THE FUTURE WILL BE MORE RELIGIOUS AND CONSERVATIVE THAN YOU THINK: Eric Kaufmann

in The American:

As the 2012 presidential election grows closer, voter demographics will grab ever more airtime. In a finely balanced electorate, switching parties is less common, making internal growth of party bases more important. Getting the vote out is one aspect of this; population change another. ...

All of which explains why pundits' interest in demography has been steadily rising. Ruy Teixeira, for instance, claims that the growth of the college-educated, secular and Hispanic proportion of the population will soon provide the Democrats with an inbuilt electoral majority. Chris Bowers of the Nation styles this the “End of Bubba Dominance.” On the other side of the ledger, American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks highlights the role of fertility: “Liberals have a big baby problem: They're not having enough of them, they haven't for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result.” “In Seattle,” adds Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation, “there are nearly 45 percent more dogs than children. In Salt Lake City, there are nearly 19 percent more kids than dogs.”

In order to adjudicate between these competing predictions, I teamed up with Vegard Skirbekk and Anne Goujon, two leading Austrian-based experts in the art of projecting the size of subgroups in populations. The results, published in the journal Population Studies, show that Democrats are only marginally younger than Republicans and Republican women bear the same number of children as their Democratic sisters. Immigration, however, is an important factor. If ethnic party identification remains as it is, Latino population growth will benefit the Democrats, shifting the balance between the two parties by two and a half points in the Democrats’ favor over the next 30 years. ...

Those who doubt whether demography can shape politics should consider world Jewry. The combination of religious polarization and demographic upheaval is especially stark among Jews. They began to secularize in large numbers in the 19th century, and Orthodoxy emerged to combat this trend. The temperature of Jewish fundamentalism increased sharply after the horrors of World War II, and an ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, community emerged, segregating itself from other Jews. Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, and the largely secular Zionist leadership assumed that the black-hatted, sidelocked Haredim were a relic of history. They gave the ultra-Orthodox an exemption from the draft, subsidies to study at yeshiva, and other religious privileges to make sure their anti-Zionism didn't dissuade the Great Powers from establishing a home for the Jews in Palestine. In 1948, there were only 400 Israeli Jews with military exemptions, many of which were not used. By 2007, that number had soared to 55,000. Meanwhile, the fringe of ultra-Orthodox pupils in Israel's Jewish primary schools in 1960 has ballooned: they now comprise a third of the Jewish first grade class. They are gaining power: in Jerusalem, Haredim rioted in late December, demanding the right to segregate women on buses, and have already elected the city's first Haredi mayor. Outside Israel, work by Joshua Comenetz and Yaakov Wise reveals that the ultra-Orthodox may form a majority of observant American and British Jews by 2050.

The Jewish example shows that population change can reverse secularism and shift the center of gravity of an entire society in a conservative religious direction. Notice that change has come about because values have polarized people and increasingly determine family size.

In a more modest way, the same is true elsewhere.

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Labels: Christianity, culture, demographics, Europe, immigration, Islam, Israel, Judaism, Orthodox Judaism, religion

posted by Eve at 7:43 PM VOTE

"REVERTS" COME BACK TO THE RELIGIONS OF THEIR CHILDHOODS: USA Today

feature [too fluffy for my taste--I really like the focus on the positive call of a faith (and on Confession!), but would have liked more exploration of how people overcame the negative aspects which led them to leave in the first place. Still, good focus on something which often gets left out of stats-based stories on religious "churning." --Eve]:

Bruce Boling will celebrate Easter Sunday this weekend among Southern Baptists, just as he did when he prayed at a tiny Kentucky church where his family filled half the pews.

After decades away from faith, "I slowly began to see what I was missing was the relationship with God that I could find in my church," says Boling, 45, settled in with a little Baptist congregation in Hendersonville, Tenn.

Lydia Scrafano's heart will again thrill to hear Catholic hymns sounding on a great pipe organ, just as she did as a child in Detroit.

