Sacred Rhythms and Political Frequencies: Reading Lefebvre in an Urban House of Prayer

In recent years, Lefebvre’s concept of rhythm analysis has been implied in various ways to critically examine how rhythms are formed, disrupted, and reformed through different urban venues. One theme that this body of knowledge has yet to comprehensively examine, however, is how changes in the urban sphere impact the spatial rhythms of religious institutions in cities, which can be pivotal for understanding how religious institutions are formed as urban public spaces. This article addresses this issue with a rhythm analysis of a particular religious urban locus: a synagogue in the mixed Palestinian and Jewish city of Acre in northern Israel. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and an urban survey, the article discusses how different forms of rhythm making undergo a process of contested synchronization with linear and cyclical rhythms of the city. More specifically, how the ability to forge a space hinges on the ability to maintain a rhythmic cycle of attendance, which, in turn, is not only dependent on the ability to achieve synchronization amongst the needs of the different participants but is also intertwined with the larger linear cycle of urban life as a rhythmic equation that fuses the personal with the political, the linear with the cyclical, and the religious with the urban

“At ‘Amen Meals’ It’s Me and God” Religion and Gender: A New Jewish Women’s Ritual

New ritual practices performed by Jewish women can serve as test cases for an examination of the phenomenon of the creation of religious rituals by women. These food-related rituals, which have been termed ‘‘amen meals’’ were developed in Israel beginning in the year 2000 and subsequently spread to Jewish women in Europe and the United States. This study employs a qualitative-ethnographic methodology grounded in participant-observation and in-depth interviews to describe these nonobligatory, extra-halakhic rituals. What makes these rituals stand out is the women’s sense that through these rituals they experience a direct con- nection to God and, thus, can change reality, i.e., bring about jobs, marriages, children, health, and salvation for friends and loved ones. The ‘‘amen’’ rituals also create an open, inclusive woman’s space imbued with strong spiritual–emotional energies that counter the women’s religious marginality. Finally, the purposes and functions of these rituals, including identity building and displays of cultural capital, are considered within a theoretical framework that views ‘‘doing gender’’ and ‘‘doing religion’’ as an integrated experience

Soft Ultra-Orthodoxy: Revival Movement Activists, Synagogue Communities and the Mizrahi-Haredi <i>Teshuva</i> Movement in Israel

This article offers an in-depth ethnographic and historical description of how an ethnic-religious revival movement has had an impact on religious life. The article will focus on the story of one of Israeli’s foremost religious revival movements—the Mizrahi-Haredi teshuva movement. We will look at the encounter between the Mizrahi-Haredi teshuva movement activists and Mizrahi synagogue congregations, and at the outcomes of that encounter on religious infrastructures, and on the activists’ religious agenda. The following questions will be addressed: How did the relationship between the activists and the synagogue congregations develop? What tensions arose and how did they turn a strict religious outlook into a soft religious approach? The article is based on many years of fieldwork in congregations exposed to the impact of the Mizrahi-Haredi teshuva movement in Israel. The fieldwork provided both a rich ethnographic inventory and an opportunity to describe a historical trend that illuminates the communal, authoritative, and gender models that originated with the encounter between the Mizrahi-Haredi teshuva movement activists and the local synagogue congregations

Effects of Crystalline Anisotropy on Nanomagnetic Computer Logic Channels

We report a theoretical study to use a patterned network of nanomagnets (nanocells) as a new architecture for next-generation computing processors, in which the direction of the magnetization represents a binary signal in each cell. Previous research on magnetic logic focused on using mostly soft materials, such as Permalloy, patterned into cells with a non-circular symmetry to trigger shape-induced in-plane magnetic anisotropy. In this article, instead of shape-dominated magnetic cells as building blocks for magnetic logic, we explore materials with magneto-crystalline anisotropy. Such shape-insensitive nanomagnetic devices can relieve severe fabrication constraints associated with building nanomagnetic cells of narrowly defined shapes. Particularly, we compare materials with in-plane and out-of-plane crystalline anisotropy. Properties of materials with in-plane crystalline anisotropy can be tailored to match those of shape-induced longitudinal nanomagnets while materials with out-of-plane anisotropy could enable a new set of features. For instance, besides the key features of any magnetic logic, i.e., non-volatility, low-power consumption, and radiation hardness, some of the new features of the out-of-plane materials include (i) cost-effective fabrication, (ii) scalability to sub-10-nm dimensions, and (iii) their natural ability to be extended into a three-dimensional (3-D) physical space which opens a new era of technology opportunities