Shlomo Guzmen Carmeli

בנקודת המפגש בין אנתרופולוגיה ולימודי תרבות לבין מדעי היהדות, בוחנת אסופת המאמרים בספר זה את ה"טקסטואליות היהודית", דהיינו, את הפנייה לטקסט, ואת השימוש והמשמעות הסמלית המיוחסת לטקסט הדתי ביהדות לגווניה. המאמרים בוחנים כיצד קהילות יהודיות מפרשות את הטקסטים הקאנונים וכיצד פרשנותם מחדשת את התרבות; כיצד הפרשנות יוצרת תרבות; וכיצד הפרשנות משפיעה על המערך החברתי. המאמרים בספר יוצאים גם אל מחוץ למחוזות הלימוד והפרשנות: אל מגוון קהילות שונות, סידורי התפילה, הטקסים, המשפחתיות ואורחות החיים, וגם אל מרחבי הרשת, בכל המקומות הללו יוצרת הטקסטואליות קוסמולוגיות מקומיות והיא נוכחת ומשפיעה על האופנים שבאמצעותם מובן העולם. בחינת טיב המפגשים עם הטקסט מראה כי הם אינם "רק" ביטוי של מחקר בתחום היהדות, אלא מצביעים על הזדמנות ייחודית לפרשנות אנתרופולוגית גדושה. המפגש עם הטקסט יוצר אירועים של רפלקסיה, רגעים שבמהלכם ניתן לחשוב ולהרהר על מהות תרבותנו.

רובין, ניסן ושלמה גוזמן (עורכים).2021. כוחן של מילים, אנתרופולוגיה של
.טקסטואליות יהודית. ירושלים: כרמל
Rubin, Nissan and Guzmen-Carmeli, Shlomo (Eds.). 2021.  The Power of Words: Anthropology of Jewish Textuality. Jerusalem: Carmel Press [Hebrew].

This article draws on the anthropology of crisis to analyze ways in which communal-religious responses to crisis situations can reveal engrained social and cultural structures, and especially their gendered aspects. We focus on two alternative forms of Jewish communal prayer service that emerged in Orthodox communities in Israel during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic: street and balcony minyans. Based on interviews and texts, we explore Orthodox women's experiences of these new religious spaces that entailed the rearrangement of traditional gender and spatial boundaries. We show that while these spaces opened room for new religious experiences for women, they ultimately accentuated their experiences of exclusion. We argue that the destabilization of the physical religious space in these alternative communal prayers reinforced symbolic gender boundaries. Thus, our study not only demonstrates how crises can uncover the deep social grammar of a community, but also how they unearth processes that defy and challenge that grammar.

This paper describes CliniCrowd, a patient-designed, entrepreneurial, crowd-sourced citizen-science approach to evaluating mannitol-essentially, an orphan drug-as a Parkinson's disease treatment. As such, CliniCrowd addresses 'undone science', and our paper contributes to the sociological literature thereon. Based on 38 qualitative interviews, fieldwork, and content analyses (2017-2020), we trace CliniCrowd's background and rationale. We: discuss undone science and its wider contexts; present earlier iterations of citizen-science and treatment activism; examine CliniCrowd's application of crowd-sourced citizen-science to address undone science around 'orphan drug' treatment for Parkinson's disease; explore how CliniCrowd has evolved, and re-framed its work, since its founding; ponder its future; and consider whether their approach can guide future citizen-science treatment research. Our paper contributes to the existing literature in four ways. First, we focus on medical treatment issues, an under-studied area of undone science. Second, we highlight orphan drugs as both major source of, and fruitful area for research on, undone science. Third, we describe CliniCrowd's pragmatic, entrepreneurialrather than the more common activist-citizen-science approach to addressing undone treatment science. Finally, from our data on CliniCrowd we distil a preliminary model for future treatment activism around undone science.

