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Anthropology of the Jews (Jewish Studies)

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  1.  
  2. Introduction
  3. Anthropology of the Jews encompasses a modern intellectual tradition of ethnographic study of Jews, resulting in the collection and representation of behaviors, languages, and customs of a dispersed and diverse subject. Anthropologists of Jews regularly enter into dialogue about how the study of Jews calls into question accepted disciplinary boundaries, methods, and practices. Across Europe, Israel, and Argentina, for example, sociology and anthropology are often housed in one department under a broad umbrella of “social sciences.” As such, anthropological studies of Jews have taken place under many disciplinary headings: folklore, ethnography, linguistics, sociology, and cultural studies, just to name a few. Another central theme in anthropological studies of Jews takes on the issue of how Jewishness itself is defined, contested, negotiated, transmitted, and transformed. Anthropology of the Jews necessarily begins with the question of how Jewishness, in all its varied expressions, takes on meaning in the world. Anthropologists have resisted, in general, accepting a priori definitions of Judaism emanating from rabbis or community elites, looking instead to the variety of ways people relate to (or reject) tradition and change. Anthropologists allow these categories of belonging to surface from their informants, which sometimes leads to decidedly nonelite (especially non-rabbinic) definitions of Judaism and Jews. Anthropological representations of Jews have taken the form of popular literature, theatrical and museum exhibitions, and scholarly publication in ethnographies and academic journals.
  4.  
  5. General Overviews
  6. Overviews of this topic, such as a collection edited by Harvey Goldberg (Goldberg 1987), a leading anthropologist of Jewish life, regularly begin with a consideration of how the modern scholarly discipline of anthropology long ignored the Jewish subject and how the Jewish Studies canon once overlooked the value of anthropological contributions. Overviews sometimes consider the relationship between anthropology and Judaism from a different angle. Goldberg 1998, for example, addressed the question of how Jewish studies might better integrate anthropological methods and theories in dealing with Jewish subjects. Most major collections make the question of disciplinarity an explicit concern. The disciplinary bridge between anthropology and history, for example, has been widely promoted as necessary for the study of Jews, as explored in Boustan, et al. 2011, a recent essay collection that resulted from a yearlong dialogue between historians and anthropologists under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. When studying Jews, one cannot describe them as a people “without history” (as many early anthropological studies imagined their subjects to be). Another intellectual and methodological challenge to anthropological approaches to Judaism took up the question of how to integrate text study into ethnographic projects and the Jewish culture as historical literacy of (elite) Jews as opposed to the non-literacy of most early anthropological subjects. The absence of anthropological studies of Jews in the early years of the discipline has been attributed to the modern discipline’s early focus on non-literate peoples. Boyarin was among the first to offer an in-depth scholarly examination of the assumptions of anthropological thought as they relate to the study of Judaism, especially as they relate to assumptions about orality and literacy (Boyarin 1991). Recently, in order to bridge religious studies and anthropological approaches, Marcy Brink-Danan, who chairs the American Anthropological Association’s Committee of the Anthropology of Jews and Judaism, with Matti Bunzl, provided an introduction (Brink-Danan 2008) to the topic of the anthropology of Judaism for a wide audience.
  7.  
  8. Boustan, Raʿanan S., Oren Kosansky, and Marina Rustow, eds. Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.
  9.  
  10. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  11.  
  12. The introduction highlights issues of post-disciplinarity and the intellectual questions that arise when considering Jewish authority, Diaspora, and tradition; geared toward a scholarly audience. Some essays are more clearly “anthropological” than others and so may be used selectively, especially for graduate pedagogy.
  13.  
  14. Find this resource:
  15.  
  16. Boyarin, Jonathan. “Jewish Ethnography and the Question of the Book.” Anthropological Quarterly 64.1 (January 1991): 14–29.
  17.  
  18. DOI: 10.2307/3317833Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  19.  
  20. This essay explores reasons for the marginality of Jewish subject matter in anthropology as rooted in the Christian theological heritage of anthropological thought, an overemphasis on area studies, and inadequate tools to deal with the textual aspects of Jewish culture.
  21.  
  22. Find this resource:
  23.  
  24. Brink‐Danan, Marcy. “Anthropological Perspectives on Judaism: A Comparative Review.” Religion Compass 2.4 (2008): 674–688.
  25.  
  26. DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00092.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  27.  
  28. Offers a brief overview of the variety of approaches the discipline has taken toward the subject of Jewish religion, society, and culture; written with a general (i.e., non-anthropologically trained) audience in mind.
  29.  
  30. Find this resource:
  31.  
  32. Goldberg, Harvey E. “Coming of Age in Jewish Studies, or Anthropology Is Counted in the Minyan.” Jewish Social Studies 4.3 (1998): 29–64.
  33.  
  34. DOI: 10.2979/JSS.1998.4.3.29Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  35.  
  36. Describes how the inclusion of structural anthropology in the study of Jewish life in historical settings infused analyses of past practices, with a new emphasis on understanding everyday experience.
  37.  
  38. Find this resource:
  39.  
  40. Goldberg, Harvey E., ed. Judaism Viewed from Within and from Without: Anthropological Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.
  41.  
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  43.  
  44. The introduction, especially, argues that shifts in anthropological theory toward a focus on symbols, combined with a reflexive turn of the 1980s American anthropology, created an opening for a productive reevaluation of Jewish themes through an anthropological lens.
  45.  
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  47.  
  48. Identity and National Politics
  49. Many essays have puzzled through the role of Judaism in the life history of individual anthropologists and what this has meant for the development of anthropological thought more broadly. It has been suggested that the assimilatory postures of Jews in early anthropology––such as Malinowski, Boas, Herskovits, Levi-Strauss, and others––created a disincentive to consider the practices of Jews (i.e., those occupying a similar subject position as themselves) as “primitive.” Leonard Glick broached the topic of Boas’s personal identity quandaries about Jewishness and belonging as they influenced his theoretical assumptions, in Glick 1982. Dominguez 1993 is a provocative essay that asked if, based on this history, the discipline has a “Jewish problem.” Feldman responded after an intervening decade (in Feldman 2004) to Dominguez’s question about anthropology’s Jewish problem, suggesting that the problem is not in the discipline but in the reluctance of anthropologists to deal with their identity complexes in the first place. Other scholars have focused on the particular national contexts and ideologies that conditioned the ways anthropologists understood Jewish subjects. Some national contexts that have been considered include the United States (Frank 1997 and Frank 2001), Germany (Penny and Bunzl 2003 and Hauschild 1997), and Israel (Shokeid 2004).
  50.  
  51. Dominguez, Virginia R. “Questioning Jews.” American Ethnologist 20.3 (1993): 618–624.
  52.  
