Rabbis Reporters And The Public In The Digital Holyland

Focused on the triangular relationship between rabbis, journalists and the public, this book analyses each group’s role in influencing the agenda around religion in Israel. The book draws upon the author's original research, comprising an analysis of the coverage of religion on four Israeli news websites, a series of surveys of rabbis, journalists, and the public, as well as a large number of interviews conducted with a range of stakeholders: community rabbis, teacher rabbis, and religious court judges; reporters, editors, and spokespersons; and the Israeli Jewish public. Key questions include: What are rabbis’ philosophical views of the media? How does the media define news about Judaism? What aspect of news about religion and spirituality interest the public? How do spokespersons and rabbis influence the news agenda? How is the triangular relationship between rabbis, journalists and the public being altered by the digital age? Despite a lack of understanding about mass media behaviour among many rabbis, and, concurrently, a lack of knowledge about religion among many journalists, it is argued that there is shared interest between the two groups, both in support of mass-media values like the right to know and freedom of expression. It is further argued that the public's attitude to news about religion is significant in determining what journalists should publish. The book will be of interest to those studying mass communications, the media, Judaism and Israeli society, as well as researchers of media and religion.

As the availability and use of media platforms continue to expand, the cultural visibility of religion is on the rise, leading to questions about religious authority: Where does it come from? How is it established? What might be changing it? The contributors to The Media and Religious Authority examine the ways in which new centers of power and influence are emerging as religions seek to “brand” themselves in the media age. Putting their in-depth, incisive studies of particular instances of media production and reception in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and North America into conversation with one another, the volume explores how evolving mediations of religion in various places affect the prospects, aspirations, and durability of religious authority across the globe. An insightful combination of theoretical groundwork and individual case studies, The Media and Religious Authority invites us to rethink the relationships among the media, religion, and culture. The contributors are Karina Kosicki Bellotti, Alexandra Boutros, Pauline Hope Cheong, Peter Horsfield, Christine Hoff Kraemer, Joonseong Lee, Alf Linderman, Bahíyyah Maroon, Montré Aza Missouri, and Emily Zeamer, with an afterword by Lynn Schofield Clark.

Explicating one of the most potent and recurring mass-culture fantasies, this book explores Jewish-Christian couplings across a century of popular American literature, theater, film, and television.

Christian Zionism influences global politics, especially U.S. foreign policy, and has deeply affected Jewish–Christian and Muslim–Christian relations. With a fair-minded, longitudinal study of this dynamic yet controversial movement, Donald M. Lewis traces its lineage from biblical sources through the Reformation to various movements of today.

Today more than ever before, the historical witness is now a “museum objectâ€_x009d_ in the form of video interviews with individuals remembering events of historical importance. Such video testimonies now not only are part of the collections and research activities of museums, but become deeply intertwined with narrative and exhibit design. With a focus on Holocaust museums, this study scrutinizes for the first time this new global process of “musealisationâ€_x009d_ of testimony, exploring the processes, prerequisites, and consequences of the transformation of video testimonies into exhibits.

How nineteenth-century Protestant evangelicals used print and visual media to shape American culture In nineteenth-century America, "apocalypse" referred not to the end of the world but to sacred revelation, and "geography" meant both the physical landscape and its representation in printed maps, atlases, and pictures. In Apocalyptic Geographies, Jerome Tharaud explores how white Protestant evangelicals used print and visual media to present the antebellum landscape as a “sacred space” of spiritual pilgrimage, and how devotional literature influenced secular society in important and surprising ways. Reading across genres and media—including religious tracts and landscape paintings, domestic fiction and missionary memoirs, slave narratives and moving panoramas—Apocalyptic Geographies illuminates intersections of popular culture, the physical spaces of an expanding and urbanizing nation, and the spiritual narratives that ordinary Americans used to orient their lives. Placing works of literature and visual art—from Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden—into new contexts, Tharaud traces the rise of evangelical media, the controversy and backlash it engendered, and the role it played in shaping American modernity.

