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24 Aug 2023 • Journal Article • Plos One
Religious diversity and public health: Lessons from COVID-19
AbstractScholars have identified a range of variables that predict public health compliance during COVID-19, including: psychological, institutional and situational variables as well as demographic characteristics, such as gender, location and age. In this paper, we argue that religious affiliation is also a clear predictor for compliance with public health guidelines. Based
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Jun 2023 • Book
The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land
AbstractAn intimate account of Orthodox family planning amid shifting state policies in IsraelIn recent years, Israeli state policies have attempted to dissuade Orthodox Jews from creating large families, an objective that flies in the face of traditional practices in their community. As state desires to cultivate a high-income, tech-centered nation come into greater conflict
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27 May 2023 • Journal Article • Ethnologia Europaea
Negotiating Tradition Archives in a Community Setting: Sounds of Silence and the Question of Credibility
AbstractFollowing the digitization of archival records of ethnographic work conducted among Yemeni Jews in the early 1970s, we presented these findings to the same community at the same location, fifty years later. In this renegotiation, our interlocutors radically undermined the credibility of our archival material. We analyze the audience’s reactions and the way they reflect
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23 May 2023 • Journal Article • History of European Ideas
Claude Lefort: the myth of the One
AbstractA growing interest in Claude Lefort is bringing to light his radical insights on modern democracy, totalitarianism, and human rights. While the notion perhaps most closely associated with Lefort is that of ‘the empty place of power,’ this article offers a reading of Lefort from a unique angle: his concept of the myth of the One. I demonstrate that to Lefort, the
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6 Apr 2023 • Journal Article • International Journal of Heritage Studies
Postcards of the Holy Land: kaleidoscopic heritage offered by a modern global object
AbstractThis article examines the heritage potential of postcards following the donation of the David Pearlman Holy Land Postcard Collection to the Folklore Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The heritagisation of postcards is attributed to the transformation in the meaning of postcards from a souvenir or a communication device to a collectable through
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Feb 2023 • Journal Article • Convergence
Thumbs up and down: The cultural technique of thumb-typing
AbstractThis paper explores thumb-typing as a cultural technique stemming from the mutual development of typing interfaces and practices. Focusing on the work of the typing fingers, it examines how the assignment of thumbs to be the primary writing digits is an innovation that correlates—and in some respects causes—textual and social changes that are central to digital culture
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15 Nov 2022 • Journal Article • New Media & Society
Use this sound: Networked ventriloquism on Yiddish TikTok
AbstractThis article explores body–voice entanglements in TikTok through the prism of ventriloquism. It suggests that TikTok is an app of network ventriloquism, that is, an audiovisual technology–based web of dissociations and reconfigurations of users’ bodies and voices. Yiddish serves as a case study for how TikTok’s features build an infrastructure for language, heritage
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1 Aug 2022 • Journal Article • Public Understanding of Science
“We think this way as a society!”: Community-level science literacy among ultra-Orthodox Jews
AbstractDespite growing interest in community-level science literacy, most studies focus on communities of interest who come together through particular science, environmental or health-related goals. We examine a pre-existing community—ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel—with a particular history and politics vis-à-vis science, technology, and medicine. First, we show how Haredi
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29 Jul 2022 • Book Chapter • Routledge Handbook on Contemporary Israel
Religion in Contemporary Israel: Haredi Varieties
AbstractUntil recently, Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews in Israel were mainly examined through the lens of the “isolated enclave model.” Yet the Haredi sector has undergone radical changes in a wide array of social and cultural spheres. Many of the traits that exemplified Israeli yeshiva fundamentalism at its inception, such as uncompromising dedication to Torah study, the exclusion
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Mar 2022 • Journal Article • photographies
Between emptiness and superfluity: funeral photography and necropolitics in late-apartheid South Africa
AbstractDocumentary photography has undergone a process of devaluation in post-apartheid South Africa. In response, Patricia Hayes has introduced the term “empty photographs” into the scholarly conversation, using it to designate images that have been derided as “‘bad,’ ‘boring,’ or repetitious” in post-apartheid settings (“The Uneven Citizenry,” 189). This article revisits a
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