  53. DOI: 10.1525/ae.1993.20.3.02a00090Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  54.  
  55. Technically, a book review of Boyarin’s Storms from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (1992) and Fishman’s Judaism and Modernization on the Religious Kibbutz (1992), Dominguez provocatively considers the likelihood that these works––and others that take Jewish subjects as their focus––will be received marginally in anthropological circles.
  56.  
  57. Find this resource:
  58.  
  59. Feldman, Jeffrey D. “The Jewish Roots and Routes of Anthropology.” Anthropological Quarterly 77.1 (2004): 107–125.
  60.  
  61. DOI: 10.1353/anq.2004.0003Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  62.  
  63. A response to Dominguez 1993, this article refocuses the question away from Jews as anthropological subjects. Feldman argues that the Jewishness of anthropology and of anthropologists, while acknowledged by disciplinary historians such as Stocking, demands closer inspection.
  64.  
  65. Find this resource:
  66.  
  67. Frank, Gelya. “Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 99.4 (1997): 731–745.
  68.  
  69. DOI: 10.1525/aa.1997.99.4.731Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  70.  
  71. This article traces how promoting an antiracist science has roots in the “double consciousness” and the strained Jewish identification of founders of modern anthropology, such as Boas, Herskovits, and Levi-Strauss.
  72.  
  73. Find this resource:
  74.  
  75. Frank, Gelya. “Melville J. Herskovits on the African and Jewish Diasporas: Race, Culture and Modern Anthropology.” Identities Global Studies in Culture and Power 8.2 (2001): 173–209.
  76.  
  77. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  78.  
  79. Locates the comparatively different history of anthropological treatments of the diasporic cultural transmission of American Jews and blacks within the context of disciplinary, identity, and national politics of the first half of the 20th century; focuses on the unsettled category and self-definition of Jewishness among Herskovits and other early American anthropologists.
  80.  
  81. Find this resource:
  82.  
  83. Glick, Leonard B. “Types Distinct from Our Own: Franz Boas on Jewish Identity and Assimilation.” American Anthropologist 84.3 (1982): 545–565.
  84.  
  85. DOI: 10.1525/aa.1982.84.3.02a00020Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  86.  
  87. Examines the influence of Boas’s personal history—centrally, his Jewish and German heritages—on his promotion of certain theories that appear, at first, to be in ironic tension: assimilation and cultural pride.
  88.  
  89. Find this resource:
  90.  
  91. Hauschild, Thomas. “Christians, Jews, and the Other in German Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 99.4 (1997): 746–753.
  92.  
  93. DOI: 10.1525/aa.1997.99.4.746Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  94.  
  95. Explores how 20th-century German anthropology pursued not the description of an ethnos but the creation of one––a pure, German nation that would eliminate traces of otherness among true Germans, for whom the Jew was not the ultimate other (which was reserved for the true––and remote––primitive).
  96.  
  97. Find this resource:
  98.  
  99. Penny, H. G., and Matti Bunzl, eds. Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.
  100.  
  101. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  102.  
  103. Describes how German anthropology rejected the American and British turn to cultural relativism in exchange for turn-of-the-20th-century German nationalism and anti-Semitism, from which Franz Boas and other marginalized German-Jewish academics fled.
  104.  
  105. Find this resource:
  106.  
  107. Shokeid, Moshe. “Max Gluckman and the Making of Israeli Anthropology.” Ethnos 69.3 (2004): 387–410.
  108.  
  109. DOI: 10.1080/0014184042000260035Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  110.  
  111. Provides a detailed history of the development of the discipline by the once-student of Gluckman, treating the subject of the relationship between sociology and anthropology, the Manchester school and the politics of studying Jews––and others––in the early Israeli scene.
  112.  
  113. Find this resource:
  114.  
  115. Memory and Salvage
  116. A dominant segment of ethnographies of Jews and Judaism fall into a category we might call “the anthropology of Jewish memory,” in which the stories, customs, and lifeways of “lost” or dwindling Jewish communities are catalogued and re-created. Bahloul 1996, Boyarin 1991, Boyarin 1992, Haskell 1994 (see Diaspora), Deshen and Zenner 1996, Kugelmass 1996 (cited under American Jews), Salamon 1999 (cited under World Communities) and, more recently, Behar 2007 have crafted ethnographies memorializing the life of Jews from Algeria, Cuba, and Poland, to name just a few. As a collection of essays on precolonial Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, Deshen and Zenner 1996 shows the fact that the distribution of Jews in the world has dramatically changed in the past hundred years (whether that should be through changing political scenarios, through expulsion, or through genocide) indeed demands a reckoning of what was (or is in the process of being) lost in “the old country.” This kind of engagement has led many anthropologists of Jews, such as Bahloul 1996, Boyarin 1991, Boyarin 1992, and Valensi 1986, to develop new theories of the role of memory in human experience, and its problems, and to develop methods for studying “usable pasts.” Some creative efforts in this category include Behar’s photo essay about Cuban Jews (Behar 2007); the book engages the question of visual cultural artifacts and introduces an important question, suggested earlier in the Algerian case in Bahloul 1996, of who is responsible for the “curatorship” of memories of dwindling or vanished communities. Finally, Lehrer 2010 takes the question of memory a step further in asking if it can be used for non-nostalgic yet positive purposes, such as the reconciliation of “difficult” pasts.
  117.  
  118. Bahloul, Joelle. The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937–1962. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
  119.  
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  121.  
  122. Based on accounts of the author’s family homestead and broader Jewish-Muslim relations in Setif, Algeria, especially as recounted by family members now living in France. Although theoretically sophisticated, it is quite useful for teaching students about Jewish-Muslim relationships in light of North Africa’s colonial past.
  123.  
  124. Find this resource:
  125.  
  126. Behar, Ruth. An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007.
  127.  
  128. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  129.  
  130. Documents the small Jewish community of Cuba and its recent history, through photos and accompanying narratives.
  131.  
  132. Find this resource:
  133.  
  134. Boyarin, Jonathan. Polish Jews in Paris: The Ethnography of Memory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
  135.  
  136. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  137.  
  138. A non-nostalgic reckoning of elderly Jews in France who congregate in community associations, which calls into question the delimitation of an anthropological field community. Suggests a focus on the use value of memory for future-oriented communal strategies.
  139.  
  140. Find this resource:
  141.  
  142. Boyarin, Jonathan. Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
  143.  
  144. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  145.  
  146. A collection of fragments from Boyarin’s prolific writing on topics both anthropological and Jewish; heavy emphasis on the categories of intellectual and political thought that propel and limit anthropological studies of Jews, as well as memory as an anthropological category.
  147.  
  148. Find this resource:
  149.  
  150. Deshen, Shlomo A., and Walter P. Zenner. Jews among Muslims: Communities in the Precolonial Middle East. New York: New York University Press, 1996.
  151.  
  152. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  153.  