How the rabbis of the Talmud transformed Jewish law into a way of thinking and talking about everything Typically translated as "Jewish law," halakhah is not an easy match for what is usually thought of as law. This is because the rabbinic legal system has rarely wielded the political power to enforce its rules, nor has it ever been the law of any state. Even more idiosyncratically, the talmudic rabbis claim the study of halakhah is a holy endeavor that brings a person closer to God—a claim no country makes of its law. Chaim Saiman traces how generations of rabbis have used concepts forged in talmudic disputation to do the work that other societies assign not only to philosophy, political theory, theology, and ethics but also to art, drama, and literature. Guiding readers across two millennia of richly illuminating perspectives, this panoramic book shows how halakhah is not just "law" but an entire way of thinking, being, and knowing.

In order to understand contemporary Jewish identity in the twenty-first century, one needs to look beyond the Synagogue, the holy days and Jewish customs and law to explore such modern phenomena as mass media and their impact upon Jewish existence. This book delves into the complex relationship between Judaism and the mass media to provide a comprehensive examination of modern Jewish identity in the information age. Covering Israel as well as the Diaspora populations of the US and UK, the author looks at journalism, broadcasting, advertising and the internet to give a wide-ranging analysis of how the Jewish religion and Jewish people have been influenced by the media age. He tackles questions such as: What is the impact of Judaism on mass media? How is the religion covered in the secular Israeli media? Does the coverage strengthen religious identity? What impact does the media have upon secular-religious tensions? Chapters explore how the impact of Judaism is to be found particularly in the religious media in Israel – haredi and modern Orthodox – and looks at the evolution of new patterns of religious advertising, the growth and impact of the internet on Jewish identity, and the very legitimacy of certain media in the eyes of religious leaders. Also examined are such themes as the marketing of rabbis, the `Holyland’ dimension in foreign media reporting from Israel, and the media’s role in the Jewish Diaspora. An important addition to the existing literature on the nature of Jewish identity in the modern world, this book will be of great interest to scholars of media studies, media and religion, sociology, Jewish studies, religion and politics, as well as to the broader Jewish and Israeli communities.

Positioning race front and centre, this book theorizes that political violence, in the form of a socio-political process that differentiates between human and less-than-human populations, is used by the state of Israel in racializing and ruling the citizens of occupied Palestine. Lentin argues that Israel's rule over Palestine is an example of Agamben's state of exception, Goldberg's racial state and Wolfe's settler colony; the Israeli racial settler colony employs its laws to rule besieged Palestine, while excluding itself and its Jewish citizen-colonists from legal instruments and governmental technologies. Governing through emergency legislation and through practices of exception, emergency, necessity and security, Israel positions itself outside domestic and international law. Deconstructing Agamben's Eurocentric theoretical position Lentin shows that it occludes colonialism, settler colonialism and anti-colonialism and fails to specifically foreground race; instead she combines the work of Wolfe, who proposes race as a trace of settler colonialism, and Weheliye, who argues that Agamben's western-centric understanding of exception fail to speak from explicitly racialized and gendered standpoints. Employing existing media, activist, and academic accounts of racialization this book deliberately breaks from white, Western theorizations of biopolitics, exception, and bare life, and instead foregrounds race and gender in analysing settler colonial conditions in Israel.

Since 1967, more than 60,000 Jewish-Americans have settled in the territories captured by the State of Israel during the Six Day War. Comprising 15 percent of the settler population today, these immigrants have established major communities, transformed domestic politics and international relations, and committed shocking acts of terrorism. They demand attention in both Israel and the United States, but little is known about who they are and why they chose to leave America to live at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this deeply researched, engaging work, Sara Yael Hirschhorn unsettles stereotypes, showing that the 1960s generation who moved to the occupied territories were not messianic zealots or right-wing extremists but idealists engaged in liberal causes. They did not abandon their progressive heritage when they crossed the Green Line. Rather, they saw a historic opportunity to create new communities to serve as a beacon—a “city on a hilltop”—to Jews across the globe. This pioneering vision was realized in their ventures at Yamit in the Sinai and Efrat and Tekoa in the West Bank. Later, the movement mobilized the rhetoric of civil rights to rebrand itself, especially in the wake of the 1994 Hebron massacre perpetrated by Baruch Goldstein, one of their own. On the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 war, Hirschhorn illuminates the changing face of the settlements and the clash between liberal values and political realities at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.