Goddess Religion, Postmodern Jewish Feminism, and the Complexity of Alternative Religious Identities

1998 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Raphael
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Feminist Discourse ◽  
Ideological Perspective

ABSTRACT: This paper argues that Jewish Goddess feminism illustrates the complexity of alternative religious identities and their fluid, ambiguous, and sometimes intimate historical, cultural, and religious connections to mainstream religious identities.1 While Jewish Goddess feminists find contemporary Judaism theologically and politically problematic, thealogy (feminist discourse on the Goddess and the divinity of femaleness) can offer them precisely the sacralization of female generativity that mainstream Judaism cannot. And yet the distinctions between present/former, alternative/mainstream religious identities are surely ambiguous where the celebration of the Goddess can at once reconstruct Jewish identity and deconstruct the notion of religious identity as a single or successive affiliation. It would seem that Jewish Goddess feminism epitomizes how late or postmodern religious identity may be plural and inclusive, shifting according to the subject's context and mood and according to the ideological perspective of the observer.

American Jews and the Construction of Israel’s Jewish Identity

2000 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-201
Author(s):  
Yossi Shain
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Jewish Family ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Public Campaign

In 1999, on the eve of the Jewish New Year, members of the Reform and Conservative Jewish movements funded a public campaign on Israel’s city billboards and in the Israeli media, calling on secular Israelis to experience their religious identity afresh. In a backlash against the monopoly and coercion exercised by religious orthodoxy—which has led many Israelis to shed their religious identities to an extent that goes beyond what their socialization by secular Zionism urged—the campaign called upon Israelis to embrace religious pluralism under the slogan “there is more than one way to be a Jew.” Financed by a grant from a Jewish family foundation in San Francisco, this campaign met with a harsh and somewhat violent response from the Israeli ultra-Orthodox sector. A leading ultra-Orthodox figure stated, “Ifthis situation continues, we will have a cultural war here, the likes of which we have not seen in a hundred years” (Sontag).

Food and Religious Identities in the Venetian Inquisition, ca. 1560–ca. 1640

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 181-214
Author(s):  
Eleanor Barnett
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Lived Religion ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Access Points ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Eating Practices ◽  
The City ◽  
Insight Into

Through Venetian Inquisition trials relating to Protestantism, witchcraft, and Judaism, this article illuminates the centrality of food and eating practices to religious identity construction. The Holy Office used food to assert its model of post-Tridentine piety and the boundaries between Catholics and the non-Catholic populations in the city. These trial records concurrently act as access points to the experiences and beliefs—to the lived religion—of ordinary people living and working in Venice from 1560 to 1640. The article therefore offers new insight into the workings and impacts of the Counter-Reformation.

After Luther: Visual Culture, Materiality and the Legacy of 1517

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
JENNIFER SPINKS
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Public Activity ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
The Impact

Do historians look at Luther and the Lutheran Reformation differently in the aftermath of the Lutherjahr of 2017, and its frenzy of academic and public activity? As recent publications on Luther demonstrate – notably Lyndal Roper's 2016 biography Martin Luther: renegade and prophet – there is a still a great deal to say about Luther, and how his friendships, passions, prejudices and physical experiences shaped him. But while Luther was the monumental public figure of 2017, some of the most important work coinciding with the anniversary addressed instead Lutheranism as a movement, and the nature of religious identities in Luther's aftermath. It also demonstrated and furthered the impact of the visual and material turn in history and in Reformation studies. Building upon decades of scholarship on Lutheran visual images, recent Reformation scholarship has demonstrated in increasing depth how religious identity can and should be read through both material and visual culture. The three publications examined here – a monograph by Bridget Heal, a website by Brian Cummings, Ceri Law, Bronwyn Wallace and Alexandra Walsham, and the exhibition catalogue Luther! 95 treasures – 95 people – contribute to the material, sensory turn in Reformation and early modern scholarship, and in the latter two cases also reveal the impact of this upon public engagement with Reformation histories.