"I missed it all. I missed taking communion with a priest. I missed the stained glass. I missed the Virgin Mary," says Scrafano, 55, who has reconnected with her faith through a Catholic church in Williamsburg, Va.

Like many Christians and Jews, Boling and Scrafano drifted — or marched — away from the religion of their childhood.

Then, unlike most, they came back.

And they came back to stay, not just to parachute in for the Easter celebration this Sunday or a Passover Seder meal Friday night — holidays fundamental to Christianity and Judaism.

According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, more than half of Americans say they've switched religions at least once, but just 9% of U.S. adults say they've returned to the pews, practices and prayers that shaped them.

They're not converts; they're reverts. And religious denominations are stepping up efforts to reclaim, re-energize — and sometimes re-educate — these fallen-away faithful.

Catholic churches are adding adult programs to focus on returnees who often fear their actions or choices will keep them from the sacraments, the essential rites of Catholicism. Evangelical churches steer reverts to group Bible studies to help them establish stronger religious roots.

Rabbis reach out person-to-person to young adults through a program called "Next Dor" (dor is Hebrew for generation). It's promoted by Synagogue 3000, a consortium of leaders from Reform and Conservative movements, the two largest branches of Judaism in the USA.

Several Catholic dioceses have reported post-Christmas or post-Easter attendance bumps after major advertising efforts, such as a "Catholics Come Home" media campaign launched in Phoenix in 2008.

The Archdiocese of Washington pushed to increase confessions during Lent — the 40 days preceding Easter — by opening church and chapel doors on Wednesday evenings. Their advertising slogan: "The Light is ON for You." Within five years, the campaign spread across the country as more bishops adapted the idea for their dioceses.

But are they staying?

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Labels: Catholic Church, Christianity, culture, evangelical Protestantism, Judaism, religion

posted by Eve at 9:55 PM VOTE

MARRIAGE, FAMILY PRESSURE AND JEWISH GEOGRAPHY: Jewish Journal

feature:
...Demographers have long noted that non-marital unions are more likely to be interracial than are marital unions (i.e., married couples). And according to Stanford demographer Michael J. Rosenfeld, interracial couples and same-sex couples are more likely to live away from the community in which their parents reside.

Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion demographer Bruce Phillips has found that this also applies to Jews when he looked at non-marital unions in the 2000-2001 National Jewish Population Survey. Respondents under 30 were the most likely to be cohabiting. Phillips found that persons of mixed Jewish/non-Jewish ancestry (i.e. one or no Jewish parents) are far more likely to intermarry than those of single Jewish ancestry (i.e., two Jewish parents). Almost all of the mixed Jewish ancestry respondents under 30 had a non-Jewish partner, regardless of marital status. Among single Jewish ancestry respondents, however, those who were cohabiting were almost two and half times as likely to have a non-Jewish partner as those who were married (73 percent versus 30 percent).

Phillips pointed out that Jewish cohabitation resembles interracial cohabitation.

For both Jews and African-Americans, non-marital unions are more likely to be interfaith/interracial than are marriages. Young Jews in cohabiting interfaith unions apparently have reservations about their parents’ reaction and/or the complications that arise from an interfaith marriage.
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Labels: cohabitation, culture, intermarriage, Judaism, Marriage, race, religion

posted by Eve at 9:13 PM VOTE

RISE IN SINGLE MOTHERS GIVING BIRTH: Jerusalem Post

reports:

The number of single Jewish women opting to become mothers has increased dramatically over the past decade, according to statistics released on Tuesday by the Central Bureau of Statistics.

The data, which were published to coincide with Family Day celebrated nationwide on Thursday, shows that some 4,900 single Jewish women in Israel gave birth in 2010, nearly double the 2,600 single women who gave birth in 2000. The increase can be linked to advances in medical technology and the country’s policy of making fertility treatment widely available and free.

The number of mothers raising children without any partner has doubled from 8,000 women in 2000 to more than 16,000 women in 2010. ...

Ninety-one percent of single parent families with young children are headed by a woman: 57% are single mothers because of divorce, 16% are women who chose to give birth without a partner, 15% are separated from their spouse and the rest are widows.

