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“A normal nation in our land”: Reproductive righteousness, redemptive politics and LGBTQIA+ opposition in contemporary Israel
This article discusses the recent political alliance between IC and the “Hardal” (acronym for Haredi-Dati-Leumi, meaning Ultra-Orthodox-Religious-Zionists) followers of Rabbi Zvi Thau. This new cooperation is surprising, due to Thau’s tendency to criticize groups that do not adhere to his strict interpretation of Judaism. In this article we analyze the recent developments within Thau’s circle, and determine that this cooperation is a consequence of a unique interpretation of a spiritual state of emergency. We conclude by analyzing the circumstances in which IC was formed, as a lesson religious Zionists took from the 2005 disengagement from Gaza plan. The article demonstrates that IC intentionally intended to enable the creation of this sort of political alliance.
Agunah activism, a flagship struggle of Religious-Zionist feminism, links gender politics, Jewish-Orthodox politics, and national Israeli politics. This qualitative study focuses on agunah activists’ strategies and conceptions of change, highlighting the complex ways religious women radically transform conservative contexts, complicated by intersections of religion, gender, and state. It examines dynamic boundary-work and how activists deploy the inner workings of “the Halakhic framework” to shift creatively between social positioning, ideological or cultural positioning, and a political positioning to create “change from within”. My case study troubles the premise that religion and feminism are antithetical, and that distinct identities or set social locations predetermine social movements’ frames or actions. I expand upon the term “tempered radicals” which challenges reformist/revolutionary and conservative/radical binaries. “Tempered radical” strategies are two-pronged: a tempered mode of modulation and moderation to rock the boat without falling out (avoid the red lines, find “the right way”) and a radical mode of stirring the sea and creating horizons (arrive there, one way or another). Dynamically holding both modes together, through a “multifocal lens”—the world-as-it-is and the world-as-it-should-be—enables their strategic maneuverings. They remain “within” while radically transforming individuals, communities, Jewish law, Orthodox society and the Israeli public sphere. This study demonstrates how religious and gendered structures are at once constitutive and mutable.
5/3/2021 4 reasons why Gender Studies has changed because of illiberal attacks, and why it matters | Heinrich Böll Stiftung | Brussels office-European Union https://eu.boell.org/en/2021/05/03/4-reasons-why-gender-studies-has-changed-because-illiberal-attacks-and-why-it-matters?fbclid=IwAR2zO-f0kzsCUso6hhzANKdqf2x62aYj5RPwS5rBkEQFVK4Ojqfrx… 1/5 4 reasons why Gender Studies has changed because of illiberal attacks, and why it matters Commentary Systematic and systemic attacks on Gender Studies are part of anti-gender campaigns and online public harassment, associated with the anti-gender movement, a nationalist, neo-conservative response to the triple crisis (migration, financial and security). These illiberal attacks are gaining much support all over Europe. licence infos
Over the last decade, ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) society in Israel has begun to counter sexual violence in ways and on a scale previously unimagined. The shift has been spearheaded by a heterogeneous network of haredi activists, professionals, community leaders and survivors, who are laboring to flag the issue on the community agenda as a high-priority social ill and to assist individuals and families in need. Pushing back against prevailing cultures of denial and silence, this groundbreaking movement works toward new possible scripts for communal accountability. Based on anthropological fieldwork underwritten by feminist sensibilities, I demonstrate that these anti-sexual violence initiatives are creating a venue for public criticism of rabbinic complicity and for the envisioning and enactment of new formations of rabbinic leadership. While this venue is not necessarily subversive in essence, the climate it helps foster is potentially critical, as these discussions expose and unpack taken-for-granted, unchallenged or opaque structures of rabbinic power and authority.
A key thread of research on how lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) persons of faith navigate and make sense of gender and sexual identities and desires that defy their religious traditions’ teachings focuses on identity conflict, management, negotiation, and reconciliation. Drawing on interviews with 64 Orthodox Jewish same‐sex attracted persons in Israel, supplemented by physical and digital ethnographic data, I argue that the conflict frame is empirically imprecise and conceptually flawed. I demonstrate fluidity and ambivalence vis‐à‐vis religiosity and sexual identity and argue that ambivalence is generative: In the process of making sense of their sexual and religious selves, my respondents challenge what it means to be Orthodox and what it means to be same‐sex attracted, thereby challenging the conflict frame's categorical schema. I then make the case for a more contextualized and dynamic framework for theorizing LGBT negotiations of religious and sexual identities. I also observe that the limitations of the conflict lens are symptomatic of broader tendencies in the sociology of religion to rely on U.S. and Christian cases and a pattern of limited engagement with work in other disciplines and subdisciplines.
