Politics of purity: Menstrual defilement and the negotiation of modern Jewish femininities

niddahThis study of religious change explores how the dialogue with secular, "western," sensibilities shapes a traditional social order. Specifically, I examine how orthodox Jews in Israel negotiate their participation in Israeli culture and its major social institutions while attempting to retain a purportedly timeless culture and its institutional structures, value systems, and ritual practices. I approach this question by focusing on Jewish menstrual laws (niddah), one of the three key ritual domains of Orthodox Judaism. I draw on varied data, including ethnographic and interview data with practitioners of niddah and ritual experts who support them; analyses of pedagogical documents that contextualize niddah as a discursive site that preserves Jewish traditions; and analyses of cultural artifacts that view niddah as symbolic of an archaic gendered social order. Drawing on this broad range of data, I analyze niddah as a site of negotiations between orthodox traditionalists and reformist critics who aim to reform orthodoxy from within, with a specific focus on the social organization of this ritual domain. This dialogue is representative of other dialogues about continuity and change, subject formation, and the protection of threatened boundaries within the orthodox Jewish community in Israel.; A major finding of this study is that niddah is in the process of being transformed from an oral cultural domain, sustained by women's folk practices, to a professionalized, institutionalized, and standardized ritual domain, supported by new forms of professional women ritual experts and modern therapeutic discourses about love, sexuality, family, and nation. Analyzing these discourses and professions, along with their recipients, clients, and critics, I diverge from the story of enlightened progress that informs recent work on Israeli orthodoxy and from the association of processes of professionalization with a master narrative of "modernity." Instead, by naming, documenting, assessing, and contextualizing the changes in the social organization of niddah, this study sheds light on the sensibilities that shape and inform religious change, revealing a duality. I find that the emergence of a new class of women ritual experts who draw on a range of religious as well as non-religious knowledges, along with the democratization of knowledge about niddah, simultaneously challenge and entrench traditional gendered authority structures and Judaism's traditional systems of knowledge. At the same time, I find that traditionalists and reformists partake in a dramatic rewriting of Jewish religious practices, institutions, and dogmas, thereby suggesting that religious change is a product of multi-faceted communal negotiations. These negotiations between traditionalists and reformist critics about a politics of purity both unmask the ambivalences surrounding femininity, sexuality, and the female body among modern-orthodox Jews in Israel and fracture the notion of the "Orthodox" as a social category.; This case study sheds light on more general processes of religious change as a product of community-wide conversations between a continuum of voices, ranging from radical reformists to die-hard traditionalists. I demonstrate that such agents of change occupy their categories with ambiguity, and that religious change is a product of negotiation of shared anxieties and a community-wide dialogue---not the product of the work of maverick agents of social change. The study also shows that the encounter between a traditional social order and "modern," western, and secular sensibilities points to a dialogue with, and incorporation of, dominant secular cultural sensibilities that reshape "authentic" traditions. This case study poignantly demonstrates how modern elements enable "tradition" to transform in response to pressures from within, while retaining the semblance of time-honored, unchanging tradition. Finally, I use this case study and my own experience a...