  154. This book aimed to fill in gaps of knowledge about “traditional” Jewish communities in North Africa and Southwest Asia; includes a treatise on what traditional Judaism might mean in these settings, and a diverse collection of essays that survey Jewish populations in this region.
  155.  
  156. Find this resource:
  157.  
  158. Lehrer, Erica. “Can There Be a Conciliatory Heritage?” International Journal of Heritage Studies 16.4–5 (2010): 269–288.
  159.  
  160. DOI: 10.1080/13527251003775596Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  161.  
  162. Considering the example of Polish Jewry, the author examines the way the collective memory of Jews can be recuperated to surprising ends.
  163.  
  164. Find this resource:
  165.  
  166. Valensi, Lucette. “From Sacred History to Historical Memory and Back: The Jewish Past.” History and Anthropology 2.2 (1986): 283–305.
  167.  
  168. DOI: 10.1080/02757206.1986.9960770Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  169.  
  170. Takes up what the author calls the “Jewish question par excellence” of collective memory, through the lens of Tunisian Jewry (and North African Jews in general) who immigrated to France.
  171.  
  172. Find this resource:
  173.  
  174. Diaspora
  175. If Judaism’s suprastate reach once troubled the analytical categories of area studies so basic to anthropological study (as we saw in Mead’s mid-20th-century realization that Jews sometimes share a culture across state borders), in today’s academically and geographically border-crossing world, Jews should be an anthropologist’s dream subject. This theoretical question has been treated in-depth in Boyarin and Boyarin 1993, an essay that reveals the Christian theological assumptions of anthropological thought on the meaning of Diaspora. A handful of anthropological studies indeed analyze the ongoing process of Diaspora formation among Jews. However, as mainstream anthropology increasingly reckons with subjects who are “Diasporic,” as in Clifford 1994, a widely cited anthropology article, the Jews are (sometimes) cited dismissively as historical precedents whose experience should not determine a model for understanding the phenomenon. A book that aims for a middle ground on this issue––neither privileging nor wishing away the deep history of Jewish Diaspora identity––is Levy and Weingrod 2005, whose introduction considers the concept of Diaspora but then suggests that the work of creating typologies and kinds of Diaspora is perhaps less interesting than the lived experience of being part of one; the book offers many chapters to push these questions further by means of comparative ethnographic example. Finally, a number of excellent stand-alone monographs provide fuller detail about particular Jewish Diaspora exprerience. Habib 2004 was among the first to ethnographically examine the particular relationship obtained between North American Jews and Israel through organized touristic visits. Haskell 1994 takes up the rubric of Diaspora, in the author’s ethnography of Bulgarian Jews. Walter P. Zenner, whose work on urban Jews (Zenner 2000) drew insights from his training as an anthropologist as well as a rabbi, developed research on Syrian Jews in many globally connected locations. In an unusual twist on the subject of anthropology of Diaspora, an ethnographer (Shlomo Deshen) develops nostalgia for a colonial site he never visited––Tunisia––through his ethnographic subjects’ memories (Deshen 1997). Perhaps most surprisingly, Moshe Shokeid (Shokeid 1988), a well-regarded anthropologist known for his work among gay Jews in New York, inverted the typical “solar system” model (Levy and Weingrod 2005, p. 69) of Israel at the center of Diaspora life, by doing anthropological research with Israelis living abroad.
  176.  
  177. Boyarin, Daniel, and Jonathan Boyarin. “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity.” Critical Inquiry 19.4 (1993): 693–725.
  178.  
  179. DOI: 10.1086/448694Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  180.  
  181. While this essay is not explicitly “anthropological,” it critiques the neutrality of many popular anthropological theories of identity that reject genealogical ties as valid, arguing, instead, that social theories of achieved status have roots in Pauline rejections of Jewish forms of communal identification.
  182.  
  183. Find this resource:
  184.  
  185. Clifford, James. “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 302–338.
  186.  
  187. DOI: 10.1525/can.1994.9.3.02a00040Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  188.  
  189. In conversation with Boyarin and Boyarin 1993, Clifford argues that Jewish claims to the title of the Diaspora par excellence need be reexamined today because they are found to be only one of a number of groups that might now claim such a title.
  190.  
  191. Find this resource:
  192.  
  193. Deshen, Shlomo. “Near the Jerba Beach: Tunisian Jews, an Anthropologist, and Other Visitors.” Jewish Social Studies 3.2 (1997): 90–118.
  194.  
  195. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  196.  
  197. Decades after his fieldwork with Jews from Jerba who immigrated to Israel (where he studied them) was complete, this piece reflects on how changing political relations allowed him to travel with his subjects to Tunisia many years after studying their integration into Israeli society.
  198.  
  199. Find this resource:
  200.  
  201. Habib, Jasmin. Israel, Diaspora, and the Routes of National Belonging. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
  202.  
  203. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  204.  
  205. Through participant-observation in North American Jewish tours to Israel, struggles to understand the relevance of Israel to Jews living outside of it.
  206.  
  207. Find this resource:
  208.  
  209. Haskell, Guy H. From Sofia to Jaffa: The Jews of Bulgaria and Israel. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994.
  210.  
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  212.  
  213. A short, folklore-inspired monograph about a population that largely avoided the lens of Israeli and American social scientists.
  214.  
  215. Find this resource:
  216.  
  217. Levy, Andreh, and Alex Weingrod, eds. Homelands and Diasporas: Holy Lands and Other Places. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.
  218.  
  219. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  220.  
  221. Although the book’s topic is not limited to the Jewish case, its introduction and many chapters contextualize a number of key Jewish cases into the broader anthropological literature on the topic.
  222.  
  223. Find this resource:
  224.  
  225. Shokeid, Moshe. Children of Circumstances: Israeli Emigrants in New York. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.
  226.  
  227. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  228.  
  229. Illuminates the meaningful connections obtained across a loosely connected landscape of Israeli emigrants in urban America.
  230.  
  231. Find this resource:
  232.  
  233. Zenner, Walter P. A Global Community: The Jews from Aleppo, Syria. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000.
  234.  
  235. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  236.  
  237. A late monograph by a champion of Jewish ethnography that takes up many contemporary themes of anthropology: urbanity, Diaspora, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, multisited research, and tension between individualism and collective identity.
  238.  
  239. Find this resource:
  240.  
  241. World Communities
  242. In the style of many anthropological monographs, there are many titles that can be seen as “community studies” in which a broad picture of social life is portrayed. Community studies are increasingly rare in anthropology; however, given that so many Jews consider themselves to be “part of” something called a “community,” taking a wide view of what is constituted by this emic category allows for an organic picture of the practices and negotiated boundaries seen from within and without. Titles in this category, such as Salamon 1999, a widely read study of Ethiopian Jewish-Christian relationships, focus on how definitions of communal boundaries are flexible and contested––rather than essential––especially in light of broader political and global trends, diasporic connections, and other factors. Community studies of Jews are often tied to a larger national frame. However, monographs that take up the study of a national community are regularly––although not always––based on in-depth research in one particular city, pointing to an increasing trend in urban anthropology to shift the scale of research away from the national. Finally, acclaimed studies of Jewish communities in various national settings are always more than a description of them; they use the relationship of Jews to other kinds of citizens to examine broader anthropological concerns, such as secularism (Buckser 2003), cosmopolitanism (Brink-Danan 2011), modernity (Bunzl 2004), caste (Loeb 1977), or social networks (Markowitz 1993).
