Abstract
This paper contributes to current debates over the “Jewish continuity crisis” and its paradigmatic status, by broadening the scope to include the Israeli context, shifting the focus from reproduction and intermarriage to struggles over Jewish divorce, and challenging gendered assumptions about the nature of the crisis and its solutions. Based on a qualitative study of agunah activists’ narratives and Israel’s rabbinic courts’ rulings, it demonstrates how both religious-feminist activists and conservative judges frame their actions as caring for the collective. They aim to rescue not only Jewish families, but “the Jewish family” writ large, entangling national, gendered, and religious politics in supposedly private divorce disputes. This paper argues that Israeli marriage and divorce is a central, intractable battlefield shaped by overlapping “wars.” Understanding it as (also) a site of contention over Jewish continuity clarifies the field’s affective dynamics of anxiety, urgency, and risk, and challenges dominant scholarly constructions of a single binary conflict. Juxtaposing the North American and Israeli continuity debates allows for critical reflection on how each political, social, and academic context shapes the issues similarly and differently. Specifically, this study broadens the possible political and theoretical implications of the “Jewish continuity” frame, arguing that agunah activists’ family-centered logic and commitment to Jewish continuity bridge autonomy and collectivism to advance feminist politics.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 61-84 |
| Number of pages | 24 |
| Journal | Contemporary Jewry |
| Volume | 42 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 4 Mar 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:I wish to thank the editor of this journal and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, as well as several colleagues who contributed to my thinking on this topic, and graciously read various versions of my work over the years. I am particularly grateful to friends from the “Israel and the Jewish World” research lab at the Azrieli Centre for Israel Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (2016-2018), where I first began developing these ideas. That early work was supported by the Israel Institute Post-Doctoral Fellowship.
Funding Information:
I wish to thank the editor of this journal and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, as well as several colleagues who contributed to my thinking on this topic, and graciously read various versions of my work over the years. I am particularly grateful to friends from the “Israel and the Jewish World” research lab at the Azrieli Centre for Israel Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (2016-2018), where I first began developing these ideas. That early work was supported by the Israel Institute Post-Doctoral Fellowship.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.
Keywords
- Agunah
- Feminism
- Gender
- Israel
- Jewish continuity
- Orthodoxy
RAMBI Publications
- Rambi Publications
- Feminism -- Religious aspects -- Judaism
- Jewish families
- Divorce (Jewish law)
- Agunahs (Jewish law)
- Domestic relations (Jewish law)
- Domestic relations -- Israel
- Orthodox Jews -- United States
- Orthodox Jews -- Israel