The traditional family structure is still very much the norm – 96% of couples are officially married, while the remaining 4% are couples who have chosen to share their lives without traditional approval.

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Labels: demographics, divorce, Israel, Judaism, Marriage, Middle East, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, single parenting

posted by Eve at 7:57 PM VOTE

ISRAEL: ALTERNATIVE RELIGIOUS WEDDINGS ALLOWED TO CONTINUE: Jewish Telegraph Agency

reports:

An organization of Modern Orthodox rabbis that performs alternative religious wedding ceremonies for non-religious couples can continue to register the couples.

The Tzohar organization can register the married couples in the community of Shoham, where the head of the organization serves as chief rabbi, while a new bill proposed to loosen restrictions on where marriages can be registered works its way through the system, the organization said Thursday.

Weddings currently must be registered with the municipal rabbinate where one member of the couple lives. Tzohar had been registering couples with one of two municipal rabbinates headed by members of the organization, in Shoham and Gush Etzion, in contravention of the law. Under Thursday's agreement, the organization can continue to register the couples.

A Jewish couple must have a religious ceremony in Israel in order to be recognized as married. Many travel abroad to marry in secular ceremonies.

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Labels: Israel, Judaism, Marriage, Orthodox Judaism, religion

posted by Eve at 11:03 PM VOTE

A NEW DAWN FOR "SUNRISE, SUNSET" AT SAME-SEX WEDDINGS: Playbill

reports:

One of the most common things in the world happened on Oct. 1 in Tappan, NY. "Sunrise, Sunset" was performed at a wedding.

Only this time it was a little different. The song — which has accompanied thousands of nuptials since its debut on Sept. 22, 1964, in Fiddler on the Roof — graced the wedding celebration of two men, entertainer Richard Skipper and landscape architect Daniel Sherman, and the melancholy-happy tune's story of a "little girl I carried" and a "little boy at play," now told of two boys.

"I've been doing same-sex weddings since New York law permitted it in July," said Rev. Joshua Ellis, whose new career as a New York-based Interspiritual minister was preceded by many years as a theatrical press agent in New York City. "And something was missing. Nobody was singing 'Sunrise, Sunset.' It's sung all the time in weddings of mixed couples. I guessed it was because they talk about a little boy and a little girl. So I contacted [lyricist] Sheldon Harnick."

Ellis continued, "Within a few days, he wrote a note back. He'd contacted Richard Ticktin, who was best friend of Jerry Bock and his representative. Attached to that email were revised lyrics of the song." Ellis then gently asked Harnick if he could also write a set of lyrics for a female couple. Those arrived soon after.

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Labels: culture, gay marriage, gender, heteronormativity, Judaism, religion

posted by Eve at 6:43 PM VOTE

Conservative Rabbis Disagree on Same-Sex Marriage: New York Times

reports:

Though he approves of New York State’s new law allowing same-sex marriage, Rabbi Allan Schranz of the Sutton Place Synagogue, a Conservative congregation in Manhattan, will not officiate at a wedding ceremony for same-sex couples, pointing out that his reasons, though partly rooted in Jewish traditions, are mostly rooted in his personal traditions.

“I won’t participate because I’ve never done it and don’t want to start at this stage of my career,” said Rabbi Schranz, 64, who has been a rabbi for almost 40 years. “I’m not going to change, but if somebody else wants to do it, I’ll support that.”

But at another Conservative congregation, Temple Israel Center in White Plains, Rabbi Gordon Tucker, 60, the synagogue’s leader, performed a Jewish ceremony a year ago for two young gay men who had been civilly married in Connecticut. On Saturday, the first anniversary of the wedding, the men were called up for an aliyah, a blessing they said over the Torah, and their parents sponsored the celebratory kiddush, the postworship meal for congregants.

“It’s not controversial in the congregation,” said Rabbi Tucker, a former dean of the rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the movement’s fountainhead. “Over a period of years we have reached a consensus and people supported my position.”

