scholarly journals Sport and British Jewish identity

2020 ◽  
pp. 101269022095862
Author(s):  
Jon Dart

This article examines the relationship between sport and Jewish identity. The experiences of Jewish people have rarely been considered in previous sport-related research which has typically focused on ‘Black’ and South Asian individuals, sports clubs, and organisations. Drawing on data generated from interviews ( n = 20) and focus groups ( n = 2) with individuals based in one British city, this article explores how their Jewish identity was informed, and shaped by, different sports activities and spaces. This study’s participants were quick to correct the idea that sport was alien to Jewish culture and did not accept the stereotype that ‘Jews don’t play sport’. The limited historical research on sport and Jewish people and the ongoing debates around Jewish identity are noted before exploring the role of religion and the suggestion that Jewish participation in sport is affected by the Shabbat (sabbath). Participants discussed how sports clubs acted as spaces for the expression and re/affirmation of their Jewish identity, before they reflected on the threats posed to the wider Jewish community by secularism, assimilation, and antisemitism. The article concludes by discussing how the sporting experiences of the study’s British Jewish participants compare with the experiences of individuals from other ethnic minority communities.

Author(s):  
Leana A. Bouffard ◽  
Haerim Jin

This chapter provides an overview of the literature examining the role of religion and military service in the desistance process. It also identifies outstanding issues and directions for future research. It first presents an overview of research examining the role of religion in desistance and highlights measurement issues, potential intervening mechanisms, and a consideration of faith-based programs as criminal justice policy. Next, this chapter covers the relationship between military service and offending patterns, including period effects that explain variation in the relationship, selection effects, and the incorporation of military factors in criminal justice policy and programming. The chapter concludes by highlighting general conclusions from these two bodies of research and questions to be considered in future research.


2012 ◽  
Vol 19 (1, 2 & 3) ◽  
pp. 2011
Author(s):  
Benjamin L. Berger

There is perhaps no more important access point into the key issues of modern political and legal theory than the questions raised by the interaction of law and religion in contemporary constitutional democracies. Of course, much classical political and moral theory was forged on the issue of the relationship between religious difference and state authority. John Locke’s work was directly influenced by this issue, writing as he did about the just configuration of state authority and moral difference in the wake of the Thirty Years’ War. Yet debates about the appropriate role of religion in public life and the challenges posed by religious difference also cut an important figure, in a variety of ways, in the writings of Hobbes, Rousseau, Spinoza, Hegel, and much of the work that we now view as being at the centre of the development of modern political philosophy.


ALQALAM ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 365
Author(s):  
M.A. TIHAMI

This article tries to discuss the function and the role of religion and magic for kyai ('ulama') and Jawara (local strongmen) in Pasanggrahan, Pabuaran, Serang Banten where this research was conducted. It also tries to describe the meaning and functions of religion and magic for Pasanggrahan society. In this village, kyai, who obtain legitimation from religion (Islam) by his authority to lead religious ceremonies and to interpret religious doctrines, gains many opportunities to play a role in magical sciences derived from the religion; indeed, to upgrade them. It happens because in Islam there are magical elements which are inseparable from religion. Therefore, jawara obtains magic from kyai to meet their practical needs. Based on this relationship, it shows that magic is functionally needed by both of leaders (kyai and jawara) functioned to maintain their leadership. Moreover, each leader needs the perpetuation of the relationship by maintaining solidarity of the society through performing magic. Hence, it seems that the leadership of kyai and jawara in Pasanggrahan is in the networks of religion and magic. Keywords: kyai,jawara, tradisional leadership, magic Banten


2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas J. Westers ◽  
Mark Rehfuss ◽  
Lynn Olson ◽  
Constance M. Wiemann

Abstract Many adolescents who engage in nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) self-identify as religious, but the role of religion in their NSSI is not known. This exploratory study examined the relationship between religious coping and religiousness among adolescents who self-injure and the function of their NSSI. Thirty adolescents aged 12–19 years who had engaged in NSSI participated in an interview and completed questionnaires. Multiple regressions were used to examine the relationship between religious coping and NSSI, and Pearson correlations were used to assess the relationship between religiousness and function of NSSI. Greater use of positive religious coping was associated with lower likelihood of engaging in NSSI to rid oneself of unwanted emotions, whereas greater use of negative religious coping was associated with greater likelihood of engaging in NSSI for this reason as well as to avoid punishment or unwanted responsibility. Higher religiousness was associated with greater use of NSSI to communicate with or gain attention from others, whereas lower religiousness was associated with greater use of NSSI to relieve unwanted emotions. Having a greater understanding of how religious constructs are related to the various functions served by NSSI may inform treatment of this population, particularly among religious youth who self-injure.