  243.  
  244. Brink-Danan, Marcy. Jewish Life in Twenty-First-Century Turkey: The Other Side of Tolerance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.
  245.  
  246. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  247.  
  248. Describes the tensions between the public rhetoric of Jews and their private struggles to maintain a collective Jewish identity, a cosmopolitan outlook, and a role as model Turkish citizens, in light of Turkish overtures toward the European Union and the rise of Islamist politics.
  249.  
  250. Find this resource:
  251.  
  252. Buckser, Andrew. After the Rescue: Jewish Identity and Community in Contemporary Denmark. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
  253.  
  254. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  255.  
  256. This book offers an important study of a “secularized” Jewish community, in contrast to many other monographs that portray Jewish life with a synagogue or religious practices at its center.
  257.  
  258. Find this resource:
  259.  
  260. Bunzl, Matti. Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
  261.  
  262. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  263.  
  264. Describes how Jews and queers have occupied similar positions in central European discourse about otherness. Theoretically sophisticated in its comparative discussions; ideal for graduate students and scholars.
  265.  
  266. Find this resource:
  267.  
  268. Loeb, Laurence D. Outcaste: Jewish Life in Southern Iran. New York: Gordon and Breach, 1977.
  269.  
  270. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  271.  
  272. Describes the ancient community of Jews in light of their struggles and survival techniques, considering the anti-shah movements, emigration, and political weakness.
  273.  
  274. Find this resource:
  275.  
  276. Markowitz, Fran. A Community in Spite of Itself: Soviet Jewish Émigrés in New York. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.
  277.  
  278. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  279.  
  280. Outlines the dense social networks obtained by secular and individualist ex–Soviet Jews “in spite” of these characteristics; highlights the seemingly apolitical communal ties based on shared emotional ties.
  281.  
  282. Find this resource:
  283.  
  284. Salamon, Hagar. The Hyena People: Ethiopian Jews in Christian Ethiopia. Contraversion 13. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
  285.  
  286. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  287.  
  288. Documents the communal strategies of Ethiopian Jews; emphasis on Jewish-Christian relations. This book’s length and style make it a great teaching tool; (non-Israeli) students are generally underinformed about the history and practices of Ethiopian Jews, so this text also draws interest in the sense of filling in knowledge gaps.
  289.  
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  291.  
  292. American Jews
  293. Like that of Israeli Jewry, the anthropological study of American Jewry demands its own category. The confluence both of a large number of Jews living in the country and the prominence of American anthropologists in this endeavor have led to a number of widely read ethnographies of Jewish life. A World War II–era, US government-sponsored research project on national cultures instigated by Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict took up the topic of Jewish American reconstructions of shtetl life (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995). Although the work is purportedly about eastern European small towns, as a new introduction by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett suggests, the book is also useful for understanding how American Jews remember and reinterpret their pasts in light of the American context. Myerhoff 1978 provided an early example of “self-anthropologizing” in the American reflexive tradition when the author studied elderly American Jews. The same time period saw the publication of Mitchell 1980, an ethnography of American Jewish social clubs, notable also for the fact that unlike much anthropology of the Jews, the author himself was not Jewish. For Americanists, Kugelmass’s collection of ethnographic essays on American Jewish life (Kugelmass 1988) offers a landmark description of Jewish experiences that shift the national scale to a more localized one, exhibiting the range of diverse experiences across the American scene. Kugelmass’s prominence as an expert in the anthropology of American Jewry was cemented by his sensitive and non-nostalgic portrayal of a “dying” Jewish congregation in the Bronx, in Kugelmass 1996. Prell 1989, a work on the Havurah movement, diverged from then-contemporary sociological analyses of American Jewry that largely used quantitative measures to describe the diminishment of synagogue membership and other indices of community involvement.
  294.  
  295. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “Introduction.” In Life Is with People: The Culture of the Shtetl. Edited by Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog. New York: Schocken, 1995.
  296.  
  297. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  298.  
  299. Considered the first major American authoritative anthropological account of eastern European Jewish life. In a new introduction, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett considers how Mead, perhaps the best-known American anthropologist, saw this as cutting-edge anthropological research.
  300.  
  301. Find this resource:
  302.  
  303. Kugelmass, Jack. Between Two Worlds: Ethnographic Essays on American Jewry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.
  304.  
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  306.  
  307. A central resource for the study of Judaism in the United States; essays notable both for their quality of description and for their overall reflexive stance and evidence of the centrality of secularism among many American Jews.
  308.  
  309. Find this resource:
  310.  
  311. Kugelmass, Jack. The Miracle of Intervale Avenue: The Story of a Jewish Congregation in the South Bronx. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
  312.  
  313. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  314.  
  315. This monograph assesses the changes that take place during the urban population shifts in the Bronx and how these relate to a small community of (largely) elderly Jews. Excellent for teaching; expanded edition; a documentary film by the same name is also available. First published in 1986.
  316.  
  317. Find this resource:
  318.  
  319. Mitchell, William E. Mishpokhe: A Study of New York City Jewish Family Clubs. Families in Changing Urban America. The Hague: Mouton, 1980.
  320.  
  321. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  322.  
  323. An early American ethnography that discusses the relational aspects of urban Jewish communal life, with special attention to the variety of agonistic language that lubricates social ties. In the notes section, the author comments on the politics of a non-Jew studying Jewish families.
  324.  
  325. Find this resource:
  326.  
  327. Myerhoff, Barbara. Number Our Days. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978.
  328.  
  329. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  330.  
  331. A blurred genre of personal narrative and stories recounted by Jews living in California and participating in life at a center for the elderly. Films about the population and the author make for good teaching material.
  332.  
  333. Find this resource:
  334.  
  335. Prell, Riv Ellen. Prayer & Community: The Havurah in American Judaism. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989.
  336.  
  337. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  338.  
  339. Ethnographically examines the meanings that Jews attribute to their religious behavior in the larger American context.
  340.  
  341. Find this resource:
  342.  
