Abstract: This article focuses on a multireligious building project named House of One in contemporary Berlin. Initiated in 2012 by a Protestant community at the center of Berlin, House of One consists of a synagogue, a church, a mosque, and a communal room. My central suggestion is that House of One is invested in a pluralist re-branding of (liberal) Protestantism, a rebranding that underlies the post-unification emergence of a new national German imaginary: out of “soil” marked as historically Christian spreads an “Abrahamic” future that transcends its particularity via its assumed ability to incorporate Islam and Judaism. Liberal, Christian-secularized norms and affects are thus being rearticulated in a language of religious pluralism, so that a normative, Christian-secularized category of religion can be extended to Christianity’s “monotheistic brothers.” Elaborations of this building project’s intended purpose, I argue, are thus animated by a broader question about the appropriate relation between religion and the state, and conjointly, between the self and culture at a moment in time in which hitherto normative, Christian-secularized assumptions concerning this relation are challenged. As such, the discursive representation that sustains the yet-to-be-built House of One is conducive to the making of a new national imaginary: it is driven both by the desire to renounce past evil through a recognition and inclusion of alterity into the body politic, as much as by the simultaneous de-politization and scrutinization of such alterity.
Abstract: Despite many cultural and theological similarities and frequent social interaction between both groups, a one-sided negative, unqualified and polarized image of the relations between Jews and Muslims prevails. This book aims to break through this negative image, which is continuously fed and reinforced by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Particularly in the Low Countries, where large groups of Jews and Muslims live as religious minorities.
On the one hand , Jews and Muslims at the Start outlines the contours of the various historical and geographical contexts within which Jewish-Islamic relations can be situated: from the violent confrontation between the Jews in and around Medina and the prophet Mohammed via the so-called 'Golden Ages' in Andalusia to the explosive situation in the Middle East today. On the other hand, it delves deeper into the complex interaction between Islam and Judaism, which is expressed, among other things, in the attitude of the Koran towards Jews. Finally, both the mutual influence of texts and traditions are examined, as well as parallels and differences in the practice of religious life and the position of women and the LGBTQIA+ community.
Abstract: During the past 15 years, there has been a rapid increase in interfaith initiatives in the United Kingdom. Even though the “interfaith industry,” as some have cynically called it, has rapidly increased, the involvement of women in these groups has been relatively low. Based on ethnographic data, including 20 interviews and 3 years of fieldwork with female interfaith activists in the United Kingdom (2017–2020), this ethnography focuses on the emergence of Jewish and Muslim female interfaith initiatives, analyzing the creative ways religious women negotiate their challenges and struggles as women of faith, together. I examine the ways Jewish and Muslim women form nuanced representations of female piety that disrupt “strictly observant” gendered representations, thus diversifying the binary categories of what being Jewish, or Muslim, entails. Further, whereas former studies have focused on interfaith settings as crucial for the construction of religious identities, I show that interfaith activism also serves as a site for religious minorities to learn how to become British citizens. In a highly politicized Britain, where allegations of racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia prevail, I argue that Jewish-Muslim encounters are sites for the construction and performances of British civic citizenship well beyond the prescriptions of the state. Drawing on these findings, I situate interfaith activism at the anthropological intersection of gender, religion, and citizenship, and as a site that reproduces and disrupts minority-state relationality.
Abstract: This thesis centres the lived experiences of eighteen queer Jews in postsecular Britain. In situating my work between postsecular geographies of lived religion and the anthropology of experience, I present rituals as the technologies by which things are brought into being. By foregrounding rituals, I critically outline the haptic, politically conscious, and symbolic acts queer Jews mobilise in the (trans)formation of selves, spaces, and others. My findings are grounded in fourteen months of virtual narrative ethnography. My focus is on the stories participants told, the memories they recalled, and the queered ethnoreligious worlds they (trans)formed through unstructured life story interviews, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation. Considering this, I conducted my research in collaboration with the Council of Christians and Jews – a nationwide forum for interfaith engagement – as part of their ongoing LGBT+ initiative. Throughout this thesis, I illustrate the ritual performances latent in participants’ selfactualisation. First, I explore the role of heritage and memory in participants’ selfconstrual. I find that rituals are pivotal in actualising ties to an imagined community or symbolic peoplehood – an affective, (im)material, and fundamentally social entity (trans)formed through the narration of history and recollection of memory. Second, I focus on participants’ extrasensory perception of the spatialised power relations they are subjected to, subject others to, and subject themselves to. Here, I find that rituals represent key place-making practices – the tools by which selves, spaces, and others are differentiated as such through the active, agential, and creative (re)aggregation of spatial configurations. Third, I emphasise the actualising power of ritual performance through the ethnographic vignette of Buttmitzvah. I demonstrate how ritual – alongside liminality and communitas – actualises the process of self (trans)formation in a queer Jewish rite of passage that is at once spatially bound and diffused, temporally fixed and transcendent. In doing so, I trace the complicated and often contradictory relationship between structure and anti-structure, communitas and commerciality, ritual and resistance. I conclude by arguing that rituals are more than indexical phenomena, they are the tools by which things are brought into being, worlds constructed, and subjectivities (trans)formed.
