Abstract
The religious Zionist collective in Israel combines modern habitus with life according to the strict Jewish law (Halacha). The constant efforts to combine the two do not prevent anxieties in regard to its very survival, stemming from the embeddedness in the nonreligious collective and close contacts with it. This chapter looks into one of the major loci of concern – the moral of the Jewish family – as inculcated to teenage girls in a special class on “education for family life” called Kedusha (holiness class).
The ethnographic research was carried out in a class which took place in a religious boarding school for girls. The article ethnography depicts the production of attractive, up-to-date pedagogy directed at motivating the adolescent girls, to internalize the normative Jewish ideal of womanhood, sexuality, and family life. It reveals two major practices used in the classes – “Modeling and Deconstruction of Modern Discourses.” Both practices dismantle and invalidate secularism and modernity while simultaneously co-opting modern, secular themes in the construction and reproduction of religious womanhood. Anticipating marriage and childbearing, the students tend to the embrace the messages conveyed by the teachers about religious Jewish womanhood and motherhood, expressing little resistance to their ideal representation by the teacher.
The article is an adaptation of the original version published in Megamot 1999 (a journal in Hebrew), vol., 39, pp. 492–516.
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Notes
- 1.
Using standard parentheses ( ) indicates textual omission in order to shorten the text, the use of square parentheses [ ] is meant to explain local idioms and connotations in Hebrew.
- 2.
The ZR collective is consisted of various subsectors that differ, sometimes substantially, in their religious and ideological interpretations of nationality, Jewishness, and Israeliness, as well as in their attitudes toward the “secular” and the “religious ultra-Orthodox” collectives. However, in the Israeli state education system, the subsectors – called state-religious educational system in contrast to the state education system – are treated and considered as one body.
- 3.
The terms “secularity” and “secular people” are used in the ZR discourse. However, as in Israel state and religiosity are conflated the term “nonreligious” is used when the text does not refer to this discourse. The terms modernity, moderna, and modernism are used interchangeably in the ZR discourse.
- 4.
The concept “Kedusha,” holiness in English, is abstract and charged with different and diversified meanings. Calling a lesson “Kedusha” signifies that the study of sexuality, womanhood, and family life is a holy task. The opposite of Kedusha is secularity (“Hulin” in Hebrew).
- 5.
The study of holiness class is part of a larger research project on girlhood, including religious girlhood in the Ulpana.
- 6.
In Israel today, there are more than 60 new and old Ulpanot (including in the occupied territories), most of them operate as half or full boarding schools. They serve girls’ populations who differ in their ethnic, racial, and sociocultural background. The Ulpanot call the class on family life in different names, yet, to the best of our knowledge, only the Ulpana studied named it “holiness class.”
- 7.
Israeli borders from 1948 to 1967.
- 8.
In the first phase of the research, a religious educator-researcher joined the research for a short time in order to discuss the observations made about the ZR educational process.
- 9.
At the time of the research in the mid-1990s, the ZR educational system was much more open than today to let nonreligious researchers in their schools. However, in the last decade these researchers (and I personally) experience the closing of these doors due to the escalating mutual suspicion and growing fissure between the “camps.”
- 10.
Rabbi Akiva is a central rabbinical figure in the Babylonian Talmud, who has become a key cultural hero in Judaism; the righteous Rachel was his wife.
- 11.
The collection of ancient Jewish writings that forms the basis of Jewish religious law.
- 12.
In portraying the character of the destructive wife, the teacher used the example of Rabbi Eliazer Ben-Erech who forgot what he studied and could not study because he listened to his wife’s advice not to leave home in order to study.
- 13.
The version told by the teacher blended two original texts that appear in the Babylonian Talmud.
- 14.
Some of the girls told in the interview they watch the soap opera “Dalas” that was highly popular in Israel at the time of the research.
- 15.
Covering the head either by a scarf or a wig is required of every Jewish religious woman after her marriage. The streams among the religious population differ in the type of cover required.
- 16.
- 17.
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Acknowledgments
I warmly thank the girls from the Ulpana (who are now more than 30 years old) for sharing their life stories with us. Many, many thanks are extended to Gili David who worked as a research assistant. She contributed much to it by conducting interviews and observations, as well as in discussing the data.
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Rapoport, T. (2013). “Holiness Class”: “Constructing a Constructive Woman” in a Zionist Religious Ulpana . In: Gross, Z., Davies, L., Diab, AK. (eds) Gender, Religion and Education in a Chaotic Postmodern World. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5270-2_11
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