  343. Chabad Lubavitch
  344. There is a relatively sparse anthropological literature on this organization/community, which demands much more ethnographic attention, especially given that its transnational nature, its claims to Jewish authority, and its ubiquity in the global Jewish scene speaks to so many contemporary themes in broader anthropological research, such as religious authority, media, assimilation, Diaspora, and so on. As a full-length monograph on Chabad, Dein 2011 stands alone in English-language ethnographic descriptions. However, Henry Goldschmidt provides a comparative study of Chabad and black American claims to authentic Judaism as neighbors in New York City (Goldschmidt 2006). It is fair to say that most ethnographies of Jews around the world have not treated the question of Chabad’s place in their local contexts as deeply as they might; one exception is Buckser 2005, which attempts to puzzle out the relationship obtained between liberal Danish Jews and Chabad members who claim a fundamentalist interpretation of Judaism in Copenhagen. Another reason to focus more anthropological attention on Chabad is that their claims to authentic Judaism invoke a specific understanding of time and space, an increasingly popular topic in anthropological intellectual circles. Chabad’s leaders manifest a particular obsession with conceptualizing time––evident both in their relationship to the past and in a messianic future––that makes their practices a useful site for understanding cultural variations in temporal reckoning (see Kravel-Tovi and Bilu 2008).
  345.  
  346. Buckser, Andrew. “Chabad in Copenhagen: Fundamentalism and Modernity in Jewish Denmark.” Ethnology 44.2 (Spring 2005): 125–145.
  347.  
  348. DOI: 10.2307/3773993Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  349.  
  350. Wrestles with the seeming tension between the broad adoption of secularism among Danish Jewry with their warm reception of Chabad’s traditionalist tendencies.
  351.  
  352. Find this resource:
  353.  
  354. Dein, Simon. Lubavitcher Messianism: What Really Happens when Prophecy Fails? London: Continuum, 2011.
  355.  
  356. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  357.  
  358. One of the few full-length anthropological treatments of Chabad in England.
  359.  
  360. Find this resource:
  361.  
  362. Goldschmidt, Henry. Race and Religion among the Chosen Peoples of Crown Heights. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006.
  363.  
  364. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  365.  
  366. The author investigates competing claims to Jewish authenticity among Brooklyn Lubavitchers and their black neighbors.
  367.  
  368. Find this resource:
  369.  
  370. Kravel-Tovi, Michal, and Yoram Bilu. “The Work of the Present: Constructing Messianic Temporality in the Wake of Failed Prophecy among Chabad Hasidim.” American Ethnologist 35.1 (2008): 64–80.
  371.  
  372. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.00006.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  373.  
  374. These authors consider the employment of various epistemologies of time among messianic Jews.
  375.  
  376. Find this resource:
  377.  
  378. Israel and Zionism
  379. A number of widely discussed monographs point to the currently popular anthropological engagement with the question of Israel’s Jewish “character.” This topic is not usually regarded as “anthropology of the Jews,” perhaps because “Jewishness” is naturalized in Israel. However, putting these works in dialogue with other studies of Judaism is an overdue intellectual move. Two ethnographies about Jewish claims to Israeli land approach the topic in different ways: Slyomovics 1999 looks at one particular city in Israel and how it is remembered by Jewish and Palestinian inhabitants, former and present. El-Haj 2001 takes a broader look at the use of archaeological knowledge in building Jewish claims. Feldman 2007 and Stein 2008 contribute very different portraits of how tourism constructs and reinterprets Jewishness, Arabness, and other identities in contemporary Israel. More-recent anthropology, such as that in Dalsheim 2005 and Feige 2009, considers a long-ignored, but centrally important, place for the study of Judaism; that is, the Israeli settlement project. Don Seeman’s recent monograph on Ethiopians in Israel (Seeman 2010) addresses the religious authority surrounding the Jewishness (or lack thereof) of immigrants to Israel, opening a discussion point for scholars interested in thinking about the role of the state in Jewish identity building. Finally, Kahn 2000 brought our attention to the critical place of demography in the policies and practices of Jewish women in Israel.
  380.  
  381. Dalsheim, Joyce. “Ant/agonizing Settlers in the Colonial Present of Israel-Palestine.” Social Analysis 49.2 (2005): 122–143.
  382.  
  383. DOI: 10.3167/015597705780886176Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  384.  
  385. Argues that the apparent conflicting ideologies between secular and religious Zionists are actually united by a culture of fear and an insistence on Jewish peoplehood, in spite of their obvious political disputes.
  386.  
  387. Find this resource:
  388.  
  389. El-Haj, Nadia A. Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
  390.  
  391. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  392.  
  393. A book chronicling what the author sees as a nationalistic and “Judaizing” role of archaeology in Israel. Widely critiqued and debated by various political camps; the author also was subject to a campaign to deny tenure at Barnard College (which failed), based on the content of this and other scholarly work.
  394.  
  395. Find this resource:
  396.  
  397. Feige, Michael. Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009.
  398.  
  399. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  400.  
  401. An intimate portrait of the settlement project and its meanings and contradictions; emphasis on Gush Emunim.
  402.  
  403. Find this resource:
  404.  
  405. Feldman, Jackie. “Constructing a Shared Bible Land: Jewish Israeli Guiding Performances for Protestant Pilgrims.” American Ethnologist 34.2 (2007): 351–374.
  406.  
  407. DOI: 10.1525/ae.2007.34.2.351Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  408.  
  409. Describes the sacralization of different religious narratives through a coproduction process that takes place between Israeli guides and the tourists with whom they interact.
  410.  
  411. Find this resource:
  412.  
  413. Kahn, Susan. Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
  414.  
  415. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  416.  
  417. Based on ethnographic engagements with sites and debates around issues of reproductive technology, this work gets at the core issues of Jewish (and other) belonging: nationalism, kinship, gender, cultural transmission, and core myths of identity.
  418.  
  419. Find this resource:
  420.  
  421. Seeman, Don. One People, One Blood: Ethiopian-Israelis and the Return to Judaism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010.
  422.  
  423. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  424.  
  425. Examines the borderline between Christianity and Judaism among Feres Mura, their relationship to the Beta Israel, and the various authorizing religious debates surrounding their integration in Israel and elsewhere.
  426.  
  427. Find this resource:
  428.  
  429. Slyomovics, Susan. The Object of Memory: Jew and Arab Narrate the Palestinian Village. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
  430.  
  431. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  432.  
  433. A study in the processes of collective memory, the author puts Jewish and Arab memories and myths about the city of Ein Hod / Ein Houd into comparative perspective.
  434.  
  435. Find this resource:
  436.  
  437. Stein, Rebecca L. Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Political Lives of Tourism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
  438.  
  439. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  440.  
  441. Of particular interest to this field is the ethnography of “micronationalism” the author relates, specifically how Jewish Israelis’ consumption practices construct Arab culture as authentically local.
  442.  
  443. Find this resource:
  444.  