Author(s):  
Christina Phillips

This chapter introduces the topic of religion and literature, theorises the novel as a secular genre, and develops a concept of religion as the other in the Arabic novel. It begins with a discussion of the relationship between religion and literature, identifying imagination, metaphorical language and mythos as areas of overlap, before turning to the question of religion and the Arabic novel as a modern form which eschews faith and dogma but is nevertheless packed with religious themes, images, characters, language and intertextuality. This is accounted for by the form’s secularism, which is theorised in terms of Charles Taylor’s conditions of belief. Literary secularism is not static and stable however, thus religion emerges as the other in the Egyptian novel, with all the ambivalence which alterity characteristically entails. This religious other calls into question postcolonial studies’ over-valorisation of the East/West binary insofar as it has obscured the critical role of religion in Arab postcolonial literature and identity.


2020 ◽  
pp. 106591292094813
Author(s):  
Alper T. Bulut

Although a voluminous literature has studied the substantive representation of women, these studies have largely been confined to advanced democracies. Similarly, studies that focus on the relationship between Islam and women’s rights largely ignored the substantive representation of women in Muslim-majority countries. As one of the first studies of its kind, this article investigates the role of religion in the substantive representation of women by focusing on a Muslim-majority country: Turkey. Using a novel data set of 4,700 content coded private members’ bills (PMBs) drafted in the Turkish parliament between 2002 and 2015, this article synthesizes competing explanations of women’s representation in the Middle East and rigorously tests the implications of religion, ideology, critical mass, and labor force participation accounts. The results have significant implications for the study of gender and politics in Muslim-majority countries.


Author(s):  
Ellie R. Schainker

The epilogue summarizes how the phenomenon of Russian Jewish conversion, though marginal in number, left an outsized imprint on the cultural map of East European Jews who grappled with questions of Jewish identity and the role of religion in the increasingly powerful Jewish secular nationalist ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The epilogue explores evolving Jewish attitudes towards baptism, interfaith sociability, and cultural mobility in the late-imperial period, and it puts conversions from Judaism in imperial Russia in conversation with conversions from Judaism in the modern period more broadly. Finally, the epilogue looks ahead to the inter-revolutionary period (1906-1917) and the Soviet period when conversions from Judaism accelerated, accompanied by a growing ethnic conception of Jewish identity whereby national Jewishness found explicit harmony with Christian religious adherence.


2016 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 789-793
Author(s):  
David Arnold

As studies of technology in modern Asia move from production to consumption, and from big machines to small, so they confront increasingly complex and nuanced issues about the relationship between the local, the regional, and the global; between political economy and culture; and, perhaps most crucially, between technology and modernity. From a South Asian perspective (and perhaps from a Southeast Asian one as well), many of these issues are inescapably bound up with the Western colonial presence, decolonization, and the post-independence quest for national self-sufficiency and economic autarky. In East Asia, as the articles by Antonia Finnane and Thomas Mullaney demonstrate, the issues play out somewhat differently, not least because of the pivotal role of Japan as a major regional force, an industrial nation, and an imperial power. In South Asia in the period covered by these essays, Japan was a far more marginal presence, with only some industrial goods—such as textiles, bicycles, or umbrella fittings—finding a market there by the mid-1930s. At their height in 1933–34, some 17,000 Japanese bicycles were imported into India (out of nearly 90,000 overall), and in 1934–35, barely 1,400 sewing machines (out of 83,000); within three years this had fallen to less than 700. However, as Nira Wickramasinghe has recently demonstrated with respect to Ceylon (colonial Sri Lanka), Japan had a significance that ranged well beyond its limited commercial impact: it inspired admiration for the speed of its industrialization, for its scientific and technological prowess, and as the foremost exemplar of an “Asian modern” (Wickramasinghe 2014, chap. 5). One other way in which Japan figured in postwar regional history was through demands for compensation made in 1946 for sewing machines destroyed by Japanese bombing (or the looting that accompanied it) and the occupation of the Andaman Islands. And yet, relatively remote though Japan and China might be from South Asia's consumer history, across much of the Asian continent there was a common chronology to this unfolding techno-history, beginning in the 1880s and 1890s and dictated less evidently by the politics of war and peace than by the influx of small machines, of which sewing machines and typewriters were but two conspicuous examples.


Author(s):  
Jaco Beyers

Human consciousness instinctively tries to make sense of reality. Different human interpretations of reality lead to a world consisting of multiple realities. Conflict occurs when differing realities (worldviews) encounter one another. Worldviews are socially created and determine human behaviour and, as such, most often find expression in religion. The discussion of conflict and the role of religion in civil society take place within the discourse of the sociology of religion. Religion is socially determined. Peter Berger’s insight into the sociology of religion therefore plays an important role in establishing the relationship between religion and civil society as one that takes on different forms. Thus, a clear definition of both civil society and religion was needed to understand the nature of these relationships. The role of religion in civil society with regard to the presence of conflict in society was further investigated in this article. The conditions under which conflict in society occurs were discussed, as were the conditions for tolerance in society, for religion ultimately becomes the provider of moral discernment when conflict occurs in civil society.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document