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Redeeming marriage? Bittersweet intimacy and the dialectics of liberation among Haredi Jews in London
Author(s): Sheldon, Ruth; Frosh, Stephen; Vyrgioti, Marita
Date: 2024
Topics: Anthropology, Marriage, Family and Household, Food, Ritual, Ethnography, Haredi / Strictly Orthodox Jews, Main Topic: Other, Festivals and Holidays
Abstract: This article intervenes in feminist anthropological debates about marriage within Western cosmopolitan, ‘post-traditional’ contexts through a close ethnographic examination of food and ritualized meals among Haredi Jews in London. We focus on this diasporic religious Jewish minority, whose marital practices have been the object of debates over marriage, gender, and cultural difference in cosmopolitan London. Learning from ethnographic and conjugal instances of hunger around Haredi dining tables, we explore the broader question of how heterosexual marriages endure in the face of struggles for intimacy and freedom between different genders. By focusing on what can be learnt about marriage through mealtime rituals with religious significance, we develop a response rooted in a form of Jewish relational ethics that has been repressed within ‘Western’ liberal culture. This approach addresses some tenacious dualisms at play in the anthropology and politics of marriage and articulates a vernacular dialectical grammar of desire, tradition, freedom, and love.
Ethics without borders: solidarity and difference in inter-community dialogue
Author(s): Egorova, Yulia
Date: 2023
Topics: Ethnography, Jewish - Muslim Relations, Inter-Communal Relations, Interfaith Dialogue, Main Topic: Other
Abstract: The article offers an ethnographically embedded analysis of a UK-based Jewish-Muslim inter-community network to contribute to anthropological research into the ethical efforts that groups seen as polarized invest in negotiating boundaries of difference. The article makes two sets of arguments. First, it suggests that sometimes such groups have to negotiate not one but several ‘borders across difference’ and follow diverse ethical routes to navigate them depending upon how they conceptualize these borders. Second, it shows that in negotiating different sets of boundaries, network members often use techniques that at first glance appear to be artificial or even superficial in that they build on formal rules and/or contain no promise of achieving a consensus on issues important for the participants. However, I argue that these seemingly superficial efforts could still be seen as ethical endeavours underpinned by a strong commitment to inter-group solidarity and that they could be best understood as what Ruth Sheldon has described in her recent intervention in the ethics of Jewish ethnography as the movement between surface and depth.
Aporetic differences? Equality entitlements, religious schools, and contours of protection
Author(s): Kasstan, Ben
Date: 2023
Topics: Jewish Schools, Jewish Education, Main Topic: Education, Orthodox Judaism, Haredi / Strictly Orthodox Jews, Anthropology, Ethnography, Jewish - Non - Jewish Relations, Religion and State, Sex Education
Abstract: The requirement for schools in England to implement equality education has led religious conservative minorities to voice a conflict between legally protected characteristics of religion and sexual orientation. Drawing on long-term ethnographic engagement with Jewish orthodoxies in England, the article critiques these apparent aporetic differences by tracing the grammars of protection that are fielded by custodians of state governance and religious conservativism in public disputes and how particular grammars of protection are rendered authoritative over others. The article excavates how the staging of authoritative grammars of protection by state and religious conservative actors forecloses an understanding of the subject-positions that manoeuvre at the sidelines to integrate ways of being and protect a space for difference. Through the framing of an arm-wrestle, the article critiques negotiations over policy and legal reform as it is grasped in social worlds, and explores how state and religious conservative actors move within the conventions of secular liberal governance to maintain their authority and stakes amidst challenges to continuity.