Abstract: According to the Jewish Chronicle, on December 1, 2021, a group of Jewish bus passengers on their way to celebrate Chanukkah in London were attacked by a mob, spit upon, verbally abused, and subjected to Nazi salutes.1 Similarly, the monitoring group Tell MAMA reported that in the week after the Daily Telegraph published a column written by the then prime minister Boris Johnson, in which he compared Muslim women to “letterboxes” and “bank robbers,” Islamophobic incidents in the United Kingdom rose by 375 percent. In December 2019, a fourteen- year- old Muslim girl was violently attacked on her way home from school. The same month, a rabbi waiting in the Stamford Hill overground station was beaten by two men who shouted, “fucking Jew, dirty Jew” and “kill the Jews”; a month earlier a Jewish father and his two young sons were the targets of antisemitic abuse on the London Underground. While these forms of generalized Islamophobia and antisemitism have unfortunately become commonplace in the United Kingdom , there exists a largely unexamined form of antisemitic/Islamophobic violence perpetuated against LGBT Muslims and Jews— double minorities. In this chapter, I examine discourses present in the British print media that may contribute to a framing of LGBT Muslims and Jews in ways that can lead to the demonization of members of both communities. Robert Phillips My focus here is in the collective representation of double minorities by the British press. In choosing this focus, I should point out that those minorities who are the targets of harassment are targeted largely due to the saliency of their difference. As noted above, women wearing head or body coverings of any degree and men and boys wearing what are perceived to be “Muslim” or “Jewish” clothing or hairstyle (head coverings/payot) are often targeted. This includes Sikh men and boys wearing turbans, in that some may incorrectly identify them as Muslims. Because of outward appearance, many of the victims of these crimes may also be perceived to be observant in their faith and perhaps even threatening to national security and identity. This chapter is concerned with members of these communities who also identify as LGBT, positioning them as double minorities. As with members of other diasporic communities around the globe, LGBT Muslims and Jews have assumed unique types of identity forged through a combination of factors brought about by, among other things, processes of transnational migration. As both Muslims and Jews form some of the smallest ethnic communities in Britain, they are far outnumbered by more dominant Anglo groups and share a type of liminal subjectivity. Gay Muslim and Jewish men are both an ethnic and a sexual minority, further complicating this relationship. This dual-minority status has had a distinctive effect on how nonminority British view these individuals. For instance, Yip focuses on kin relations when examining the narratives of non-heterosexual British Muslims and suggests that within these communities , there is a perception of homosexuality as a “Western” disease that did not exist in the family’s community of origin. They also point out the fraught negotiations between parents and children, complicated further by sociocultural and religious factors, when it comes time to marry and the subsequent strategies employed by the children. In terms of how the nation views Muslims in Britain, Jaspal and Cinnirella position such subjects as a hybridized threat— British Muslims are positioned solidly as “other” while simultaneously being framed as a threat to the survival of the “in- group.”
