Old Order Amish and Jewish Ultra-Orthodox Women’s Responses to the Media

ARCHIVED EVENT

How do devoutly religious women cope with the media and its apparent incompatibility with their values and practices? Professor Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar, Senior Lecturer at Sapir Academic College in Sderot, Israel, will lecture on Old Order Amish and Lithuanian and Hassidic Jewish ultra-Orthodox communities, between 2012 and 2015. 

Both communities are generally familiar with the media but limit their use of it. The two groups manifested different patterns of media use or nonuse, but had similar framings of danger and threat from the media. Rigorous adherence to religious dictates is greatly admired in these communities, and the women in both take considerable pride in manipulating their status in them. Their agency is reflected in how they negotiate the tension inherent in their contradictory roles as both gatekeepers and agents-of-change, which are analyzed in the lecture as valuable currencies in the cultural and religious markets these women negotiate.

Professor Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar's research projects address the tension between religious values and new technologies among Old Order Amish and Jewish Ultra-Orthodox women. Her book, “Strictly Observant: Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Women Negotiating Media,“ will be published by Rutgers University Press in January 2024. 

Hosted by the department of Near Eastern and South Asian Literatures and Cultures.