The two rabbis’ contrasting viewpoints are reflective of the wide disagreement within Conservative Judaism on an issue that continues to roil many of its synagogues even after passage of laws in New York and five other states that legalize same-sex marriage. ...

Those rabbis who do perform same-sex ceremonies improvise the language. When Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky, 45, the leader of Temple Ansche Chesed on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, performed a wedding for two men several years ago, he eliminated some phrases from the traditional Jewish service, using “loving companion” instead of terms like bride and groom. He sees such changes as a “creative betrayal of tradition” by “finding ways to sanctify love and commitment.” But he insisted that some elements from the traditional ceremony remain ironclad, like commitments to sexual exclusivity and mutual care.

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Labels: Conservative Judaism, culture, gay marriage, Judaism, Marriage, New York, religion

posted by Imapp Staff at 9:03 PM VOTE

KIRYAS JOEL, NY, LANDS DISTINCTION AS NATION'S POOREST PLACE: NYTimes

feature:

The poorest place in the United States is not a dusty Texas border town, a hollow in Appalachia, a remote Indian reservation or a blighted urban neighborhood. It has no slums or homeless people. No one who lives there is shabbily dressed or has to go hungry. Crime is virtually nonexistent.

And, yet, officially, at least, none of the nation’s 3,700 villages, towns or cities with more than 10,000 people has a higher proportion of its population living in poverty than Kiryas Joel, N.Y., a community of mostly garden apartments and town houses 50 miles northwest of New York City in suburban Orange County.

About 70 percent of the village’s 21,000 residents live in households whose income falls below the federal poverty threshold, according to the Census Bureau. Median family income ($17,929) and per capita income ($4,494) rank lower than any other comparable place in the country. Nearly half of the village’s households reported less than $15,000 in annual income.

About half of the residents receive food stamps, and one-third receive Medicaid benefits and rely on federal vouchers to help pay their housing costs.

Kiryas Joel’s unlikely ranking results largely from religious and cultural factors. Ultra-Orthodox Satmar Hasidic Jews predominate in the village; many of them moved there from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, beginning in the 1970s to accommodate a population that was growing geometrically.

Women marry young, remain in the village to raise their families and, according to religious strictures, do not use birth control. As a result, the median age (under 12) is the lowest in the country and the household size (nearly six) is the highest. Mothers rarely work outside the home while their children are young. ...

Still, poverty is largely invisible in the village. Parking lots are full, but strollers and tricycles seem to outnumber cars. A jeweler shares a storefront with a check-cashing office. To avoid stigmatizing poorer young couples or instilling guilt in parents, the chief rabbi recently decreed that diamond rings were not acceptable as engagement gifts and that one-man bands would suffice at weddings. Many residents who were approached by a reporter said they did not want to talk about their finances.

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Labels: class, culture, economics, family size, Hasidic Judaism, Judaism, New York, Orthodox Judaism, poverty, religion, weddings

posted by Eve at 11:40 PM VOTE

Protesters Seek Woman's Religious Divorce: NYTimes

reports:

This should have been a good New Year’s for Aharon Friedman, a 34-year-old tax counsel for the Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee. He spent time with his 3-year-old daughter, and could have been thinking about the influence he will have starting Wednesday, when his boss, Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, becomes chairman of the powerful tax-writing committee.

Instead, Mr. Friedman, an Orthodox Jew, finds himself scrutinized in the Jewish press, condemned by important rabbis, and attacked in a YouTube video showing about 200 people protesting outside his Silver Spring, Md., apartment on Dec. 19. They were angered by Mr. Friedman’s refusal to give his wife, Tamar Epstein, 27, a Jewish decree of divorce, known as a get.

The Friedman case has become emblematic of a torturous issue in which only a husband can “give” a get. While Jewish communities have historically pressured obstinate husbands to give gets, this was a very rare case of seeking to shame the husband in the secular world. ...

