[Review of] Rakhmiel Peltz. From Immigrant to Ethnic Culture: American Yiddish in South Philadelphia

Rakhmiel Peltz, in From Immigrants to Ethnic Culture: American Yiddish in South Philadelphia, presents one of the few ethnographies available on spoken American Yiddish in his investigation of the elderly children of immigrant Jews in a Philadelphia neighborhood. Drawing on audiotaped ethnographic data which includes life histories, personal narratives, interviews, and naturally-occurring interactions in local contexts, Peltz examines how Jewish residents attempt to maintain their yiddishkayt (`Jewishness\u27) as they become a shrinking minority in what was once a thriving Jewish community

Occupy Judaism: Religion, Digital Media, and the Public Sphere

This article provides an analysis of Occupy Judaism, an explicitly religious expression of Jewish protest, which occurred simultaneously with Occupy Wall Street, the direct-democracy movement of 2011. Occupy Judaism, like Occupy Wall Street, took place both in physical spaces of protest in New York City and digitally, through mobilizing and circulating debate. The article focuses on the words and actions of Daniel Sieradski, the public face and one of the key founders of Occupy Judaism, supplemented by the experiences of others in Occupy Judaism, Occupy Wall Street, and Occupy Faith (a Protestant clergy-led initiative). We investigate what qualified as religion in the public sphere of Occupy Wall Street, the implications of activities that blurred the lines between religious and secular in the context of public protest, and the relationship of these place-based activities to digital practice. The article emphasizes the importance of ethnographically investigating both physical protest and digital debate, which in this case created the potential for Jewish leftist religion to occupy a new space in the public sphere for a short time in 2011. Attention to the mediation of religion in the public sphere has implications for rethinking what constitutes the political, the religious, and the secular, as well as how digital practices may be implicated in debates over these terms

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish interiority, the Internet, and the crisis of faith

This article argues for a recuperation of interiority. Rather than conflate interiority with belief, as immaterial and individualized, research with ultra-Orthodox Jews in New Yorkreveals interiority to be as public and political as is the material. Over the past fifteen years, ultra-Orthodox Jews have been increasingly concerned with religious doubt. Many communal leaders have called the current moment “a crisis of faith,” with the perception that there are new challenges to ultra-Orthodoxy, especially from the Internet. In response, leaders have turned to explicit communal talk about interiority in their attempts to strengthen faith and therapeutically treat those with religious doubts. Public talk, where certain forms and locations of interiority are cultivated and others disciplined, shows efforts by ultra-Orthodox leadership to defuse the power of secular epistemologies, such as psychology and technologies, while harnessing their potentialities for religious authenticity