Tel Aviv is becoming a hotspot for gay tourism through the support of municipal and national forces. The city is marketed as a Middle Eastern gay utopia, drawing tourists due to its location, LGBT nightlife, and Oriental flavor. Meanwhile, local Israeli LGBT individuals strive to produce themselves as Western, both performatively and politically. This paper discusses how the Tel Aviv Municipality, the state, commercial actors, and LGBT individuals utilize Israeli ethnicities. We argue that the dissonance between Orientalist images and Westernization processes, which are particularly noticeable in the marketing of gay tourism to Tel Aviv, maintains a twofold construction of Tel Aviv as a Middle Eastern global city, which we term the Progressive Orient. Reinforcing the differentiation from the Middle East and other Arab countries, while embracing Orientalist images and tastes under the guise of authenticity, this particular kind of pinkwashing also differentiates the city as other than the rest of Israel. This in turn creates new nuances of ethnic Israeli gayness illustrated by an emerging gay Mizrahi culture.
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.
Lehava is an Israeli extreme right-wing organization dedicated to fighting intermarriage and especially preventing Arab men from courting Jewish women. This article presents the results of an ethnographic research on Lehava. The organization is examined in the context of growing Jewish ethno-nationalism in Israel and the contingent development of new urban extreme right-wing movements. The research presents an initial foray into this field. Lehava brings together traditional Mizrahim, teenagers from the margins of Haredi society, and the extreme right-wing fringes of Religious Zionism. The elements that attract members of these various groups are described, especially the patriarchal notion that religious and national honor is lost when Jewish women have sexual relations with Arab men. Lehava’s positioning between extreme right-wing movements and religious organizations is explained. It is suggested that local elements including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Israeli ethnic and class relations play a role in shaping this phenomenon, and that it is also comparable to similar cases occurring in the context of postcolonial national and religious struggles.
This article analyzes the work of Palestine's most established queer rights organization, alQaws for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society, to reveal the political power of being queer in Palestine. It argues that an open, feminist, queer space such as alQaws is a productive site to think and practice decolonization. Relying on the author's direct involvement with the group, the article traces the development of queer Palestinian thought to provide a critique of queer politics in Palestine: it recounts how since the establishment of the organization in 2001, alQaws activists have increasingly transcended exclusivist gay identifications and rejected singling out sexuality as a discrete site of oppression disconnected from Zionist settler colonialism. The discussion covers Israeli pinkwashing and its counter, Palestinian pinkwatching; it deconstructs pinkwashing narratives, rejects the myth of the colonial savior, and reveals how discourses of sexual progress reproduce Zionist colonialism. It also documents alQaws's challenge to normalizing development discourse.
The ethnographic research that I conducted at a Bais Yaakov seminary in Jerusalem demonstrates how ultra-Orthodox female teachers and their teenage pupils structure an ideology of modesty through the reinterpretation of canonical texts on modesty. In this study, I show that modesty is a creative sphere informed by two trends: the adoption of modern patterns of behavior, and religious innovation. The exegesis these women give to the texts upon which they base their practice redefines the field of modesty in two primary ways: (1) It transforms modesty from a rigid halachic dictate into a dynamic feminine “mission” that is connected to the sphere of virtues; and (2) it replaces the socio-masculine discourse upon which this observance is based with a divine imperative. This phenomenon bears witness to a shift in the types of authority that these ultra-Orthodox teenage girls are willing to accept, since the only justification they accept for their modesty practices is that of personal devotion to God.
This article examines a local version of medical public discourse about fetal images produced through ultrasonography in Israel, where this technology has gained huge popularity. Nevertheless, I argue, ultrasound in Israel has not become engaged in the discursive production of "fetal subjects" central to the Euro-American life politics. Fetal images in Israel have become entangled in a "politics of threatened life": where "life" stands typically for the pregnant woman and "threat" for the fetus, while the prospect of a reproductive misfortune is the fabric through which pregnancies, regardless of their medical categorization as "low risk" or "high risk," are navigated and negotiated by doctors and women. The same processes of separation generated by ultrasonography forge different imagined relations between woman and fetus. This article opts to go beyond analyzing the cultural paradigms of thinking and the sociopolitical circumstances at play, to convey a sense of how notions of threatened life are produced.
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