Mr. Friedman and Ms. Epstein have been civilly divorced since April and share custody of their daughter, but they are still married according to Jewish law. And without a get neither he nor Ms. Epstein can remarry within the faith. She is considered an agunah, or chained woman.

Although the majority of men in Jewish divorces grant their wives a get with little fuss, the husbands who refuse — it is estimated there are several hundred agunot in the United States today — can provoke a clash between religious folkways and secular divorce law. ...

And the Rabbinical Council of Greater Washington issued a statement saying that the parties had not yet exhausted the rabbinical courts, suggesting it was premature to blame Mr. Friedman for withholding the get.

But other rabbis have argued that it is Jewish custom to give a get once divorce terms have been settled, and with no possibility of reconciliation.

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Labels: custody, divorce, Judaism, men, religion, remarriage, women

posted by Eve at 7:05 PM VOTE

INTERNATIONAL ADOPTIONS CHANGING FACE, IDENTITY OF AMERICAN JUDAISM: Religion News Service

reports:

Like so many Jewish women, Anne Suissa pursued her education and career with gusto, earning degrees from Cornell and MIT and going on to manage 27 people at the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Suissa always knew she wanted marriage and family, but by the time she had found her husband and began trying to have a child, she was in her late 30s. Doctors told her the fertility treatments she had begun would not likely succeed.

Today, the Suissas are parents of two children from Guatemala, both of whom they converted to Judaism. Though their lives are full and rewarding, Suissa still wishes someone had encouraged her to start a family earlier.

In Jewish families, it’s “education, education, education,” she said. “But nobody told me that college might be a good time to meet a nice Jewish boy.”

The general track of Suissa’s life is not unusual among Jewish American women. As a group, they’re highly educated—a fact demographers say contributes to their relatively low fertility rates.

Still longing to be mothers, they often adopt, and frequently, their children are of Latino, Asian or African descent. And that, in turn, is slowly changing the face of American Judaism. ...

The number of childless Jewish women in their early 30s is 54 percent, compared to 28 percent for American women in general, according to the most recent National Jewish Population Survey.

The survey also shows about 5 percent of American Jewish households with children include adopted children, compared to the national rate of 3.7 percent. But unlike Americans in general, the survey notes, Jewish Americans are not having enough children to replace themselves.

more (see also here)

Labels: adoption, culture, demographics, feminism, Judaism, religion

posted by Eve at 1:21 PM VOTE

IS IT CONSTITUTIONAL FOR NEW YORK TO CRIMINALIZE CLERGY'S PERFORMING WEDDING WITH NO CIVIL LICENSE FOR COUPLES?: Howard Friedman

at the Religion Clause blog:

A Forward article published last week raises the question of the constitutionality of New York's Domestic Relations Law, Sec. 17, which makes it a misdemeanor for any clergy member to "solemnize or presume to solemnize any marriage between any parties without a license being presented ... or with knowledge that either party is legally incompetent to contract matrimony." The article reports on the case of Yehuda Semel, who obtained a Jewish religious divorce from his wife. However their civil divorce proceedings are still pending in the courts. Nevertheless, Semel has married another woman in a religious ceremony without obtaining a civil marriage license. Most rabbis oppose performing a religious marriage ceremony where there has not been a civil divorce. Commentators argue, however, that it is a violation of the 1st Amendment for the state to make it illegal for a rabbi to perform a purely religious ceremony. It was not unusual before a 1983 change in the Social Security Law that preserved benefits for widows who remarry, for rabbis to perform a religious ceremony for a couple otherwise eligible to marry but who did not obtain a civil marriage license to avoid the woman's loss of her Social Security benefits. There was a Yiddish phrase for that type of marriage-- stile chupa (a "quiet marriage").

link

Labels: family policy, Judaism, law, Marriage, religion, religious liberty

posted by Eve at 2:18 PM VOTE

GUILTY PLEASURES: RELIGION AND SEX AMONG AMERICAN UNIVERSITY STUDENTS: Roger Friedland with Paolo Gardinali

at the Huffington Post:

... In 2008 and 2009 we asked close to a thousand students, mostly freshmen and sophomores, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to tell us about their sex lives. In this anonymous web-based survey we also asked them to which religious denomination they belonged. Almost everybody who claims to belong to a religion also believes in God. A lot of students -- just shy of a third -- don't identify with any religion. But just because somebody doesn't belong does not mean they don't believe. About a quarter of those unaffiliated nonetheless believe in God. Most commonly, they believe in a higher, ordering power or cosmic force, but not God, not the big Who. True atheists are a tiny minority in the sample -- about eight percent.

