Lea Taragin-Zeller

Radical right-wing movements are resurging around the globe and thriving during global pandemic crises. Far-right leaders in India, Hungary, Philippines, Israel, Brazil, United States, United Kingdom and elsewhere have gained and retained power in recent years, despite involvement in massive corruption scandals and failing to deliver on campaign promises. From Trump's "America first" to Kaczyński's "there is only one Poland," expressions of ethnonationalism, right-wing populism, and authoritarianism are taking nightmarish form-especially during the COVID-19 pandemic (Edelman 2020). Strongmen regimes (Ben-Ghiat 2020) are building power through angry politics (Maskovsky and Bjork-James 2020) that polarize populaces, capitalize on catastrophe, and undermine democratic institutions. While not new, right-wing parties worldwide are advancing similar agendas in diverse historical, economic, cultural, and religious contexts that promote nationalist, xenophobic, demagogic, antifeminist, and majoritarian issues-and are doing so more successfully than any other political group in decades (Spierings et al. 2015). The global ascension of illiberal movements is experiencing a distinct "moment" (Mouffe 2018) in the twenty-first century-and reproductive politics are at its center.

Until recently, Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews in Israel were mainly examined through the lens of the "isolated enclave model." Yet the Haredi sector has undergone radical changes in a wide array of social and cultural spheres. Many of the traits that exemplified Israeli yeshiva fundamentalism at its inception, such as uncompromising dedication to Torah study, the exclusion of women from public life, sizeable families, male asceticism, and community-wide segregation, have all been called into question by community members and modified by grassroots forces. In this chapter, we offer an overview of contemporary Haredi Judaism while using three trends of religious revival-fundamentalism, charismatic manifestations and ritualization. Analytically, these trends can be identified globally, among many other religious groups. Like in other countries, Jewish men and women have reacted to monotheistic ideals of religiosity and produced a variety of new religious experiences that fuse paganism, shamanism, aspects of Buddhist spirituality with new-age spiritualties and Judaism. Demonstrating these trends in the Israeli case, we also build on feminist and critical studies to offer a more nuanced look at fundamentalism, charisma and group worship taking gender, race and inner-communal power struggles into account.

While scholars have highlighted how science communication reifies forms of structural inequality, especially race and gender, we examine the challenges science communication pose for religious minorities. Drawing on the disproportionate magnitude of COVID-19-related morbidity on Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox Jews, we examined their processes of COVID-19 health decision making. Survey results show that both religious and health-related justifications were common for personal decisions, yet a disparity was found between the ways social distancing guidelines were perceived in the general education context compared with the religious context, signaling the importance for inclusive models of science communication that account for religious sensibilities and state-minority relations.

The present article focuses on contemporary fundamentalist norms that pertain to the body, carnality, and related transgressions. While most scholars work under the assumption that fundamentalist movements are adept at preserving their worldviews and enforcing corporeal taboos, institutionalized groups of this sort are undergoing major transformations in all that concerns asceticism, communal isolation, gender roles, and the family. Our case study of an ultra-Orthodox group in Israel indicates that younger members, both men and women alike, are casting doubt on two of their community’s paradigms: the yeshiva scholar and the virtuous mother. Drawing on an analysis of recent male and female interpretations of the yaiṣer ha'rah (evil inclination), we point to a shift from ascetic and reclusive fundamentalism to a piety grounded in interaction with the surrounding society. Bucking the consensus in the literature on how religious groups handle change, this paper demonstrates that as these communities settle down and institutionalize, religious educators are finding creative ways to meet their members’ deep-seated need to engage with the world at large by, inter alia, modifying distinctly gendered body-based practices and taboos.

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.

The Reproductive Righteousness Project is a new initiative launched to explore the ways in which families, fertility and reproduction have become increasingly important discursive moral devices through which right wing populist leaders invoke the threat of national, social and cultural decline. From Trump's "America first" to Kaczyński's "there is only one Poland," expressions of ethno-nationalism, right-wing populism, and authoritarianism are increasingly central to rightwing authoritarian regimes. This project brings together feminist scholars with wide-ranging expertise to collaboratively theorize expressions of what we call "reproductive righteousness." The project is interdisciplinary, comparative, and global in scope. We take a critical approach that incorporates intersectional feminist, queer, and reproductive justice perspectives, and questions normative assumptions about reproduction, gender, religion, race and the state.

Can words alone can draw people into meaningful relations of mutual respect, tolerance, and peace? 

Recent decades have seen a global rise in inter-religious initiatives. Of late, however, inter-religious organizations and other stakeholders have expressed concerns about the challenges of talking about faith and across faiths, highlighting dialogue’s potential for failure and what might be ‘lost in translation’ in talk-based exchange (Brink-Danan 2015). Perhaps in response to these concerns, materially oriented inter-religious activities are becoming increasingly popular in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere. 

At the same time, the material turn in sociology, anthropology, and religious studies has shown the need to attend to the material and embodied nature of religious experience (c.f. Becker 2020; Eichler-Levine 2020; Fader 2009; Meyer and Houtman 2012; Naumescu 2017; Stadler 2022). Pushing back against earlier approaches focused narrowly on belief and text, scholars across these disciplines have explored embodied practices and material engagements. Thinking through space (Simmonds 2019; Victor 2022) and buildings (Bano & Benadi 2018; Coleman 2019), clothing and makeup (Badder forthcoming; Sagir 2021), light, music, and sound (Rakow 2020), aesthetics (Esposti 2018), ruins and archaeological sites (Hanscam 2018), and many more material forms, this wide-ranging body of work showcases the  ways and contexts in which different objects and materials enable or support religious feelings. This body of work demonstrates the central role that material elements and ‘sensational forms’ (Meyer 2011) play in cultivating connections, belongings, and community across various religious groups. 

Inspired by this turn and drawing on the growing literature on inter-religious relations (Egorova 2018; Everett and Gidley 2018; Hadžimuhamedović 2018; Özyürek 2022; Sheldon 2022; Taragin-Zeller forthcoming; Walton 2016) in a post-pandemic world where people are renegotiating face-to-face encounters (Kasstan 2022), this conference will explore materiality in the context of inter-religious encounters. We are seeking papers that explore questions in this area, including:

- How do material elements – from buildings to food to bodies – enable inter-religious relations, shape the texture of those relations, and facilitate respect and care?

- How do materially-oriented activities bring people of different faiths into interaction with each other?

- What links between dialogue and material things are at work in these various encounters? 

- How is this process understood to build respect and peace?

- What are ‘materials-in-action’ (Guerrettaz 2021) capable of doing that dialogue cannot?

- What happens when these material inter-religious encounters intersect with the (secular) public sphere?

By focusing on the role of the material in inter-religious encounters, we hope to reveal an aspect of inter-religious relations so far uninterrogated by scholarship on interfaith relations, complicate the ideological/material, mind/body dichotomies often erected by inter-religious discussions and initiatives, and produce novel connections and insights that will lay the foundations for further investigation and praxis in this area.