Abstract: For some, the early hours of the morning are a time when few are awake, the city quiet, and the streets empty. In London’s East End, however, the dimly lit alleyways are teaming with late- night revelers. Historically characterized as largely working- class neighborhoods, districts like Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, and Whitechapel have undergone a rapid process of gentrification in recent years and are now synonymous with trendy clubs, pubs, and wine bars.1 The Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, located just off Pollard Square, has been a cultural, political, and social hub of the East End since 1887. In recent years, the venue has become popular among students at the nearby Queen Mary, University of London, and a new wave of young urban professionals who are spatially segregated from the club regulars: Downstairs, the octogenarians still have their cards and gambling machine. But upstairs, the space is used for concerts, burlesque shows, voga (a dynamic fusion of yoga and vogueing), a pop- up Chinese restaurant and . . . “wild, unhinged good times.”2 Now and again, the walkways crossing Weavers Fields and the A1209 from the Bethnal Green Underground Station become a threshold to the United 148 Matthew Richardson Kingdom’s first queer Jewish club night. Organized around special and transitory dates in the Hebraic calendar, Buttmitzvah is a camp, erotic, playful, and satirical celebration of queer Jewish identities in postsecular Britain. The evening is centered around the backstory of the Rimmer family, pun intended, hosting their daughter Becky’s Bat Mitzvah. Facilitated by a troupe of dedicated actors, dancers, and drag kings and queens, the night is more than just a raunchy get-together. In this chapter, I explore the Bethnal Green Buttmitzvah as an ethnographic case study to argue that the evening functions as an aspirational and motivational platform from which partygoers construct, demarcate, and celebrate an affirming identity politics. To do so, I use Turnerian anthropology of experience as a key analytical , methodological, and theoretical heuristic tool to explore the affective , anti- structural, collectivizing, and subversive qualities of the Bethnal Green Buttmitzvah. First, I situate Buttmitzvah in the socio- cultural- geographic context of postsecular Bethnal Green and identify it as liminal space providing the ideal settings for the generation of communitas, a special type of ritualized space- time whereby all those present enjoy an intense sense of belonging and identification with each other. Next, I explore the ritualization needed to generate this social state of communitas by drawing on what I call the ritual complex, an intricate system involving myths, symbols, and rituals functioning as media through which selves and others are formed, mobilized, and resisted. Finally, I unpack the anti- structural qualities of communitas by characterizing Buttmitzvah as a liminoid phenomenon in a liminal space, providing those in attendance with a platform for subverting antisemitic, heterosexist, and postsecular social structures. As such, I argue that religious life is life together because it is only when people come together and generate the collective electricity of communitas that the aspirational and motivational forces for constructing, demarcating, and celebrating religious selves and others becomes possible. It is through ritual performance, in other words, that an imagined community is actualized in an intense emotional state of social belonging. I conclude this chapter by highlighting the benefits of engaging with Turnerian anthropology of experience when researching alongside minoritized religious communities in postsecular contexts. The findings in this chapter are grounded in fifteen months of narrative ethnographic research (April 2020 to July 2021) with eighteen queer Religious Life Is Life Together 149 Jews who were living, or had previously lived, in postsecular Britain (their selected profiles are included in the appendix for context).
Topics: Family and Household, Main Topic: Other, Jewish Continuity, Anthropology, Ethnography, Intermarriage, Intermarriage: Children of Intermarried Couples, Conversion, Gender, Jewish Women, Religious Observance and Practice, Jewish Community
Abstract: There are less than 1300 Jews living in Finland who are members in the two officially Orthodox Jewish communities in Helsinki and in Turku. After the Civil Marriage Act was put in effect by the Finnish Parliament in 1917 the number of intermarriages between Jews and non-Jews started rising in the communities. Most of these marriages were officiated between Jewish men and non-Jewish women. In the beginning, the non-Jewish spouses kept their respective religious affiliations, but in many cases, their halachically non-Jewish children converted to Judaism. In the 1970s, adulthood conversions to Judaism became far more frequent in the communities—especially in the Jewish Community of Helsinki. Today, most of these individuals and their families concerned are still active members of the Jewish congregation. The high number of intermarriages and the conversions to Judaism have had a crucial impact on the development of the religious customs of local Jewry. Through the analysis of archival sources and new ethnographic material derived from semi-structured qualitative interviews, this case study investigates how intermarriages formed the traditions and habits in the families and in the communities. By relating the topic of intermarriage to the question of conversion, the study sheds light on institutional changes within the Jewish Community of Helsinki, and analyzes how women, who converted to Judaism in 1977, articulate and perform their religious practices, identities, and agencies when consciously aiming at building Jewish families.