With all these God-believers, it is striking that most students -- nearly 60 percent -- don't think sexual intercourse before marriage is wrong, at all. If you look at the table below, you can see that very small proportions -- even among the conservative Christians -- think it is absolutely wrong. Eighteen percent of the Evangelical students think such sex is absolutely wrong. That's less than the 25 percent of those students who took a virginity pledge. ...

If, within a particular religious community, the percentage who think sex it is not at all wrong is less than the percentage who have had sexual intercourse, you have a kind of "guilt gap," a rough relative likelihood that young people in that community will have had sex but think there is something shameful in what they have done. For the Protestants, unlike the Catholics and the Jews, the "guilt gap" is huge: 21 percent more mainline Protestants have had sex than think there is nothing morally wrong about it; for Evangelicals the gap is 29 percent. That is a lot of guilty sex. For Catholics and Jews, the gap is 10 percent and 2 percent, respectively. For those who don't belong to any religion, there is a guilt deficit.

The problem with guilty sex is that it is sex students don't expect to have, for which they are not prepared, executed in the heat of passion, often -- if students came out of an abstinence-only sex education -- without much knowledge. (In this respect, these religious differences are even more striking because the State of California stood by its comprehensive sex education approach and opted out of Federal abstinence funding. That means that most of these students had some school-based sexual education.) Although the numbers are small, the pregnancy rate is also much higher for Protestant girls. Catholic and Jewish girls hardly ever get pregnant. Half of those Protestant pregnancies, mainline and Evangelical alike, ended in abortion. Protestant guilt is killing the unborn.

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Labels: abortion, Catholic Church, Christianity, contraception, culture, Judaism, premarital sex, religion, sex, universities

posted by Eve at 5:24 PM VOTE

INTERFAITH MARRIAGES ARE RISING FAST, BUT THEY'RE FAILING FAST TOO: Naomi Shaefer Riley

in the Washington Post:

...The Reyes-Shapiro divorce is about as ugly as the end of a marriage can get. Some of the sparring is an example of the bad ways people act when a union unravels. But the fight over Ela's religion illustrates the particular hardships and poor track record of interfaith marriages: They fail at higher rates than same-faith marriages. But couples don't want to hear that, and no one really wants to tell them.

Figuring out how to raise the kids in a mixed-faith household is difficult. Religions, if taken seriously, are often mutually exclusive (not withstanding the argument of Reyes's lawyer, who told me that taking Ela to church was not a violation of the court order because Jesus was a rabbi and "there is no sharp line between Judaism and Christianity").

Most families work things out, peacefully deciding on one religion, both or neither. But the fact is that conflicts such as the one between Reyes and Shapiro will probably become more common.

According to the General Social Survey, 15 percent of U.S. households were mixed-faith in 1988. That number rose to 25 percent by 2006, and the increase shows no signs of slowing. The American Religious Identification Survey of 2001 reported that 27 percent of Jews, 23 percent of Catholics, 39 percent of Buddhists, 18 percent of Baptists, 21 percent of Muslims and 12 percent of Mormons were then married to a spouse with a different religious identification. If you want to see what the future holds, note this: Less than a quarter of the 18- to 23-year-old respondents in the National Study of Youth and Religion think it's important to marry someone of the same faith.

In some ways, more interfaith marriage is good for civic life. Such unions bring extended families from diverse backgrounds into close contact. There is nothing like marriage between different groups to make society more integrated and more tolerant. As recent research by Harvard professor Robert Putnam has shown, the more Americans get to know people of other faiths, the more they seem to like them.