  445. Race and Genetics
  446. One arena in which anthropology of Jews and Judaism continues to make waves is that of race studies and medical anthropology (tied together by new genetic theories). By engaging with a theoretical concept (race; now also encompassing biology, or genetics) that uses Jews as an example to illustrate an anthropological concern, this kind of ethnography about Jews and Judaism continues to bring Judaism and Jewishness into the larger academic debate. If race was always an implicit question for the anthropological study of Jews, the late 1990s and early 21st century saw a move toward more-explicit ethnographic focus on the Jews’ complicated racial categorization, such as in Brodkin 1998 a monograph on the historicization of Jews’ place in American racial categories, and Markowitz’s publications on black Hebrews (Markowitz, et al. 2003). Similarly, Gibel Mevorach (also published as Gibel Azoulay) has written extensively about questions of Judaism and race, based on ethnographic fieldwork and other research in the United States and Israel (Azoulay 1997). Goldschmidt 2006 took the question of Jewishness and race to a microlocal level, examining relationships among variously racialized groups living near each other in Brooklyn. More recently, Arkin 2009 has extended the question of Jewish racial categories in Parisian Jews’ relationships to French Muslims.
  447.  
  448. Arkin, Kimberly A. “Rhinestone Aesthetics and Religious Essence: Looking Jewish in Paris.” American Ethnologist 36.4 (2009): 722–734.
  449.  
  450. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01206.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  451.  
  452. Provides a close analysis of the relatively understudied French Jewish experience, describing how Jews in Paris racialize their identity and manage their tensions with French Muslims in light of Middle Eastern politics.
  453.  
  454. Find this resource:
  455.  
  456. Azoulay, Katya Gibel. Black, Jewish, and Interracial: It’s Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
  457.  
  458. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  459.  
  460. The author brings comparative evidence from the United States and Israel, revealing how racial categories shift not only across time but also in various national contexts (see also Katya Gibel Mevorach, “Les Identités Juives au Miroir de l’héritage du Racisme aux Etats Unis,” in Juifs et Noirs: Du Mythe à La Réalité, Vol. 44, edited by Shmuel Trigano, 119–132 [Paris: Pardes, 2008]).
  461.  
  462. Find this resource:
  463.  
  464. Brodkin, Karen. How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998.
  465.  
  466. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  467.  
  468. A widely taught book that traces the processes of changing ethnic and racial categories in the American scene.
  469.  
  470. Find this resource:
  471.  
  472. Goldschmidt, Henry. “The Voices of Jacob on the Streets of Brooklyn: Black and Jewish Israelites in and around Crown Heights.” American Ethnologist 33.3 (2006): 378–396.
  473.  
  474. DOI: 10.1525/ae.2006.33.3.378Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  475.  
  476. By studying historiographic practices that invoke race and religion among communities with competing, and sometimes complementary, claims but that are within close geographic proximity, the article (and the author’s monograph on the same subject) allows definitions of Jewishness to emerge “in the field” rather than be predetermined by the researcher.
  477.  
  478. Find this resource:
  479.  
  480. Markowitz, Fran, Sara Helman, and Dafna Shir‐Vertesh. “Soul Citizenship: The Black Hebrews and the State of Israel.” American Anthropologist 105.2 (2003): 302–312.
  481.  
  482. DOI: 10.1525/aa.2003.105.2.302Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  483.  
  484. This article, like much of Markowitz’s work, highlights a claim for Jewish collective self-understanding that is less regularly highlighted in political and social analysis: soul citizenship, a transcendent identity outside of blood and territory.
  485.  
  486. Find this resource:
  487.  
  488. Ethnicity
  489. The ethnographic study of Jewish ethnicity, especially in Israel, dominated the early intellectual landscape of anthropology of the Jews. Early studies focused largely on non-European Jews, especially emigrants from the Middle East and North Africa. This focus has bred some critique, in light of postcolonial studies, that European Jews re-created an orientalizing gaze in their depictions of Jews from these regions, a charge contested in Tlamim and Shokeid 2001. Increasingly, this debate has given way to a more comprehensive field of study that challenges a priori ethnic categories, producing ethnographic studies of how these identities are co-created and reformed over time (Khazzoom 2008), such as what Weingrod saw as an ethnic revival among Moroccans in Israel (Weingrod 1990). In light of the changing political landscape of the Middle East and other regions where Jewish ethnic categorization is experiencing flux (Saada‐Ophir 2006, Goodman and Mizrachi 2008), more and more ethnographies that take ethnicity as their main concern reveal the processes of intra-Jewish distinction, such as in Goluboff 2003, a monograph about ethnic divisions in a Moscow synagogue. Wayne State University Press, Indiana University Press, and State University of New York Press all are notable for their support in publishing studies of ethnographic writing about Sephardic and Mizrahi populations; one concern for teaching is that many of the best and classic stand-alone monographs are often out of print and/or prohibitively expensive. With the rise of electronic publishing, perhaps titles can be made more readily available.
  490.  
  491. Goluboff, Sascha L. Jewish Russians: Upheavals in a Moscow Synagogue. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
  492.  
  493. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  494.  
  495. This ethnography of a Jewish synagogue in Moscow attempts to pull apart the overlapping categories of religious practice, ethnicity, and race in post-socialist Moscow.
  496.  
  497. Find this resource:
  498.  
  499. Goodman, Yehuda C., and Nissim Mizrachi. “‘The Holocaust Does Not Belong to European Jews Alone’: The Differential Use of Memory Techniques in Israeli High Schools.” American Ethnologist 35.1 (2008): 95–114.
  500.  
  501. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.00008.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  502.  
  503. Based on participant observation in Israeli high schools, the authors suggest that national processes of collective memorialization reveal the different ethnic and class positions that condition the way the Holocaust––and other central Jewish historical events––are understood.
  504.  
  505. Find this resource:
  506.  
  507. Khazzoom, Aziza. 2008. Shifting Ethnic Boundaries and Inequality in Israel: Or How the Polish Peddler Became a German Intellectual. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.
  508.  
  509. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  510.  
  511. After over half a century of ethnicity being code for non-Ashkenazi communities (especially in Israel), this work offers a timely social history of the making of an “unmarked” ethnic group; namely, Ashkenazim in Israel.
  512.  
  513. Find this resource:
  514.  
  515. Saada‐Ophir, Galit. “Borderland Pop: Arab Jewish Musicians and the Politics of Performance.” Cultural Anthropology 21.2 (2006): 205–233.
  516.  
  517. DOI: 10.1525/can.2006.21.2.205Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  518.  
  519. Takes the example of Israeli “mizrahi” (Eastern) music to study the cultural performances of Arab Jews, evaluating the creation of symbolic borders of nations and sound in light of intra-Israeli and international political and ethnic conflict.
  520.  
  521. Find this resource:
  522.  
  523. Tlamim, Moshe, and Moshe Shokeid. “On the Sin We Did Not Commit in the Research of Oriental Jews.” Israel Studies 6.1 (2001): 15–33.
  524.  