Abstract: The anthropologist Robert H. Lowie (Towards understanding Germany. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1954) offers a historically informed ethnography of Jewish/non-Jewish relations in German speaking lands. Jewish families in Germany, Jews in families, and Jews and their families in post-1945 need to be seen in the context of these historically informed structures that shaped family histories: Interfamilial transmissions of identities and praxes that impacted on family, marriage, and partnership patterns. Issues of family structures including endogamy and exogamy cannot solely be explained by drawing on the religious (halachic) prohibition of exogamy, they need to be understood as a means of boundary management of a specific ethnic group (Rapaport, Jews and Germans after the holocaust. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997), to forestall assimilation (Kauders, Unmögliche Heimat. dtv, Munich, 2007), and within a specifically fraught context (Czollek, Desintegriert Euch! Hanser, Munich, 2018; Ginsburg, I’m a German Jew, and I’d Love to Be Normal, In HaAretz, May 19, 2020. https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium-i-m-a-german-jew-and-i-d-love-to-be-normal-1.8856650. Accessed May 19 2022, 2020; Kranz, Shades of Jewishness: the creation and maintenance of a Jewish community in post-Shoah Germany, University of St Andrews: St Andrews. Open Access: https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/handle/10023/872. Last accessed 19 May 2022, 2018) that drives the creation of transnational family networks (Bodemann, A Jewish family in Germany today: an intimate portrait. Duke University Press, Durham, 2005)—and neither can proximity, intimacy and love across the ethnic – and religious – divide be phased out because a very significant number of Jews marry and partner up with non-Jews (Kauders, 2007; Kessler, Jüdische Migration aus der ehemaligen Sowjetunion seit 1990. Beispiel Berlin. Magisterabschlußarbeit Sozialwissenschaften. Unpublished Master’s thesis, Fern-Universität Hagen, Hagen, 1996; Umfrage 2002: Mitgliederbefragung der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin. Unpublished research report, 2002; Körber, Zäsur, Wandel oder Neubeginn: Russischsprachige Juden in Deutschland zwischen Recht, Repräsentation und Neubeginn. In: Körber K (ed) Russisch-jüdische Gegenwart in Deutschland, Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, Göttingen, pp 13–36, 2015; Osteuropa 69:83–92, 2019; Kranz, Notes on embodiment and narratives beyond words. In: Hoffmann B, Reuter U (ed) Translated memories, Rowman, Farnham, pp 347–369, 2020a; Landesbetrieb Information und Technik Nordrhein-Westfalen 2019; Rapaport 1997), and cross an ethno-sexual boundary (Bodemann, 2005; Nagel, Race, ethnicity, and sexuality: intimate intersections, forbidden frontiers. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003; Schaum, Being Jewish (and) in love. Hentrich & Hentrich, Berlin, 2020; Schaum, Love will bring us together (again)? Nachwirkungen der Shoah in Liebesbeziehungen. In Chernivsky M, Lorenz F (eds) Weitergaben und Wirkungen der Shoah in Erziehungs- und Bildungsverhältnissen der Gegenwartsgesellschaft, Verlag BarbaraBudrich, Leverkusen, pp 159–174, 2022). This chapter offers a comprehensive overview of Jewish families, Jews and their families and Jews in families in Germany after 1945 by drawing on qualitative and quantitative data, and by way of contextualizing individual and collective Jewish praxes.
Abstract: Staatsexamen am Feiertag? Arbeiten statt Neujahrsfest? Immer wieder kommt es im Alltag von Jüdinnen und Juden in Deutschland zu Konflikten zwischen religiösem Leben und weltlichen Ansprüchen und staatlichen Regelungen. Jüdische Studierende berichten davon, dass sie oft zwischen einem zügigen Studienabschluss und ihrem Glauben wählen müssen, da Prüfungstermine auf Samstag, also Schabbat, oder auf hohe jüdische Feiertage gelegt werden – ganz ohne Ersatztermine. Auch in der Arbeitswelt besteht oft kein Verständnis gegenüber der Befolgung der halachischen Arbeitsruhegebote. Alternative Prüfungstermine und Freistellungen von der Arbeit oder vom Schulunterricht für die Religionsausübung zu verweigern, verletzt aber die Religionsfreiheit und stellt eine unzulässige Benachteiligung dar.
Mit diesem Buch wird die Bedeutung der jüdischen Feiertage beleuchtet und gezeigt, wie der Gesetzgeber handeln müsste, soll die Religionsfreiheit von Jüdinnen und Juden in unserer Rechtsordnung den verfassungsrechtlich gebotenen Respekt erfahren.
Mit Beiträgen von Zsolt Balla, Daniel Fabian, Christian Gehring, Eric Haußmann, Susanna Kahlefeld, Rainer Kampling, Dorothea Marx, Sarah Serebrinski, Anna Staroselski, Heinrich de Wall
Herausgegeben vom Tikvah Institut und Volker Beck
Mit einem Vorwort von Volker Beck
Mit Grußworten von Patricia Ehret und Shila Erlbaum
Abstract: On the eve of the 2024 UK General Election, national polls show the Labour Party ahead of the
Conservative Party by 20 percentage points. An average of polls at the time of publication has Labour
at 41.9% and Conservatives at 22.2%, with Reform UK at 15.0%, well ahead of the Liberal Democrats,
Greens, Scottish National Party (SNP), Plaid Cymru and other parties. These polls do not, however,
show the voting intention of Jewish people in the UK. The JPR Research Panel provides the research
infrastructure to gather nationally representative data about Jewish people’s behaviours and attitudes
on a wide range of social and political issues. This paper presents initial data on voting intentions for
4 July 2024, based on 2,717 UK-based Jewish adults who responded to a survey between 14-20 June
Abstract: This chapter focuses on the city of Odesa and its altered reality after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It discusses the different levels of fragmentation that run through the everyday life of a city and its residents and create fissures in identity and kinship, upheavals and reversals of historical memory, and challenges for conducting research during the war. Ukraine has an unusually complex ethno-linguistic and religious composition, with inherited historical divides. As a borderland, it constituted a pronounced case of political and national fragmentation even before the war. Odesa has its own forms of fragmentation, populated as it is by a rich amalgam of people and cut through with the afterlives of empires. The war has intensified all of these forms of fragmentation, bringing different histories into the present. The chapter addresses fragmentation on three different scales: the vignettes of Jewish Odesans reflecting on the war in the contexts of self, family, community, city, and nation; the historical narratives and historical truths revealed by the term “denazification,” which has served as Putin’s justification for the invasion of Ukraine.; and the reflections of a fragmented anthropologist, highlighting ethical dilemmas and practical difficulties of researching a constantly changing and deeply painful reality during the war.