This paper explores spirituality and associated practices in the daily life of Jewish Atheists in Israel. While the atheist narrative excludes a belief in God, our findings show a bricolage of spiritual practices and strengthening strategies in times of crisis and loss of control. The article uses the ‘Lived Religion’ approach as a theoretical tool for exploration and focuses on everyday practices that facilitate a sociological examination of individual experiences hitherto overlooked. Drawing from in-depth interviews and fieldwork conducted between 2019-2021, our article demonstrates a continuous internal discourse that emphasizes rationalism anchored in an atheistic perspective and spiritual perceptions that resort to comforting practices influenced by a diversity of theological toolbox, such as luck management, specific prayers, perceptions of faith in a just-universe, and relating to Jewish sacred objects in their homes. Describing our interviewees' daily experiences takes their worldview into account but also seeks to illustrate their ‘lived atheism’ as a whole within which rationalism is combined with what we term ‘post-rationalism.’ Our findings add a dimension to the understanding of Israeli secular identities as bricolage, as well as the understanding of religious and spiritual symbolism in ostensibly distant fields.

This paper, based on fieldwork conducted in a Jerusalem yeshiva, describes how the yeshiva, a traditional institute of religious studies, also serves as an institution of healing and personal therapy in which sacred religious texts assume a central place. The article focuses on personal sessions between the rabbi who heads the yeshiva, and his audience of believers who turn to him for help in coping with personal hardships and tribulations. The paper contextualizes and elaborates upon the concept of 'deep healing' to describe how the rabbi uses his regular 'tool kit' to diagnose the problems of the person facing him and to offer optimal, personalized therapy. The rabbi uses religious texts to create textual deep healing processes that are tailor-made for the individual supplicant and are intended to accompany supplicants for a long period of time.

The article, based on fieldwork conducted among an extremist Hasidic group, demonstrates how religious fundamentalism may be linked to modernism through the way in which modern ideas infiltrate fundamentalist culture. The authors examine the contract that is signed annually by members of the group, which reaffirms their acceptance of stringent regulations. The contract is signed by every individual by means of a performative act that consolidates the separatist Hasidic social fabric on the basis of contractual legal rationality and creates categories and values that bind the individual to the community, an act that circumscribes that cultural enclave.

While the study of Kabbalah is expanding in non-Orthodox circles both around the world and in Israel, Kabbalah is also studied in Orthodox (mainly Sephardic) yeshivot concerned with tikkun (divine repair) of the world and of the individual. Tikkun of the world involves a special kabbalistic prayer method, while tikkun of the individual involves methods of healing and treatment of personal problems. This article, based on participant observation conducted for a year in a Jerusalem kabbalistic yeshiva, is a response to the appeal for an ethnographic study of those immersed in Kabbalah in the traditional locale. The fieldwork findings reveal that the yeshiva, the traditional institution of study, also serves as a place of healing and personal therapy in which the sacred text occupies a central place. In the yeshiva, instrumental use is made of the text as object. From a configuration of symbols subject to many alternate interpretations, the text is transformed into a pattern of icons and signals with only one meaning. The kabbalists as therapists use texts to create personalized symbols that assist their supplicants in coping with their personal hardships. This ability is a powerful cultural tool that provides support and solace to the community of believers, and is simultaneously a powerful instrument in the hands of the yeshiva institution. We conclude that a community whose members adopt a mystical worldview, also gradually attribute iconic significance to its texts.

In this article, we attempt to describe and analyze the social-cultural activities that take place at Rabbi Yitzchak’s rallies, while emphasizing what we have named the “teshuva (repentance, lit. return) bargain” that is formed between the rabbi and the audience participants during the rallies. As part of the ritual healing performances carried out at the rallies during the “teshuva bargains,” individuals in the audience commit themselves to more meticulous religious observance and the rabbi, on his part, graces them with a blessing for healing and success, a blessing that is backed up
by the spiritual force of the audience of believers that endorses this transaction. By describing the activity at the rallies as teshuva bargains, we seek to extricate the audiences in Rabbi Amnon Yitzchak ritual healing performances from their passive stance (to which they were relegated in previous studies carried out on these rallies) and place them center- stage in the social-cultural occurrences. In contrast to the approach that views the sermon as a one-directional process in which societal values are transferred from the darshan (preacher) to the audience of listeners, we portray
Rabbi Yitzchak’s teshuva rally via an interactive prism as the stage for a dramatic cultural performance in which the desires of the audience come face to face with the desires of the preacher.

