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Religious-Zionism developed in Israel as an attempt to combine halakhic commitment with the values of modernity, two networks of meaning not easily reconciled. This book presents a study of the discourse on the body and sexuality within religious-Zionism as it has developed in recent decades, including in cyberspace, and considers such issues as homosexuality, lesbianism, masturbation, and the relationships between the sexes. It also analyzes the shift to a pastoral discourse and alternative religious perspectives dealing with this discourse together with its far wider social and cultural implications, offering a new paradigm for reading religious cultures.
List of contents
Acknowledgments 8 Introduction 9 Chapter 1. The New Religious-Zionist Halakhah: A Conceptual Outline 18 Chapter 2. The Shift in the Discourse: Autarchic Male Sexuality 26 Mapping Reactions 34 The Pastoral Discourse 52 A Haredi Alternative 70 Chapter 3. The Shift in the Discourse: Autarchic Female Sexuality 78 Female Sexuality: Masturbation and Lesbianism 79 Mapping Reactions 85 The Effects of the Value Discourse on Halakhic Rulings 93 Chapter 4. Real and Imagined Women 120 Defining Women 123 The Conflict Discourse 135 Excluding Real Women 166 The Female Refusal 180 On Female Sexuality 183 Chapter 5. The Other Voice 193 Attitudes toward Homosexuality and Lesbianism in the New Discourse 194 The Haredi Responsum 200 The Religious Protest 206 Looking Back 214 Chapter 6. Concluding Reflections: From a Realist Disposition to an Imagined Realm 231 Appendix. The Discourse on Sexuality, Metaphysics, and Messianism 243 Bibliography 276 Index 293
About the author
Yakir Englander is a visiting scholar at the Divinity School at Harvard University. His book The Perception of the Male Body in Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodox Society During the Last Sixty Years (in Hebrew) is forthcoming.
Summary
Offers a pedagogical and sociological analysis of Shoah education in Israeli state schools. It explores issues such as materials and methods, beliefs and attitudes, messages imparted, pedagogical challenges, and implications for national and religious identity and universal values.
Additional text
“In this exciting new book Yakir Englander and Avi Sagi break new ground in treating contemporary religious-Zionism in Israel as a community with particular religious and spiritual inclinations and a complex relationship to modernity. Focusing on religious and halakhic questions around the body and in particular sexual ethics, and including an important discussion of how the Internet has changed halakhic adjudication, Englander and Sagi argue that this community has integrated a personalistic dimension to sexual practices and approaches to the body.”
