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This is a seminal study of cultural attitudes to old age among Jews of the medieval Mediterranean and Near Eastern regions. Rigorously researched and accessibly written, it will appeal to scholars across a range of disciplines as well as to the broader public. While the focus is on Jewish society and culture, critical context regarding the social history of ageing is provided by comparative perspectives from the Muslim world as well as from Spain and Provence and other areas of Christian Europe that were in the Arabic Andalusian cultural orbit. The study draws on many literary genres and scholarly disciplines: philosophy and theology, ethics and law, biblical commentary, Hebrew poetry, medical literature, and a host of marriage contracts, personal letters, and family and communal records from the Cairo Genizah. The result is a nuanced portrait of ageing as both a lived reality and a cultural paradigm in medieval Jewish society.
"This book concerns a cohort of ultra-orthodox Jews based in the greater New York area who, while retaining membership and close familial and other ties with their strictly observant communities, seek out secular knowledge about the world on the down low (so to speak), both online and via in-person encounters. Ayala Fader conducted her ethnographic research in these rarified social circles for years, developing relationships of trust with the mostly young married men and women who have taken to clandestine methods to find alternative social spaces in which to question what it means to be ethical and what a life of self-fulfillment looks like. Fader's book reveals the stresses and strains tha...
In this volume, contributors consider the ways that Jewish communities and users of new media negotiate their uses of digital technologies in light of issues related to religious identity, community and authority. Digital Judaism presents a broad analysis of how and why various Jewish groups negotiate with digital culture in particular ways, situating such observations within a wider discourse of how Jewish groups throughout history have utilized communication technologies to maintain their Jewish identities across time and space. Chapters address issues related to the negotiation of authority between online users and offline religious leaders and institutions not only within ultra-Orthodox communities, but also within the broader Jewish religious culture, taking into account how Jewish engagement with media in Israel and the diaspora raises a number of important issues related to Jewish community and identity. Featuring recent scholarship by leading and emerging scholars of Judaism and media, Digital Judaism is an invaluable resource for researchers in new media, religion and digital culture.
"Phrase 1: A captivating story of Jewish women in North America and their use of the arts, the digital, and technology to reshape Orthodoxy. First translocal ethnography of the ultra-Orthodox female art scene in music, film, and dance across North America and on social media. Phrase 2: An in-depth look into a secluded religious and artistic world in North America"--
No one theory of time is pursued in the essays of this volume, but a major theme that threads them together is Wolfson’s signature idea of the timeswerve as a linear circularity or a circular linearity, expressions that are meant to avoid the conventional split between the two temporal modalities of the line and the circle.
New ways to design spaces for online interaction—and how they will change society. Computers were first conceived as “thinking machines,” but in the twenty-first century they have become social machines, online places where people meet friends, play games, and collaborate on projects. In this book, Judith Donath argues persuasively that for social media to become truly sociable media, we must design interfaces that reflect how we understand and respond to the social world. People and their actions are still harder to perceive online than face to face: interfaces are clunky, and we have less sense of other people's character and intentions, where they congregate, and what they do. Donat...
Unraveling Religious Leadership considers various attributes related to the form and function of leadership within religious institutions in conversation with decolonial ideas and practices. Decoloniality, in negation of the ongoing legacies of colonialism, seeks ways of being and doing beyond white, eurowestern, modern ideals of who a leader is and what a leader does, especially in the context of Christianity and its entanglements with empire. In this book, Lizardy-Hajbi draws upon decolonial ideas, worldviews, and practices to question the current assumed understandings of religious leadership as individual, singular in role and structure, centralizing in power, possessing of expertise and...
"Digital Religion refers to the contemporary practice and understanding of religion in both online and offline contexts, and how these contexts intersect with each other. Scholars in this growing field recognize that religion has been influenced by its engagement with computer-mediated digital spaces, including not only the Internet, but other emerging technologies, such as mobile phones, digital wearables, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. The Oxford Handbook of Digital Religion provides a comprehensive overview of religion as seen and performed through various platforms and cultural spaces created by digital technology. The text covers religious interaction with a wide range of...
Since its inception, the internet has been theorized as a democratic force, a public sphere in which hierarchies are flattened. But the internet is not a neutral tool; it has the power to amplify and mirror certain opinions and, as a result, can concretize social norms. So what happens when matters of religious practice and gender identity collide in these—often unregulated—online spaces? In Keeping Women in Their Digital Place, Ruth Tsuria explores how Orthodox Jewish communities in the United States and Israel have used “digital enclaves”—online safe havens created specifically for their denominations—to renegotiate traditional values in the face of taboo discourse encountered ...
2009 Choice Outstanding Academic Title The ultra-Orthodox yeshiva, or Jewish seminary, is a space reserved for men, and for a focus on religious ideals. Fundamentalist forms of piety are usually believed to be quite resistant to change. In Yeshiva Fundamentalism, Nurit Stadler uncovers surprising evidence that firmly religious and pious young men of this community are seeking to change their institutions to incorporate several key dimensions of the secular world: a redefinition of masculinity along with a transformation of the family, and participation in civic society through the labor market, the army, and the construction of organizations that aid terror victims. In their private thoughts...