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.

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.

Scholars 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 on a sample representative survey (N = 800) of Haredi Jews in Israel, we found that Haredi Jews mostly followed COVID-19 health regulations. Among the respondents who were non-compliant, however, we found large divergences which mostly reflected religious affiliation. While members of Lithuanian and Sephardi communities reported following guidelines, Hasidim, a more charismatic sub-group, were 12% and 14% more likely to flout public health guidelines than their Lithuanian and Sephardi counterparts, respectively. Despite this inner diversity, all Haredim were portrayed in Israeli media as one homogeneous group that was blamed for flouting public health guidelines and spreading COVID-19. Based on these findings, we argue for the importance of public health messaging that attends to diverse aspects of religious dogma, practice and observance by creating partnerships and sustainable relationships between different actors and stakeholders. In addition, we found that compliance was also shaped by knowledge about COVID-19 and public concern. Taking these findings together, health communication that acknowledges religious diversity while providing critical knowledge about the pandemic is key to developing and implementing community-focused interventions and public health programs. Practically, these insights help to improve pandemic governance as well as contributing theoretically to the study of public health relations and religion by highlighting how discourses around health vary and how differently positioned actors shape representations of responsiveness and health compliance.

An 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 with common Orthodox familial practices, Jewish couples are finding it increasingly difficult to actualize their reproductive aims and communal expectations. In The State of Desire, Lea Taragin-Zeller provides an intimate examination of the often devastating effects of Israel’s steep cutbacks in child benefits, which are aimed at limiting the rapid increase in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish population. Taragin-Zeller takes the reader beyond Orthodox taboos, capturing how cracks in religious convictions engender a painful process of re-orientating desires to reproduce amidst shrinking public support, feminism, and new ideals of romance, intimacy and parenting. Paying close attention to ethical dilemmas, the book explores not just pro-ceptive but also contraceptive desires around family formation: when to have children, how many, and at what cost. The volume offers a rare look at issues of contraception in the Orthodox context, and notably includes interviews with men, making the case that we cannot continue to study reproductive choice solely through the perspectives of women. The State of Desire is a groundbreaking anthropological approach to the study of religion and reproduction, and a remarkably intimate account of the delicate balance between personal desires and those of the state.

Following 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 different ethnographic dynamics, contextualizing their critical position in the tensions between archival knowledge and lived repertoire in general, and specifically in relation to traumatic experiences of Yemenis in Israel. Finally, we discuss how the suspicion toward the archive is embedded in larger current discourses on “truth” and “facts” and how in this context, it can be beneficial to scrutinize tradition archives in a community setting.

A 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 phantasmagorical appeal of the One – the desire for harmony, unity and stability – is the force that continually endangers the democratic project, while the distinctive and unavoidable characteristic of democratic society is its ‘inability’ to name itself as One – a coherent and established social self. Thus, the main challenge of society is its symbolic self-institution. The discussion illuminates Lefort’s singular stance in the study of totalitarianism (Arendt), his rejection of the imaginary (next to Castoriadis), his debt to the structuralism scheme (Lévi-Strauss), as well as his conversation with anarchist voices (La Boétie, Clastres) and with psychoanalysis (Lacan). Ultimately, what Lefort coins ‘symbolic division’ condenses the pledge of democracy to embrace a neurotic self, a bodiless body, a nameless identity in an empty space of power. As such, Lefort’s anti-myth of the One promises to be a vexing objective.

This 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 Pearlman’s cataloguing and classification practices, as well as in the process of the institutionalisation of his collection and its digitisation. The value of postcards as a heritage object is discussed through an analysis of ‘used’ postcards produced around the June 1967 War. It discloses momentary incomplete but heterogeneous networks of a mobile object. Considering the ways in which local situations are practiced as part of a global modernity, I argue that the heritage of postcards manifests their innate mobility; they are both tangible material objects and intangible in the way they engage with postal practices. Each postcard in its mobile existence offers a fragment of an experience that ties myths and history to its present. The potential value of the Pearlman collection lies in the way many such fragments are available at once, reflecting one another as a kaleidoscopic heritage.

This 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. It argues that thumb-typing embodies recursive relations between behavioral patterns, technological infrastructure, and textual creation. The analysis shows how the invention of the typewriter keyboard introduced the fingers to typing, and how developments of digital media refined the finger-work in interacting with the device, resulting in thumb-typing. The new functionality of the thumb as an executing rather than supporting finger, promotes a novel equivalency and interchangeability in finger employment to typing. This, I propose, problematizes traditional concepts of textuality, its performance, and authorship.

2666 was almost complete when Roberto Bolaño passed away. Published posthumously in 2004 (English translation 2008) it is the second “great novel” of the Chilean-Mexican-Spanish writer, after The Savage Detectives (2007 [1998]). 2666 offers one of the most horrifying accounts of the times, which we often call “the contemporary,” but Bolaño does something more radical than that: rather than reading the present as a continuation of modern times he reads both with a conceptual repertoire that pushes the readers to meet them in new terms. In what follows, I begin with a very general overview, which is followed by a discussion of three aspects of the work, namely temporalities, spatialities, and infra-realistic passions. I then conclude with why I think reading (and re-reading) 2666 can inspire understanding of folklore and culture, making the passion of fiction relevant to research.