  525. DOI: 10.2979/ISR.2001.6.1.15Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  526.  
  527. Disavows the opinion that the goals of the national Jewish project and those of social scientists conscripted to facilitate this process were too close to produce “pure” research, with the resulting academic studies being tainted by political and economic goals of the state; draws also on Shokeid’s research experiences.
  528.  
  529. Find this resource:
  530.  
  531. Weingrod, Alex. The Saint of Beersheba. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.
  532.  
  533. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  534.  
  535. Seen in light of Turnerian theories of liminality, the author suggests that the increase in pilgrimages to the graves of saints among Israeli Jews of North African descent speaks to an “ethnic revival.”
  536.  
  537. Find this resource:
  538.  
  539. Gender and Sexuality
  540. A central contribution of gender studies to the anthropology of the Jews has been the emphasis on how Judaism is experienced differently between various intra-Jewish groups, including, but not limited to, attitudes toward non-Jews, sex, education, and piety. Sered 1988 led an anthropological shift toward incorporating more gendered analyses in anthropology of the Jews. El-Or 1994, about ultraorthodox women in Israel, offered a monograph-length, intimate look at negotiations between what is considered “practical” and “ideological” in women’s experiences of everyday activities. Two recent books about ultraorthodox Jews (Haredim) in New York (Fader 2009) and Israel (Stadler 2009) examine how gendered language and study practices condition Jews’ understandings of their Jewishness. Although fewer ethnographic works treat the question of Jewish sexuality, per se, Shokeid’s monograph (Shokeid 2002) about a gay synagogue in New York has become standard reading on university syllabi for courses about contemporary Jewish life. Although perhaps less well known, Kaplan 2006, on male friendship in Israeli society, will likely become a classic ethnography of gendered emotions in the Middle Eastern context, because few scholarly works treat the subject in similarly anthropological fashion.
  541.  
  542. El-Or, Tamar. Educated and Ignorant: Ultraorthodox Jewish Women and Their World. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994.
  543.  
  544. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  545.  
  546. Well written and enjoyed by undergraduate students. Through ethnographic detail, disabuses the commonly held understanding that the ultraorthodox exist in an enclave outside of other sectors of society.
  547.  
  548. Find this resource:
  549.  
  550. Fader, Ayala. Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
  551.  
  552. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  553.  
  554. Depicts the lives of American Jewish Hasidic girls; useful for teaching, and with a special emphasis on the role of language in the construction and shift in gendered and Jewish identities.
  555.  
  556. Find this resource:
  557.  
  558. Kaplan, Danny. The Men We Loved: Male Friendship and Nationalism in the Israeli Culture. New York: Berghahn, 2006.
  559.  
  560. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  561.  
  562. Explores the social aspects of male association in Israel, with special emphasis on the military and on biblical and Zionist notions of friendship and desire.
  563.  
  564. Find this resource:
  565.  
  566. Sered, Susan S. “Food and Holiness: Cooking as a Sacred Act among Middle-Eastern Jewish Women.” Anthropological Quarterly 61.3 (July 1988): 129–139.
  567.  
  568. DOI: 10.2307/3317789Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  569.  
  570. Pioneered a gender studies perspective to the anthropological study of Jews, arguing that observing women’s observance of mitzvoth, such as observing Jewish dietary laws, allows us to reconsider what counts as “sacred.”
  571.  
  572. Find this resource:
  573.  
  574. Shokeid, Moshe. A Gay Synagogue in New York. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
  575.  
  576. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  577.  
  578. Details the tensions among different social and political identities that manifest themselves through the organizational communal debates that take place in a gay urban synagogue; focus on the cultural changes and negotiations that characterize communal life.
  579.  
  580. Find this resource:
  581.  
  582. Stadler, Nurit. Yeshiva Fundamentalism: Piety, Gender, and Resistance in the Ultra-Orthodox World. New York: New York University Press, 2009.
  583.  
  584. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  585.  
  586. Stadler’s monograph is based on her unusual access to men in the Israeli Haredi scene, which she obtained through innovative and unusual methodological design.
  587.  
  588. Find this resource:
  589.  
  590. Linguistic Anthropology
  591. One productive––but largely underrepresented––area of study of Jews falls under a broad umbrella of linguistic anthropology, including sociolinguistics (Fishman 1965), ethnography of communication, and semiotics (Brink-Danan 2010). These studies look at the relationship between Jews and language, often focusing on issues of boundary making through language (Dean-Olmstead 2011, Modan 2001), Jewish linguistic styles, multilingualism, and syncretism (Fader 2007), revealing the intimate connection between Jewish identity and the portability of language and symbols over time and space, as well as the mutability of what counts as a Jewish form of expression. A forerunner of many studies of the role of language in Jewish life, Deborah Schiffrin’s ethnography of communication (Schiffrin 1984) focused on involvement styles (e.g., interruption and co-narration) among Jews in Philadelphia. The author of Bunin Benor 2009, for example, has dedicated her career to promoting the comparative social-scientific study of Jewish languages (Jewish intralinguistics) and how language is used to define social networks. In the Israeli scene, Katriel 1986 uses ethnographic materials to speak to broader national ideologies of language, especially as they are seen to be representative of ideal forms of Jewish communication.
  592.  
  593. Brink‐Danan, Marcy. “Names That Show Time: Turkish Jews as ‘Strangers’ and the Semiotics of Reclassification.” American Anthropologist 112.3 (2010): 384–396.
  594.  
  595. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2010.01247.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  596.  
  597. Based on long-term fieldwork in Istanbul, this article considers how names are signs of Jewish difference, a difference understood and constantly renegotiated through various linguistic and social practices observable in today’s Jewish community.
  598.  
  599. Find this resource:
  600.  
  601. Bunin Benor, Sarah. “Do American Jews Speak a Jewish Language?: A Model of Jewish Linguistic Distinctiveness.” Jewish Quarterly Review 99.2 (2009): 230–269.
  602.  
  603. DOI: 10.1353/jqr.0.0046Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  604.  
  605. This article nicely synthesizes the main arguments of Bunin Benor’s ethnographic research with orthodox and liberal Jews in America, in which she observes the microlinguistic differences that shape their ability to perform “as Jews” in diverse and varied speech situations.
  606.  
  607. Find this resource:
  608.  
  609. Dean-Olmsted, Evelyn. “Shamis, Halebis and Shajatos: Labels and the Dynamics of Syrian Jewishness in Mexico City.” Language & Communication 31.2 (2011): 130–140.
  610.  
  611. DOI: 10.1016/j.langcom.2010.08.005Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  612.  
  613. The description of intragroup ontological divides and their expression provides a rich portrayal of the Mexico City Jewish community’s linguistic and cultural repertoires.
  614.  
  615. Find this resource:
  616.  
  617. Fader, Ayala. “Reclaiming Sacred Sparks: Linguistic Syncretism and Gendered Language Shift among Hasidic Jews in New York.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 17.1 (2007): 1–22.