Abstract: The recent Eurozone crisis and the outbreak of political and populist Euroscepticism pose an unprecedented challenge to advocates of the post-war ‘Idea of Europe’. In the United Kingdom and France, some of the most eloquent and impassioned defences of ‘Europe’ have been penned by Jewish intellectuals. The historian Walter Laqueur, the philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy and journalists such as David Aaronovich, for example, have all rallied to the cause of ‘Europe’. This article will focus on the responses of Robert Menasse and Henryk Broder, two Jewish intellectuals from Austria and Germany, who have recently published powerful reflections on the European idea. Menasse’s polemic of 2012, Der Europäische Landbote (The European Courier), defends the idea of Europe as a ‘Friedensprojekt’, or ‘peace project’, and the European Union as an institutional antidote to the destructive power of nationalism and the self-interest of the nation-state. Broder’s bestselling book of 2013, Die letzten Tage Europas: Wie wir eine gute Idee versenken (The Last Days of Europe: How we are Scuppering a Good Idea), embraces ‘European values’ but launches a critique of a European Union which stifles pluralism and critical debate. This paper analyses how Menasse and Broder define the idea of ‘Europe’ and argues that, despite their differences, in form and content, the work of Menasse and Broder draws on a common tradition of enlightened cosmopolitanism as well as informs the renewed academic debate in the humanities and social sciences about the place of ‘cosmopolitanism’ in our global world.
Abstract: The present study investigates the prosodic realization of calling contours by bilingual speakers of Bulgarian and (Bulgarian) Judeo-Spanish and monolingual speakers of Bulgarian in a discourse completion task across three pragmatic contexts: (i) neutral (routine) context—calling a child from afar to come in for dinner; (ii) positive context—calling a child from afar to get a present; and (iii) negative (or urgent) context—calling a child from afar for a chastising. Through quantitative analyses of the F0 span between tonal landmarks, alignment of pitch peaks, intensity, and durational and prominence patterns, we systematically account for the phonetic characteristics of the contours and determine their tonal composition and meaning, thereby situating them within the intonation systems of Bulgarian Judeo-Spanish and Bulgarian. It is shown that both languages use the same inventory of contours: (1) L+H* !H-% (the so-called “vocative chant”), (2) L+H* H-L%, and (3) L+H* L-%. However, their distribution differs across contexts and varieties. Monolingual and bilingual speakers of Bulgarian, on the one hand, predominantly use (1) and (2) in neutral and positive contexts and clearly prefer (3) in negative contexts. In Bulgarian Judeo-Spanish, the bilinguals also more often recur to (3) in neutral and positive contexts and generally show more variation.
Abstract: У статті розглядається вплив масової прощі представників закордонних хасидських громад на динаміку розвитку українсько-єврейських взаємин зокрема та на етнополітичні процеси сучасної України загалом. Актуальність дослідження визначається, по-перше, недостатньою вивченістю вказаного явища у вітчизняній науці; по-друге, тією обставиною, що кількість паломників, які щороку відвідують нашу країну, суттєво перевищує чисельність парафіян місцевих юдейських громад. Специфіка хасидського віровчення вимагає, щоби віруючі регулярно відвідували місця поховання своїх провідних лідерів. Тому, оскільки згаданий релігійний рух зародився саме в Україні, зв’язок з нею багатьох закордонних юдейських релігійних громад тримається на високому рівні, незважаючи на жодні обставини. Ні пандемія, ні війна суттєво не зменшили кількість відвідувачів місць поховання вчителів хасидизму. Наведені автором факти дозволяють виявити дві суперечливі тенденції в реакції місцевих мешканців на прибуття численних послідовників юдейського релігійно-містичного руху: 1. Поширення ворожих настроїв та акцій, скерованих проти прибульців; 2. Зростання зацікавленості в розвитку прощі і збільшення толерантності.
