Reforming the Israeli–Arab conflict? Interreligious hospitality in Jaffa and its discontents

This ethnography analyzes three Israeli Reform Jewish rituals as manifestations of interreligious hospitality. The Daniel Reform congregation invites Muslim residents of Jaffa to participate in rituals incorporating Arabic and Muslim clergy and prayers. The egalitarian and pluralistic Jewish symbols and narratives promote neighborly relationships. Nevertheless, some participants’ responses reaffirm popular suspicions and prejudices, which the ceremony seeks to overcome. Interreligious hospitality here is not so much an act of theological reconciliation, but a political act also directed toward other actors – like the Israeli right-wing and Israeli society, which grant the Orthodox a monopoly on Judaism. While the shared ritual practice offers a dialogical model that engages broader publics through doing, the analytic frame of hospitality sensitizes us to the importance of space and language in the power relationships of hosts and guests. It helps explain the challenges to the messages of coexistence, which the rituals are designed to confirm.

Biblical Education and the Power of Conversation

This chapter covers the role of Bible translation in Mendelssohn’s endeavor to effect a reformation Jewish society by reimagining Jewish education. It explores Mendelssohn’s childhood education and his critique of the prevailing system of German Jewish education for males. Mendelssohn’s conception of the goal of education, his view of Yiddish, his understanding of biblical aesthetics, and his account of the roles of the Bible and rabbinic teachings in Jewish education is analyzed. The place of gender and class in Mendelssohn’s approach to Jewish education is investigated. The connection between Mendelssohn’s efforts to reform Jewish education, his attempt to restructure the hierarchy of German Jewish society and his argument for Jewish civil rights are explored. It is argued that Mendelssohn uses Protestantism and Catholicism as conceptual categories to elaborate his enlightened, bourgeois concept of Judaism.

Performing Gender and Political Recognition: Israeli Reform Jewish Life-cycle Rituals

Anthropologists see life-cycle rituals as a significant way to understand gender roles and identities in religious communities. While in the past, these compulsory rituals involved a significant change in a person’s social status, today many of their traditional features have been transformed. This ethnographic inquiry examines Bat Mitzvah ceremonies (coming of age rituals for girls) in Israeli Reform Jewish congregations. By including new blessings, appropriating masculine religious symbols, and creating new bodily gestures, the feminine life-cycle ritual challenges the traditional Jewish laws and contemporary socio-cultural constructions of the Israeli Jewish community. The exclusion of the Israeli Reform community from mainstream Jewish religion turns this ritual into a subversive act that battles local Jewish Orthodoxy authority. The ceremony is a political performance, which positions the Reform congregations as an activist religious agent for gender equality in the Israeli public space.