Vanessa Ochs said, "What a feast this is, drawn from an eclectic and refreshingly global menu of contemporary cultural performances of Jewish revival. For those who take pleasure in accounts of Jewish innovations, both enduring and ephemeral, here are the inside stories, thoughtfully parsed, with an abundance of judicious, yet still juicy detail."
Order your copy or e-book here: https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/jewish-revival-inside-out
30% discount with code AJS3 till January 18th

Title / Author / Editor
Jewish Revival Inside Out
Remaking Jewishness in a Transnational Age
Edited by Daniel Monterescu and Rachel Werczberger

Wayne State University Press (forthcoming)
Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology
General Editor
Dan Ben-Amos
University of Pennsylvania


Keynote
Unravels the cultural tension inherent in projects of Jewish revival, renewal, and survival in the face of an uncertain future.

Copy
Against the gloomy forecast of “The Vanishing Diaspora”, the end of the second millennium saw the global emergence of a dazzling array of Jewish cultural initiatives, institutional modalities, and individual practices. These “Jewish Revival” and “Jewish Renewal” projects are led by Jewish NGOs and philanthropic organizations, the Orthodox Teshuva (return to the fold) movement and its well-known emissary Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidism, and alternative cultural initiatives that promote what can be termed “lifestyle Judaism.” This range between institutionalized revival movements and ephemeral event-driven projects circumscribes a diverse space of creative agency, which calls for a bottom-up empirical analysis of cultural creativity and the re-invention of Jewish tradition worldwide. Indeed, the trope of a “Jewish Renaissance” has become both a descriptive category of an increasingly popular and scholarly discourse across the globe, and a prescriptive model for social action. This volume explores the global transformations of contemporary Jewishness, which give renewed meaning to identity, tradition, and politics in our postsecular world.

Author / editor / contributor information
Daniel Monterescu is professor of urban anthropology and food studies at the Central European University, Vienna. He is the author of Jaffa Shared and Shattered: Contrived Coexistence in Israel/Palestine (finalist of the 2016 Association for Jewish Studies Jordan Schnitzer Book Awards) coauthor of Twilight Nationalism: Politics of Existence at Life's Edge and coeditor of Food and settler Colonialism

Rachel Werczberger isa senior lecturer of anthropology of religion in Hadassa Academic college. She is the author of Jews in the Age of Authenticity: Jewish Spiritual Renewal in Israel. She is the winner of the International Society for the Sociological Study of Religion 2019 best article award.

Contributors: Asher Biemann, Jonathan Boyarin, Lucine Endelstein, Zvi Gitelman, Ruth Ellen Gruber, Shlomo Guzman-Carmeli, Nissim Leon, Shaul Magid, Daniel Monterescu, Michael Paley, Cara Rock-Singer, Hannah Tzuberi, Rachel Werczberger, Sara Zorandy, Geneviève Zubrzycki

The Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University  is pleased to announce a two day international workshop (March 18-19, 2015) convened by Prof. Don Seeman and Dr. Shlomo Guzmen: "Jews, Text and Ethnography." This workshop will address critical theoretical and methodological issues in the anthropology of Judaism as well as comparative issues raised by the anthropology of textuality in Christianity and Islam. Participants include Jonathan Boyarin (Cornell University) Philip Wexler (the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Ayala Fader (Fordham), Marcy Brink Danan (The Hebrew University), Don Seeman (Emory) Alan Brill (Seton Hall), Simon Dein (University College, London), James Bielo (Miami University)  and Sam Cooper (Bar-Ilan). More Details to Follow.

This workshop sets outs to explore the study of lived religion from a comparative perspective. In the past two decades, the concept of lived religion has become a primary analytic key for understanding and interpreting religious life. Applied by now to a wide array of religious practices and experiences, the interest in lived religion reflects a newfound interest in the sociology of religion in ordinary people as religious subjects.
In this workshop, we ask about the theoretical and methodological implications of applying this perspective, whose origins are in the North American sociology of religion, to distinct social, cultural, and religious settings and geographical locations. How does a comparative approach contribute to a more nuanced understanding of different cases of lived religion, rooted in different social and religious settings? How do the different lived dimensions of the religious experience, its materiality, the affective investments it affords, and its embodied performance, manifest differently in distinct religious cultures? And what might be the methodological implications when applying this perspective to diverse cultural and social frameworks?

The workshop will take place at Bar Ilan University, located in the city of Ramat Gan, and at Hadassah Academic College in Jerusalem. It will convene senior and junior sociologists of religion, ethnographers, and religious studies scholars working on diverse topics related to lived religion. It will also include a half-day field trip in Jerusalem.