Перша тенденція зумовлена суттєвими розбіжностями у світогляді, культурі та побутових звичках. Вона також є наслідком корупційних проблем, оскільки муніципальна влада вводить до місцевих бюджетів лише малу частину здобутих від паломників коштів. Друга тенденція визначається зацікавленістю місцевих мешканців у заробітках, пов’язаних з обслуговуванням прочан, і толерантністю, яка дедалі більше поширюється в суспільстві. У висновках відзначається, що розвиток дружніх стосунків між місцевим населенням і хасидами-паломниками сприяє позитивній динаміці іміджу українського суспільства не лише в єврейському середовищі, але також і в численних спільнотах сучасного західного світу, які безпосередньо не причетні до юдаїзму. Це, в свою чергу, допоможе Україні під час повоєнної розбудови. Задля вирішення пов’язаних з прощею проблем автор рекомендує низку просвітянських заходів для місцевого населення, регіонального чиновництва та самих паломників.
Abstract: No published research to date has investigated the mental health experiences of Orthodox Jewish adolescents in the UK, although anecdotally, the Jewish mental health community is aware of the prevalence of mental health difficulties amongst young people. This lack of research highlights a serious gap in how to best support this population in the community and in mainstream services. As a first step into this field of study, this research explored the experiences of seven London-based Orthodox Jewish female therapists offering talking therapy to strictly Orthodox Jewish (Chareidi) female adolescents in the private sector, using semi-structured interviews. An interpretative phenomenological analysis of the interview data identified several themes: The therapists navigated personal and professional overlap when working within their own community, dealt with blurred boundaries, and managed the complexities of confidentiality within a close-knit community context. Furthermore, their therapeutic practice was culturally informed, and they applied cultural sensitivity with their clients. The therapists talked about how they helped Chareidi Gen Z on their journey to adulthood and how they experienced both feeling connected to their clients, and feeling disconnected when values were at odds with each other. The implications from this study included the need to engage Orthodox Jewish adolescents in future research so that their voices can be captured, the importance of continuing to increase culturally sensitive mental health promotion, education, and provision within the Chareidi community, and for mainstream services to facilitate access for the Chareidi community by prioritising culturally informed practices and community partnership work.
Abstract: Using a ‘lived religion’ approach, this chapter analyses interviews conducted with Orthodox Jewish women to investigate how women learn about kashrut [Jewish dietary] rules, the resources they use when dealing with kashrut problems, and the kashrut practices that they develop themselves. The research shows the persistence of mimetic, family-based models in the transmission and practice of kashrut among women, thus challenging the scholar Haym Soloveitchik’s famous claim that text-based learning has superseded mimetic learning in the modern Jewish world. The chapter suggests that the two types of learning are strongly gendered, and it explores the differences between the ways men and women learn about and understand kashrut practices. The research highlights the difference, and the tense relationship, between elite text-based culture (almost exclusively male in the Orthodox Jewish world) and popular practice (largely in the hands of women in Orthodox daily kashrut observance) and raises issues of rabbinic control and authority versus family loyalty and self-confidence. The study reveals the divergence between a nominally hegemonic authority of elite, male-authored texts and their interpretation by rabbis, and an unacknowledged lived religion in which women decide everyday ritual practice. Taylor-Guthartz suggests that to gain a complete picture of any religious tradition, knowledge of its elite written aspects must be balanced with the investigation of lived, everyday religious practice, and the complex relationships between these two elements must be appreciated and understood.
Abstract: The number of Israelis in Germany is rather small, with about 20,000 total (Rebhun/Kranz/Sünker 2022: 65), and an additional 5,000 to 10,000 individuals who have a statistically inferred relationship to Israel. Most of this current volume owes to movements to Germany between the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s (ibid.); migration has plateaued since. Drawing on socio-demographic research conducted within the framework of “The Migration of Israeli Jews to Germany since 1990” (GIF 1186), and amending it by on-going, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork carried out amongst Israelis and Jews in Germany since 2002, this paper seeks to address the institutional infrastructures of migration and of social class. While ‘creative class’ (Florida 2002) Israelis migrate to and live in Berlin (Cohen/Gold 2022), they tend to be over-reported in the media, thanks to specific German and Israeli identity investments (Kranz 2022). These Israelis, or more precisely, Israeli Jews, are a smoke screen; they are interpreted as the replacements for the displaced and murdered Jews with the ‘add on’ of Israeliness. They make for a fine case study of understanding German/Jewish/Israeli relations, and unpicking the symbolic Israeli and Jewish capital in combination with the concept of ‘creative class’ (Florida 2002) in situ in Berlin and across Germany.
