This special issue, “The Materiality of Interreligious Encounters,” provides a diverse sample of scholarly attention to the role of the material in interreligious relations. It features articles by five anthropologists (Hanane Benadi, Yulia Egorova, Samuel Everett, Lindsay Simmonds, and Erica Weiss) whose research considers spaces of religious intersection, proximity, and negotiation and the potential of material things therein. Prompted by Birgit Meyer’s opening reflection, with responses from Ayala Fader, Vlad Naumescu, and Jeremy Walton, this issue’s In Conversation section further explores how closer focus on senses, aesthetics, space, time, and music can enhance our understanding of interreligious encounters as well as offer fresh insights at the nexus of religion and materiality. Together, these wide-ranging articles offer three main contributions: they demonstrate the material pragmatics of living together; they illuminate interreligious proximities that tend to be lost in discursive processes of religious differentiation; and they subvert normative views of interreligious encounter as primarily a matter of clashing beliefs, texts, and theologies.

In this commentary, we lay out a research agenda for studying religion and science communication that moves beyond theological and moral tensions to include embodied knowledge practices and orientation toward particular vocational futures. Based on findings from a case study of a National Geographic Kids magazine tailored for Orthodox Jews, we argue that diversifying science communication includes navigating embodied knowledge practices and competing “imagined futures” regarding science-related vocations. Advancing recent conversations at the nexus of religion and science communication, our case study highlights the generative possibilities that arise when centering religion amid other processes of science communication diversification.

This article examines the political rhetoric and policy pursuits of a right-wing nationalist party in Israel (‘Noam’), showcasing how opposition to gender and sexual diversity is centered within an exclusionary vision of Jewish purity. Discursive analysis of political materials show how Noam frame gender and sexual diversity as potent proof of moral decline and as contaminating forces, which can only be saved by righteous (heterosexual) saviors. From billboards and election manifestos to policy, Noam's vision of a ‘Jewish state’ is underpinned by an idea of ‘normality’ that is ethno-nationalist, heteronormative and patriarchal. Their attempts to construct threats to the ‘normal’ Jewish nuclear family help to gain broader public support and forge alliances with hegemonic political parties. Situating this particular Jewish-Israeli exclusionary logic of reproductive righteousness is part of a broader feminist study of emerging alliances within right-wing movements in an increasingly globalized identity politics of opposition to gender and sexual diversity.

During the past 15 years, there has been a rapid increase in interfaith initiatives in the United Kingdom. Even though the “interfaith industry,” as some have cynically called it, has rapidly increased, the involvement of women in these groups has been relatively low. Based on ethnographic data, including 20 interviews and 3 years of fieldwork with female interfaith activists in the United Kingdom (2017–2020), this ethnography focuses on the emergence of Jewish and Muslim female interfaith initiatives, analyzing the creative ways religious women negotiate their challenges and struggles as women of faith, together. I examine the ways Jewish and Muslim women form nuanced representations of female piety that disrupt “strictly observant” gendered representations, thus diversifying the binary categories of what being Jewish, or Muslim, entails. Further, whereas former studies have focused on interfaith settings as crucial for the construction of religious identities, I show that interfaith activism also serves as a site for religious minorities to learn how to become British citizens. In a highly politicized Britain, where allegations of racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia prevail, I argue that Jewish-Muslim encounters are sites for the construction and performances of British civic citizenship well beyond the prescriptions of the state. Drawing on these findings, I situate interfaith activism at the anthropological intersection of gender, religion, and citizenship, and as a site that reproduces and disrupts minority-state relationality.

A recent wave of studies has diversified science communication by emphasizing gender, race, and disability. In this article, we focus on the understudied lens of religion. Based on an analysis of ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) science journalism and its readership, we identify four main strategies for tailoring science, which we call the four “R”s—removing, reclaiming, remodeling, and rubricating science. By analyzing how science communication is produced by and for a particular religious group, we reveal the diverse ways a religious-sensitive science communication is shaped by community gatekeepers, while also exploring the ethical and epistemological tensions this tailoring entails.

This article explores the vocal human–machine relations embedded in text-to-speech (TTS) generators. Retracing the human sources behind the synthetic speech and tracking the remediation of the voice by the machine-learning algorithm, it argues that artificial intelligence (AI) speaking agents such as Siri and Alexa, as well as other TTS acts such as TikTok’s, are performing algorithmic ventriloquism. Speaking mechanically with the voices of professional voiceover artists, AI speech technologies algorithmically manipulate these voices, thus generating personas that hold an interconnected chain of tensions between the embodied and the virtual, the particular and the general, the human and the non-human, as well as between speech and writing. Algorithmic ventriloquism serves as an analytical framework to tie the techno-vocalic operation of the TTS system with its cultural, economic, philosophical, and sociolinguistic predicaments. The last section discusses the implications of algorithmic ventriloquism beyond the realm of the voice.

I met Naphtali on a cold winter day in Givat Ram. He was sitting at the computer station at the library, a black kippah (skullcap) on his head, with a black hat resting on the desk beside him. When I asked him what brought him to the library that day, he shared a story that has stayed with me ever since: “One day, not long after I got my driving license, I borrowed a car from my sister. I was new to driving, but didn’t think it would be too complicated. We met at the bottom of her building, she started the car and I drove to meet a friend. After the meeting was over, I got into the car and couldn’t get it to start. My sister is going to kill me! What had I done wrong? I wondered. I tried everything but couldn’t figure it out. I called my sister, who was furious. She was sure that I ruined her car. She came over and when I showed her what the problem was she started laughing. ‘Naphtali! You are in neutral! Of course you can’t get the car to go! Can’t you see? This is N and this is R.’”

The present article aims at explaining the unique role the study of folk-narrative played in the Wissenschaft des Judentums (the scholarly study of Judaism) as it emerged in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century and as it was negotiated later. This article engages how the language of Wissenschaft constructed Jewish texts in the language of folk-narrative studies. And how the language of folk-narrative studies constructed Jewish culture in the language of Wissenschaft. Given the status of scholars within this movement – Jews who were citizens of European nations – they demonstrated the affinities between Jewish folk-narrative traditions and Islamic narrative traditions; on the other hand, they used a poetic language that implemented European (mainly German) genres and forms of scholarship that were viewed as objective and scientific in their studies of Jewish texts. The article examines three works by three scholars from three generations of the Wissenschaft movement: Moritz Steinschneider, Ignaz Goldziehr and Bernhard Heller – each corresponding respectively to one genre: legend, myth and folktale.

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr's anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths that have shaped influential recent accounts of the city? This article outlines the contours of a “hydrocolonial Johannesburg” though combining Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery and Sarah Nuttall's invitation to “read for water” with existing methodologies that read for infrastructure. It sets these strategies to work in the context of Lauren Beukes' second work of speculative fiction, Zoo City (Beukes, Lauren. 2010. Zoo City. Johannesburg: Jacana Media). The novel propels its readers into a noiresque fantasy world whose spatial coordinates closely reflect the extra-textual city of Johannesburg. Taking my cue from Beukes' infrastructural allusions, I mobilize her text to provide the struts for my own as I explore the intertextuality of Zoo City with works by William Kentridge and Sarah Gertrude Millin. Alternately foregrounded or barely perceptible until deliberately sought out, water helps to distinguish the various locales of the novel from one another. My essay 39turns to Zoo City to offer three vignettes that trace the flows of water and the contiguous presence of infrastructures in Johannesburg, pursuing their intersection beyond the boundaries of the novel into a larger expressive cultural archive to reflect on the relations between privilege and forms of anthropogenic degradation in the life of the city.