This essay begins by exploring the collaborative art installation, ‘Sediments,’ by a Palestinian citizen of Israel and two Jewish Israelis, Nawal Arafat, Maayan Tsadka and Leoni Schein, shown in Haifa between November 2022 and April 2023. The installation is then juxtaposed with the futuristic short movie In Vitro (2019) by diasporic Palestinian filmmaker Larissa Sansour, co-produced with Søren Lind. How, we ask, do these two interventions connect visual articulations of political violence and territorial dispossession to socio-natures that extend beyond the human – the deep time of the sediment; the power of the heirloom seed; the archaic logic of the DNA strand? We propose the notion of ‘organic futurism,’ that is to say the deliberate yoking of cultivation with (or within) works of expressive culture to imaginings of the future, in order to demonstrate how ‘Sediments’ and In Vitro extend beyond representations of catastrophe to imagine new forms of resilience that emerge from the very ground on which we stand.

This article engages the transformation of fieldwork as an idea based on specific methodological practices, and the way different conceptions of fieldwork circulated and adapted to the study of the folklore of Jews. Doing fieldwork is not a theory, but as a concept and practice it travels between different disciplinary and ethnographic contexts. This article engages a number of synchronic episodes in which fieldwork was applied to Jewish subjects, tracing the scholarly contexts from which it was borrowed, among them: networks of corresponding authors at the end of nineteenth century in Central Europe; Russian political agendas of “going to the people”; Russian imperial expeditions to Siberia; German diffusionist works in Africa; Boasian anthropology; and studies of Japanese culture from a distance during the Second World War. On the diachronic level, these different crossroads of Jewish folkloristics with other ethnographic initiatives reflect a turbulent history of mobility, displacement, and immigration that underlies Jewish life in the twentieth century. These different adaptations, paths in which fieldwork was translated to the study of Jews, enables an examination of fieldwork as an idea that keeps traveling, or better, in Tim Ingold’s terms, “meshwork”—a texture of interwoven threads.

This essay examines “intersensory communication” in a deaf-blind theater, exploring both the potentials and limitations of negotiating sensory diversity to achieve socio-political change within Disability Culture. Based on an anthropological study of a multi-sensory cultural center in Jaffa, Israel – including a sign-language coffee shop, a pitch-dark restaurant, and a theater – this essay delves into how deaf, blind, deafblind, hearing, and seeing individuals interact through shared social, cultural, and educational experiences. Drawing from intercultural performance studies, sensory anthropology, and Disability Culture, I investigate how individuals with diverse and sometimes conflicting methods of sensory communication can “sense differently together.” The discussion centers on three aspects: 1) The theater’s synesthetic artistic techniques, 2) The rich sensory interactions among the center’s members, and 3) The sensory diversity in workshops for external visitors. Findings suggest that these intersensory engagements not only expand participants’ sensory experiences but also have the power to bridge divides between ability and disability, integrating sight, hearing, touch, and movement in ways that challenge conventional sensory boundaries.

Intermingling new and old media, this article introduces the concept of phonographic theatricality to explore the performativity of human-machine vocality. It jointly discusses the theatricality of historical and new sound media: media principles that characterized the phonograph in its emergence are still evident in the speech of contemporary AI-voice agents. Phonographic theatricality is a cross-media concept describing the conditions, playfulness, contingencies, and implications of the actualization of pre-recorded voices. It covers a broad range of cases in which a machine injects a human sounding voice into a situation, usually acousmatic in its detachment from a human body, yet performing as a theatrical agent. The analysis demonstrates how sound media theatricalize truthfulness, fidelity, illusion, and trickery as part of their mediation of voices, and how humans and machines mingle in producing phonographic theatricality. Three historical dramas, as well as contemporaneous newspaper articles, caricatures and ads, unveil the rise of phonographic theatricality as a media principle, inviting and affording a discussion on the performativity of AI voices. When machines speak and laugh in human voices, they become actors, vocally reshaping the space in which they operate, charging it with theatricality.

An investigation of the connections between the parallel rise of modern Hebrew and modern media After lying dormant for two millennia as a mainly written language, Hebrew awoke from its literary slumber to become a living modern vernacular. This revitalization is unique and unprecedented in world history, and its success has been studied in fields from linguistics to cultural history. However, the role of modern technologies in mediating this revival has not yet been considered.What happens when an ancient language meets modern technology? Lingua Ex Machina explores such a moment in its investigation of the role media technologies—including typewriters, phonographs, and computers—played in the revitalization and modernization of Hebrew from the end of the nineteenth century into the present day.Ido Ramati examines the role sound recording technologies played in shaping the reemergence of modern Hebrew speech, reveals how the Hebraized typewriter pushed for the modernization of writing in Hebrew, and ultimately argues that these media—whose development and adoption paralleled the revitalization of Hebrew—were an active force in shaping the language as a modern communicative medium. This case study of Hebrew furnishes researchers with a rare opportunity to investigate the complex relation between language, its speakers, and technology at a decisive moment, and sheds new light on the study of media technologies and their theoretical, lingual, and social implications.

'We need to change our attitude about physically integrated dance and become more inclusive', Jacob, a twenty-five-year-old professional wheelchair-user dancer wrote in a letter to the director and administra-tors of the integrated dance company he was part of at the time.' 'Let go of the image of a wheelchair as a necessity', he offered, 'and focus on encompassing all marginalized people'.'We need to be more inclusive to all people or I believe we will lose our relevancy.'

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.