Abstract: This research considers an existential exploration of the experience of coming out in the Orthodox Jewish community. It is grounded in a qualitative, phenomenological and existential methodology. Eight participants were interviewed, all male between the ages of 20-30, who grew up in the Orthodox Jewish community and came out as gay, a minimum of three years ago. The interviews were semi-structured in nature; they were recorded and transcribed. The interview transcripts were analysed using SEA, a phenomenological and existential research tool. It used two specific features of SEA; the four worlds and its paradoxes, and the timeline tool. Accordingly, data was analysed against the four existential worlds, and the four periods of time identified in the timeline tool; with the moments of coming out being the present focus. Key themes, paradoxes and similarities were drawn out from across the analysis. They were then analysed alongside a consideration of relevant literature, also presented in this study. Overall, significant findings were identified, which both resonated with, supported and questioned existing literature. Findings were linked to four particular time periods: before, during and after coming out, and the ongoing state of participants. The findings relating to the time period before coming out mainly linked to matters around identity and findings linked to the actual moments of coming out mainly related to embodiment overall. The findings of the time period immediately after coming out linked to relationships and emotions, whereas the findings linking to the ongoing state of participants were to do with spirituality and meaning. This study concludes by outlining the valuable contribution these findings have made to Counselling Psychology, as well as areas that have been highlighted as ripe for further research.
Author(s): Waites, William; Pearson, Carl A. B.; Gaskell, Katherine M.; House, Thomas; Pellis, Lorenzo; Johnson, Marina; Gould, Victoria; Hunt, Adam; Stone, Neil RH; Kasstan, Ben; Chantler, Tracey; Lal, Sham; Roberts, Chrissy H.; Goldblatt, David; CMMID COVID-19 Working Group; Marks, Michael; Eggo, Rosalind M.
Author(s): Gaskell, Katherine M.; Johnson, Marina; Gould, Victoria; Hunt, Adam; Stone, Neil RH; Waites, William; Kasstan, Ben; Chantler, Tracey; Lal, Sham; Roberts, Chrissy H.; Goldblatt, David; Eggo, Rosalind M.; Marks, Michael
Abstract: Background
Ethnic and religious minorities have been disproportionately affected by SARS-CoV-2 worldwide. The UK strictly-Orthodox Jewish community has been severely affected by the pandemic. This group shares characteristics with other ethnic minorities including larger family sizes, higher rates of household crowding and relative socioeconomic deprivation. We studied a UK strictly-Orthodox Jewish population to understand transmission of COVID-19 within this community.
Methods
We performed a household-focused cross-sectional SARS-CoV-2 serosurvey between late-October and early December 2020 prior to the third national lockdown. Randomly-selected households completed a standardised questionnaire and underwent serological testing with a multiplex assay for SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibodies. We report clinical illness and testing before the serosurvey, seroprevalence stratified by age and sex. We used random-effects models to identify factors associated with infection and antibody titres.
Findings
A total of 343 households, consisting of 1,759 individuals, were recruited. Serum was available for 1,242 participants. The overall seroprevalence for SARS-CoV-2 was 64.3% (95% CI 61.6-67.0%). The lowest seroprevalence was 27.6% in children under 5 years and rose to 73.8% in secondary school children and 74% in adults. Antibody titres were higher in symptomatic individuals and declined over time since reported COVID-19 symptoms, with the decline more marked for nucleocapsid titres.
Interpretation
In this tight-knit religious minority population in the UK, we report one of the highest SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence levels in the world to date, which was markedly higher than the reported 10% seroprevalence in London at the time of the study. In the context of this high force of infection, all age groups experienced a high burden of infection. Actions to reduce the burden of disease in this and other minority populations are urgently required.
Funding
This work was jointly funded by UKRI and NIHR [COV0335; MR/V027956/1], a donation from the LSHTM Alumni COVID-19 response fund, HDR UK, the MRC and the Wellcome Trust.
Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted ethnic minorities in the global north, evidenced by higher rates of transmission, morbidity, and mortality relative to population sizes. Orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods in London had extremely high SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence rates, reflecting patterns in Israel and the US. The aim of this paper is to examine how responsibilities over health protection are conveyed, and to what extent responsibility is sought by, and shared between, state services, and ‘community’ stakeholders or representative groups, and families in public health emergencies.