  618.  
  619. DOI: 10.1525/jlin.2007.17.1.1Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  620.  
  621. Offers evidence of how ideologies of language and gender map onto each other (and other social divisions) in Hasidic society.
  622.  
  623. Find this resource:
  624.  
  625. Fishman, Joshua. Yiddish in America: Socio-linguistic description and analysis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965.
  626.  
  627. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  628.  
  629. A founding proponent of Jewish sociolinguistics in America, Fishman’s prolific work on Yiddish, bilingualism, multilingualism, and other ethnic language politics has close ties to anthropological research on endangered and minority languages more broadly.
  630.  
  631. Find this resource:
  632.  
  633. Katriel, Tamar. Talking Straight: Dugri Speech in Israeli Sabra Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
  634.  
  635. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  636.  
  637. An ethnography of communication that chronicles the value of certain modes of expression considered “straight talk” (dugriut) in modern Israeli society and how these emerged from an ideological reaction of native Israelis to the perceptions of Jewish Diaspora “overemphasis” on indirectness as an ideal speech style.
  638.  
  639. Find this resource:
  640.  
  641. Modan, Gabriella. “White, Whole Wheat, Rye: Jews and Ethnic Categorization in Washington, DC.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11.1 (2001): 116–130.
  642.  
  643. DOI: 10.1525/jlin.2001.11.1.116Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  644.  
  645. Using linguistic anthropological theories and methods, this article considers the way that the categories of “white” and “Jewish” index different types of social experience, including ethnicity, race, political access, and histories of discrimination; useful addition to a growing canon of “white studies.”
  646.  
  647. Find this resource:
  648.  
  649. Schiffrin, Deborah. “Jewish Argument as Sociability.” Language in Society 13.3 (1984): 311–335.
  650.  
  651. DOI: 10.1017/S0047404500010526Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  652.  
  653. The author evaluates cooperative language––in this case argumentation––in its appropriate cultural context, reversing trends that considered disputative language as antagonistic.
  654.  
  655. Find this resource:
  656.  
  657. Reflexivity and Representation
  658. Among all the fields in social science, anthropology, as a discipline, embraces a reflexive mode in its search for an ethical form of representing human experience. Given the particular history of ambiguity among the Jewish identity of anthropologists, the discipline, and their subjects, the open and reflexive discussion of these relationships––in the field and in the academy––reveals the often-unspoken tensions, anti-Semitism, and undercurrents of racism of anthropological thought. In line with a shift since the 1980s toward more-explicit attention to the politics of representation, anthropological studies of how Jewishness is narrated, displayed, curated, and otherwise performed have commanded a central stage. Influenced by Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, whose author is the doyenne of folklore, Jewish, and performance studies, anthropology of Jews now regularly considers the role of self-presentation and the performativity of Jewish identity in its theoretical toolkit. Anthropologists have written about Jewish museums in places as disparate as Austria (Bunzl 2003) and Morocco (Boum 2010), showing how the display of Jewish identity can tell us much about the political and visual possibilities of representing Jews, especially in places where they are small or dwindling numbers. In 1989, Walter Zenner edited a special issue of Anthropology and Humanism (Zenner 1989), with contributors working on Jewish topics or whose Jewish identity conditioned their field research and representational techniques, including Domínguez, Glazier, Pastner, Shokeid, and Schuchat, opening up an explicit discussion of the relationship between anthropologists and their Jewish subjects. In this vein, the author of Behar 1996, an acclaimed anthropologist of non-Jewish subjects, describes how Jewishness positioned her with relation to various ethnographic projects over the course of her career. Orlove 1997 offers reflections on reflexivity, summarizing the period in which Jewish anthropologists began to publicly acknowledge the role of Jewishness in their lives and work. A decade later, Fader 2007 complicated the question of Jewish reflexivity by drawing on the author’s position as a liberal Jew in her work with Orthodox Jews.
  659.  
  660. Behar, Ruth. “The Story of Ruth, the Anthropologist.” In People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity. Edited by Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky, 261–279. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.
  661.  
  662. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  663.  
  664. In this essay, the author, known for her intimate and reflexive embrace of the ethnographic project, writes of how her Jewish identity influenced her intellectual trajectory at different points of her career.
  665.  
  666. Find this resource:
  667.  
  668. Boum, Aomar. “The Plastic Eye: The Politics of Jewish Representation in Moroccan Museums.” Ethnos 75.1 (2010): 49–77.
  669.  
  670. DOI: 10.1080/00141841003678742Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  671.  
  672. Many works on portrayals of Jews approach the topic of how they self-represent; here, Boum focuses on the representations of Jews that others make of them in their “absence.”
  673.  
  674. Find this resource:
  675.  
  676. Bunzl, Matti. “Of Holograms and Storage Areas: Modernity and Postmodernity at Vienna’s Jewish Museum.” Cultural Anthropology 18.4 (2003): 435–468.
  677.  
  678. DOI: 10.1525/can.2003.18.4.435Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  679.  
  680. This piece partners nicely with Boum 2010 in that it likewise depicts how Jews are portrayed in the “absence,” but through different logics and representational technologies, including holographic ones.
  681.  
  682. Find this resource:
  683.  
  684. Fader, Ayala. “Reflections on Queen Esther: The Politics of Jewish Ethnography.” Contemporary Jewry 27.1 (2007): 112–136.
  685.  
  686. DOI: 10.1007/BF02965548Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  687.  
  688. The author describes how the process of undertaking fieldwork among Hasidic girls and women in New York called into question the subject position of the anthropologist in a research situation in which she, as a liberal Jew, is neither insider nor outsider; relates specifically to theories of representation and partial knowledge in broader disciplinary debates.
  689.  
  690. Find this resource:
  691.  
  692. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
  693.  
  694. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  695.  
  696. Landmark, influential, and revolutionary work theorizing Jewish identity in its performative keys and venues: museums, ethnographic expositions, and other media.
  697.  
  698. Find this resource:
  699.  
  700. Orlove, Benjamin. “Surfacings: Thoughts on Memory and the Ethnographer’s Self?” In Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies. Edited by Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, 1–29. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
  701.  
  702. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  703.  
  704. Analyzes the historical moment, in the early 1990s, when many American Jewish anthropologists began to come out of the “closet” in terms of their own Jewish identities, and the impact they consider this to have on their anthropological projects.
  705.  
  706. Find this resource:
  707.  
  708. Zenner, Walter P. “Introduction: The Issue of Jewishness in Ethnographic Fieldwork.” Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly 14.1 (February 1989): 2–3.
  709.  
  710. DOI: 10.1525/anhu.1989.14.1.2Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  711.  
  712. Investigates the issue of difference as a way of understanding Jewish life, and specific methodological problems that arise when studying Jews. See also this entire special issue.
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