The End of Exile: Jewish Identity and Its Diasporic Poetics

PMLA ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 113 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maeera Y. Shreiber
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Inclusive Language ◽  
English Bilingual

What is the location of Jewish identity? Cultural studies has provoked reexaminations of many long-standing tropes of ethnic and religious identity, including that of exile. Such inquiries have potentially explosive consequences for the already vexed notion of Jewish identity, especially in the context of an American experience. This essay means to trouble the relation between Jewish identity and the problematic marker of exile, within the contexts of cultural and postcolonial theory, drawing on the work of Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers, including Alain Finkielkraut, Daniel Boyarín, and Edward Said. This analysis allows for a sustained consideration of a diasporic poetics—an alternative aesthetic model for imagining community and the attendant terms of belonging. The experimental Yiddish-English bilingual verse of the contemporary poet Irena Klepfisz serves as a paradigmatic example of such a vision that challenges the familiar opposition between home and exile. Yiddish, a notoriously inclusive language and a by-product of the Diaspora, is central to her inquiries into the relation between individual and collective identities and into the role gender plays in the construction of such entities.

scholarly journals Religious Identity and National Conflict in the 20th Century Indonesia

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 303
Author(s):  
Andreas Jonathan
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
The Past ◽  
Religious Nation ◽  
Role Of Religion

This study attempts to discuss on how religious identities contribute to or was in conflict with the emerging national identities, with focusing issue on the struggle of Islam in its relation to Indonesian identity as a multi-religious nation and Pancasila state. Based on the critical analysis from the various literature, the result of the study showed that Islam did both contribute and was in conflict with the Indonesian national identity. The Islamist fights for the Islamic state, the nationalist defends Pancasila state. As long as Islam is the majority in Indonesia and as long as there is diversity in Islam, especially in the interpretation of Islam and the state, Indonesian national identity will always be in conflict between Pancasila state and Islamic state. Even though, the role of religion in society and nation change is very significant. The Islamist is always there, although it is not always permanent in certain organizations. In the past, NU and Muhammadiyah were considered as Islamist, but today they are nationalist. At the same time, new Islamist organizations and parties emerge to continue their Islamist spirit. Keywords: Islam, Religious identity, Pancasila, 

环境因素对建立关系和宗教身份的影响∶中国研究生在美国两个社会文化环境中的个案分析

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-58
Author(s):  
Cynthia Baiqing Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Religious Identity ◽  
Network Formation ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
The United States ◽  
Multiple Relationships ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Network Ties ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Chinese Graduate Students ◽  
Primary Groups

Linking concepts from networks, identities, and ecology, I draw on material collected during sixty interviews to show how a group of culturally homogeneous Chinese graduate students, when placed in two sociocultural environments in the United States, displayed different processes of religious identity network formation. In a large and heterogeneous community with more possible identities, students showed human agency by forming religious identities less constrained by networks. Human agency is also exemplified in the expansion of their religious circle of friends once they developed a religious identity. Religious identity often preceded networks. However, in a small and homogeneous community, students did emotion work to stay in pro-religious groups, presumably due to the limitations they had in choosing friends, particularly Chinese friends. The formation of networks more likely preceded the emergence of religious identities premised on the coexistence of multiple relationships in dyads and solidarity within primary groups. The narratives demonstrate how ecology matters for the formation of network ties and religious identity. 根据对60个对硕士博士研究生的采访，通过运用网络分析、身份研究、和环境研究领域的概念，本文详述同属一个文化的中国留学生当处于美国两个不同城市文化环境中时，通过生活圈子发展特定身份的不同过程。在一个大型、充满差异的城市里，留学生的身份选择具有多样性。其主体性表现在自主选择宗教认同并扩大有宗教信仰的朋友圈子。他们的宗教认同常常先于他们的宗教朋友圈。而在一个小型、倡导同化的城市里，由于可选择的中国朋友人数少，留学生常常通过控制自我感情来维系与亲宗教的朋友的关系。他们的宗教网络常常先于他们的宗教认同。在这种环境中，当两人有多重社会关系，并处于一个高度团结的小群体中时，宗教认同才得以传播。本研究显示社区规模和文化是重要的影响身份和社会网络的环境因素。 (This article is in English.)