But the effects on the marriages themselves can be tragic -- it is an open secret among academics that tsk-tsking grandmothers may be right. According to calculations based on the American Religious Identification Survey of 2001, people who had been in mixed-religion marriages were three times more likely to be divorced or separated than those who were in same-religion marriages.

In a paper published in 1993, Evelyn Lehrer, a professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, found that if members of two mainline Christian denominations marry, they have a one in five chance of being divorced in five years. A Catholic and a member of an evangelical denomination have a one in three chance. And a Jew and a Christian who marry have a greater than 40 percent chance of being divorced in five years.

More recent research concludes that even differing degrees of religious belief and observance can cause trouble. For instance, in a 2009 paper, scholars Margaret Vaaler, Christopher Ellison and Daniel Powers of the University of Texas at Austin found higher rates of divorce when a husband attends religious services more frequently than his wife, as well as when a wife is more theologically conservative than her husband.

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Labels: Catholic Church, Christianity, culture, divorce, Judaism, Marriage, religion

posted by Eve at 2:31 PM VOTE

THE MEANING OF (GESTATING) LIFE: Book review

in Books and Culture:

"What's the book about?"

It was a question I heard frequently over the holidays this past December, as I went to pre-Christmas rehearsals, parties, and church services carrying Tsipy Ivry's Embodying Culture: Pregnancy in Japan and Israel.

"It's about pregnancy," I'd say. "In Japan and Israel."
The inevitable response: "Why there?"

The gestation of Embodying Culture began when anthropologist Tsipy Ivry was concluding a research program as a graduate student in Tokyo, and became pregnant. A native Israeli, Ivry was surprised by what she describes as "an overwhelming and all-encompassing sense of becoming 'different,'" a sensation she attributes not only to the experience of pregnancy itself but also to the reality of being pregnant as an Israeli woman in Japan. This impression in turn led to a developing interest in the lived experience of pregnancy and how it is socially and culturally constructed in different societies. ...

Although both Israeli and Japanese women experience pregnancy as a highly medicalized event, much as in the United States, the forms that medicalization take differ greatly. And these differences, Ivry argues, are deeply rooted in distinctive cultural contexts: in Israel, a struggle to stay alive amidst constant military conflict; in Japan, an emphasis on the betterment of society through the long-term maternal efforts of child-raising.

If we think of each culture's implicit understanding of pregnancy as a narrative, Ivry contends, we'll find that the "protagonist" of the Japanese narrative differs sharply from the protagonist of the Israeli narrative:

In the Japanese arena the protagonist of pregnancy is the interconnected entity of the mother-baby, whereas in the Israeli case the protagonists are the pregnant woman and her suspect fetus. Pregnancy is conceptualized as an early stage of parenting in Japan and is all about the interdependence of mother and baby and their ongoing relationships. The Israeli model defines pregnancy as a state "in limbo" that involves two separate individuals (of whom only one is a person).

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Labels: abortion, culture, Israel, Japan, Judaism, motherhood, pregnancy

posted by Eve at 3:58 PM VOTE

BATTLE OF THE BABIES: Caspar Melville

in the New Humanist:

Whenever demography is the subject a panicky headline usually follows. Generally these take the form of anxieties about overpopulation. “Are there just too many people in the world?” asks Johann Hari in the Independent. “The World’s population is still exploding,” confirms the Optimum Population Trust (patron David Attenborough). Though equally they could be about the opposite. “Is Europe Dying?” queries Catholic apologist George Weigel (before answering his own question: “The brute fact is that Europe is depopulating itself”). “Falling birth rate is killing Europe says Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks” is the Guardian’s offering. To these hysterical headlines let’s add another, especially for you secular folk: with birth rates of seven babies per women fundamentalists will take over the world. And here is the kicker: it’s all secularism’s fault.

