growing Haredi Jewish minority and the UK government negotiate their positions in the context of healthcare services in Manchester as one of the few sites where they directly engage. Low-level uptake of certain maternal and infant health interventions has led to claims that Haredi Jews are ‘hard to reach’ or a ‘non-compliant community.’ This thesis critically engages the above outlook by exploring how responses to healthcare services should be framed.
Rather than evading the NHS altogether, as the ‘hard to reach’ label implies, Haredi Jews in Manchester selectively negotiate healthcare services in order to avoid a cosmological conflict with the halachic custodianship of Jewish bodies. Maternal and infant care is situated as a particularly sensitive area of minority-state relations in which competing constructions of bodily protection are at play. Whilst maternal and infant care has historically formed part of the state’s strategy to govern the population, it is increasingly being seized as a point of intervention by Haredi rabbis, doulas, and parents when attempting to reproduce the Haredi social body.
Following Roberto Esposito’s (2015 [2002]) theoretical elaboration of ‘immunitas’ the present work depicts the margins as giving rise to antonymic conceptions of ‘immunity’ as a means of protecting collective life. Interventions that the state regard as protecting the health of the nation can, in turn, be viewed as a threat to the life of the Jewish social body. Immunity at the margins can be characterised by an antonymic fault of both the Haredim and the state to understand each other’s expectations of health and bodily care. The margins of the state illustrate how responses to healthcare interventions can be entangled within a struggle of integration, insulation, and assimilation for minority groups in ways that are contiguous over time.
Topics: Main Topic: Other, Circumcision / Brit Milah, Newspapers, Magazines and Periodicals, Media, National Identity, Islam and Muslims, Islamophobia, Antisemitism, Jewish Relations With Non-Jews, Bodies
Abstract: Im Zentrum des Dissertationsprojektes steht die empirisch verankerte Erarbeitung einer intersektionellen, feministischen Theorie von Liebe und Liebesbeziehungen als Orte des Doing Gender in Verschränkung mit Doing Being Jewish (Jüdischsein) bzw. mit Doing Being German (Deutschsein). Was Jüdischsein und Deutschsein bedeutet und wie es konzeptualisiert werden kann, soll durch die Erhebung narrativer Interview empirisch rekonstruiert werden.
Die Dissertation hat zwei Ausgangspunkte. Der erste ist, sich Liebe als eigenständigem Forschungsgegenstand feministischer Analyse zuzuwenden. In Liebesbeziehungen – als verkörperlichte Erfahrungen von Liebe und Begehren, Macht und Dominanz – werden Geschlechterverhältnisse und andere Ungleichverhältnisse und damit zusammenhängend vergeschlechtlichte Arbeitsteilungen von care work und emotional work (re)produziert, verändert, aufgehoben oder legitimiert. Der zweite Ausgangspunkt ist die Feststellung von Kurt Grünberg in seiner Studie „Liebe nach Auschwitz“ (2000), dass Liebesbeziehungen den wohl intimsten Kontakt zwischen Nachkommen von Überlebenden der Shoah und Nachkommen von Täter*innen, Mitläufer*innen und Nazi-Sympathisant*innen im Land der Täter*innen und Opfer bilden. Vor dem Hintergrund der Shoah und der Nürnberger Gesetze von 1935, welche das sogenannte „Blutschutzgesetz“ und das Verbot von Eheschließungen und Geschlechtsverkehr zwischen Juden/Jüdinnen* und Nicht-Juden/Jüdinnen* umfassten, ist zu fragen, welche Gefühlserbschaften und Erinnerungen (active memory) an die Folgegenerationen weitergegeben werden und wie intime Beziehungen und Liebesbeziehungen davon (nicht) beeinflusst werden. Die beiden Ausgangspunkte sollen miteinander verknüpft werden, um eine kritische, intersektionelle feministische Analyseperspektive in Bezug auf Liebesbeziehungen als auch auf die komplexen Differenz- und Identitätskonstruktionen von Jüdischsein und Deutschsein einzunehmen.
Außerdem sollen forschungsethische Überlegungen in Hinblick auf Theoriebildungsprozesse, Methodenentwicklung und Ergebnisdarstellung im Kontext der „negativen deutsch-jüdischen Symbiose“ (Diner 1986) einerseits und einer feministischen Epistemologie des „situierten Wissens“ (Haraway 1988) andererseits entwickelt werden, da die individuelle, familiäre und soziale Verstrickung mit dem Nationalsozialismus keine Position der Unbeteiligtheit zulässt und eine reflektierte und selbstkritische Positionierung von mir als Forscherin verlangt.
Abstract: The dissertation explores the work of Tanya Ury and Esther Dischereit as political interventional, contemporary, Jewish art in Germany. Ury and Dischereit analyze the power relationships surrounding the body, femininity, and expressions of Jewishness in contemporary Germany. The dissertation focuses on the nature of their artistic work - such as video art performances, sound installations, and radio plays- in its relation to, and impact on the public discourse about history, memory, and a culturally diverse society in contemporary Germany. Performance and Body Art comment in the strategies of `re-embodiment' and `re-enactment', illustrate the historical facts from a contemporary perspective, and urge us to reconsider the transmissions of memory. Ury and Dischereit offer experimental spaces of experience, and succeed in preserving Jewish knowledge and art. The work by Ury and Dischereit unfolds a vital political function, as it creates and fosters a creative critical resistance.
Abstract: This book focuses on two main areas – first, the response of British Lubavitchers to misfortune generally and sickness, in particular and the role of their religious leader the Rebbe in this process; and second, their response to the illness and ultimate death of the Rebbe. It addresses a number of issues in contemporary social and medical anthropology: the social construction of the body, the power of words in ritual, the relation between myth and praxis, religious texts as a charter for healing and the relation between the use of biomedicine and symbolic healing. This book will be of interest to students of social anthropology, medical anthropology, medical sociology, millennialism, religious studies and students of contemporary Judaism.
Abstract: This study examines the multiple and conflicting ways in which German national identity is spatially expressed through the material and metaphor of the human body. In particular, it describes the various gendered, sexed, and raced constructions of Germany, as they emerged in the capital city of Berlin since 1989. Based on two ethnographic case studies situated in neighboring urban environments, the Love Parade and the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, the author shows how bodily representations of post-1989 Germany are fluctuating between the sexualized, demasculinized celebration of multiculturalism and the repeatedly racist, masculinist and even anti-Semitic reconstruction of German nationhood. While the German government is making active efforts to situate the future Berlin Republic within a network of increasingly integrated European nation states, and is involved in sponsoring both the Love Parade and the MMJE, social movements in Berlin are actively supporting and contesting such politics. It is this struggle between government efforts and grassroots politics, and the role of the human body in the political process of constructing collective identities that this book ultimately explores.