An Indigenous Jesus: Methodological and Theoretical Intersections in the Comparative Study of Religion

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Simon J. Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Native Studies ◽  
Black Elk ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
Indigenous Theory ◽  
The Comparative Study

Abstract Indigeneity is a relational category that is predominantly, albeit not exclusively, applicable to Indigenous peoples. As a central theoretical site of discourse in Native Studies, indigeneity tends to be characterized by politicized relationships and provides powerful rhetorical strategies and counter-narratives. Facilitating decolonization as well as illuminating the structural and systemic relationships between the indigenous and the colonial, Indigenous theory recognizes the often complex inter-relationships attending the delineation of ethnic, social, and religious identity. The historical Black Elk, for example, illustrates how Lakota and Catholic religious identities co-exist in an ongoing site of discursive tension. This article argues that the historical figure of Jesus can be re-cognized as an indigenous Judean, complicating contemporary efforts in which the quest for the historical Jesus occurs in a predominantly Christian discursive context.

‘I wish to be no other but as he’: Persia, masculinity, and conversion in early-seventeenth-century travel writing and drama

Conversions ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloë Houston
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
Early Modern Travel Literature

In classical descriptions, Persians and their rulers are seen as being given to both tyranny and femininity; early modern Europe thus inherited a view of Persia in which the performance of religious identity, political power and gender were inter-connected. Given the complex relationships between Islam, tyranny and gender, early modern European interest in the possible religious conversion of Persia and its people marks a moment at which contemporary anxieties about religious and gender identities converge. This chapter argues that European writers’ interest in the prospect of Persian conversion became tied up with their ideas about the links between Persian effeminacy and tyranny. The prospect of the conversion of Persian Shahs in early modern travel literature and drama gives rise to particular anxieties about masculinity, both in Persian figures and in the Christian European travellers and dramatists who portrayed them. Despite the tradition of viewing Persia as feminised and luxurious, the sources betray an underlying concern that Muslims’ gender and religious identities might in fact be more ‘fixed’ than those of Christian travellers, who experienced their own conversions to Islam and to Persian identities in ways that were troubling to them both as Christians and as men.  

Diasporas in Despair, 1560–1700

The Great Sea ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Abulafia
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Muslim Population ◽  
Sephardic Jews ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Jewish Descent

Ottoman sultans and Spanish kings, along with their tax officials, took a strong interest in the religious identity of those who crossed the areas of the Mediterranean under their control. Sometimes, in an era marked by the clash of Christian and Muslim empires, the Mediterranean seems to be sharply divided between the two faiths. Yet the Ottomans had long accepted the existence of Christian majorities in many of the lands they ruled, while other groups navigated (metaphorically) between religious identities. The Sephardic Jews have already been encountered, with their astonishing ability to mutate into notionally Christian ‘Portuguese’ when they entered the ports of Mediterranean Spain. This existence suspended between worlds set off its own tensions in the seventeenth century, when many Sephardim acclaimed a deluded Jew of Smyrna as the Messiah. Similar tensions could also be found among the remnants of the Muslim population of Spain. The tragic history of the Moriscos was played out largely away from the Mediterranean Sea between the conversion of the last openly practising Muslims, in 1525, and the final act of their expulsion in 1609; it was their very isolation from the Islamic world that gave these people their distinctive identity, once again suspended between religions. The world inhabited by these Moriscos differed in important respects from that inhabited by the other group of conversos, those of Jewish descent. Although some Moriscos were hauled before the Inquisition, the Spanish authorities at first turned a blind eye to the continued practice of Islam; it was sometimes possible to pay the Crown a ‘service’ that bought exemption from interference by the Inquisition, which was mortified to discover that it could not boost its income by seizing the property of exempt suspects. Many Morisco communities lacked a Christian priest, so the continued practice of the old religion is no great surprise; even in areas where christianization took place, what sometimes emerged was an islamized Christianity, evinced in the remarkable lead tablets of Sacromonte, outside Granada, with their prophecies that ‘the Arabs will be those who aid religion in the last days’ and their mysterious references to a Christian caliph, or successor (to Jesus, not Muhammad).

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