The study investigates how public health and statutory services stakeholders, Orthodox Jewish communal custodians and households sought to enact health protection in London during the first year of the pandemic (March 2020–March 2021). Twenty-eight semi-structured interviews were conducted across these cohorts. Findings demonstrate that institutional relations – both their formation and at times fragmentation – were directly shaped by issues surrounding COVID-19 control measures. Exchanges around protective interventions (whether control measures, contact tracing technologies, or vaccines) reveal diverse and diverging attributions of responsibility and authority.
The paper develops a framework of public health relations to understand negotiations between statutory services and minority groups over responsiveness and accountability in health protection. Disaggregating public health relations can help social scientists to critique who and what characterises institutional relationships with minority groups, and what ideas of responsibility and responsiveness are projected by differently-positioned stakeholders in health protection.
Author(s): Zuriaga, Ana; Flannigan, Liam; Wilson, Joanne; Weiss, Sarah; Rottenberg, Gitit; Klynman, Nicole; Schwartz, Ellen Corine; Billett, Julie; Katz, Jacqueline; Weil, Leonora G.
Abstract: Background
There is a need for a specific programme of engagement around COVID-19 vaccination with the Charedi Orthodox Jewish community in Stamford Hill, London, UK. We co-produced a live event for women on COVID-19 safety and vaccination and wider health topics to support vaccine uptake and improve awareness of health and wellbeing issues.
Methods
For this qualitative analysis, we organised an event that was designed and delivered by a local community organisation in partnership with regional and local health partners and community groups. The event was for Charedi women aged 16 years and older, and provided information on COVID-19, childhood immunisations, oral health and dental hygiene, childhood respiratory infections, and mental health. The event included health stalls, a panel session, co-designed culturally competent physical information, and the opportunity to speak with health professionals. We evaluated the event using attendees' feedback forms, collected in person at the end of the event, and a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with organisers from community and statutory organisations. The evaluation was informed by a co-produced logic model and outcomes framework.
Findings
More than 100 women attended the event on March 28, 2022. Feedback suggested the focus on wider health issues was valued, and a greater number of more targeted events (eg on health for women older than 40) would be beneficial. Dental health, COVID-19 vaccination, and childhood immunisations were identified as the most important topics by participants. 16 (55%) of 29 respondents stated they would attend a similar event again, 12 (41%) stated they were unsure, and one (3%) said they would not attend again. Informal feedback from the community highlighted that the event was useful and acted as a basis for further engagement and collaboration with the community.
Interpretation
Our findings emphasised the need to work in partnership with a lead community organisation to identify and address principal health challenges within communities, to share community-specific insights, and to promote community events through community communication channels. Statutory institutions should engage with local community organisations to support and facilitate public health interventions to increase relevant vaccine uptake and to improve awareness around wider health and wellbeing issues and services.
Abstract: After the seventy-year break in religious life under the Soviet regime, Jewish communities in Russia revived and multiplied, now consisting mostly of new "returnees to the faith," ba'alei and ba'alot teshuvah. This article, based on biographical interviews and other sources, examines the outlook, self-image and everyday life of women "returnees," ba'alot teshuvah, in a contemporary community of Lubavitch Hasidim in Moscow. Chabad women's claims to modernity and their understanding of it, their view of their community and the social hierarchies in it, and their prioritizing of religious practice over meaning and of action over belief are examined in the contexts of women's religiosity in historical Hasidism, in present-day ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel and America, and in other traditional cultures (focusing on the "alternative modernity" of voluntarily traditional subjects) and in light of Lubavitch movement policies, late Soviet "authoritative discourse" and the current Russian move toward "conservative modernization."
Abstract: Jewish and Muslim women seeking to claim certain rights in the religious realm in France today, such as access to religious study, ritual space and public religious roles, are confronted with obstacles to gender justice both in Orthodox Judaism and in mainstream Islam. In this article, I begin by taking a brief look at strategies used by women in other countries to curtail male monopolies while remaining inside Orthodox Judaism and mainstream Islam: creating all-female spaces, partnering with men and advancing from within hegemonic institutions. These have produced new religious functions for women, including women imams and female Orthodox rabbis, Jewish and Muslim female spiritual guides (maharat, murshidat), women experts and counselors in Islamic and Jewish law (alimat, yo‘atzot halakhah), Jewish legal advocates (to‘anot rabbaniyot) and female judges (qadiya) in shari‘a courts. I then survey the situation in France, where few such innovations have taken hold. I conclude by suggesting some explanations for their absence (in Orthodox Judaism) or their very slow evolution (in Islam) in the French context.