Cover image by Martin RowsonThis grim prognostication comes courtesy of political scientist Eric Kaufmann, a reader in politics at London’s Birkbeck College, and the author of the new book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, out in March from Profile Books. If, like me, you skip the six dense chapters of politico-demographic analysis, in the very last line of the book you can find his answer: “The religious shall inherit the earth.” There is, of course, an “unless” and we’ll get to that later, but let’s just let the idea sink in first.

What Kaufmann is arguing is that the secularisation thesis, the assumption that modernity leads inexorably to a lessening of religious belief and a day when we are all rational humanists, is wrong – at one point Kaufmann approvingly quotes Rodney Stark and Roger Finke’s view that this is “a failed prophecy”. Further he is saying that there is something about our current form of liberal secularism that contains (here’s another headline) the seeds of its own destruction. Since the birth rate of individualistic secular people the world over is way below replacement level (2.1 in the West), and the birth rate of religious fundamentalists is way above (between 5 and 7.5 depending on sect), then through the sheer force of demography religious fundamentalism is going to become a much bigger force in the world and gain considerable political muscle. Literalist religious conservatism is being reborn and we secular liberals are the midwives.

So there’s the challenge.

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Labels: Amish/Mennonites, culture, demographics, Europe, Israel, Judaism, religion

posted by Eve at 8:24 PM VOTE

MASS MEDIA: Dahlia Lithwick

in Slate:

Joseph Reyes, an Afghanistan war veteran and second-year law student, converted to Judaism when he married Rebecca Shapiro in 2004. When they split up in 2008, Rebecca won primary custody of their daughter, and Joseph got regular visitation. The couple had allegedly agreed to raise their child Jewish, but Joseph, seeking to expose his 3-year-old to his Catholic faith, had her baptized last November. When she learned that her daughter had been baptized without her consent, Rebecca obtained a temporary restraining order in December 2009, forbidding Joseph from "exposing Ela Reyes to another religion other than the Jewish religion during his visitation." In January of this year, Reyes again took Ela to Mass at Holy Name Cathedral, with a local TV news crew in tow. His ex-wife's lawyers demanded he be held in criminal contempt—with a maximum punishment of six months in prison.

Can a court really tell a parent what religion his child will be? And can a judge possibly back up such an order with the threat of jail time?

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Labels: Catholic Church, children, custody, divorce, Judaism, religion

posted by Eve at 1:31 AM VOTE

ISRAELI LAWMAKERS DEFEAT CIVIL MARRIAGE BILL: JTA

reports:

A bill that allows civil marriage in Israel to couples who could not be married by the rabbinate failed by a large margin in its initial reading.

The Civil Union bill, introduced Wednesday by the Kadima Party's Meir Sheetrit, was defeated 58-22. One-third of the Kadima lawmakers did not participate in the vote, the Jerusalem Post reported.

The bill allows a civil marriage where at least one member of a couple is not recognized as Jewish. It creates a marriage registrar in the Justice Ministry authorized to legalize civil marriages for those who are not eligible to marry by current law as well as divorces.

The bill does not contravene Jewish law since it does not allow civil marriages for those who may marry by Jewish law, according to Sheetrit's office.

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Labels: Israel, Judaism, Marriage, religion

posted by Eve at 12:01 AM VOTE

GOD SAID MULTIPLY, AND DID SHE EVER: NY Times

obituary:

WHEN Yitta Schwartz died last month at 93, she left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she could claim perhaps 2,000 living descendants.

Mrs. Schwartz was a member of the Satmar Hasidic sect, whose couples have nine children on average and whose ranks of descendants can multiply exponentially. But even among Satmars, the size of Mrs. Schwartz’s family is astonishing. A round-faced woman with a high-voltage smile, she may have generated one of the largest clans of any survivor of the Holocaust — a thumb in the eye of the Nazis. ...

Like many Hasidim, Mrs. Schwartz considered bearing children as her tribute to God. A son-in-law, Rabbi Menashe Mayer, a lushly bearded scholar, said she took literally the scriptural command that “You should not forget what you saw and heard at Mount Sinai and tell it to your grandchildren.”

“And she wanted to do that,” he said, without needing to add her belief that the more grandchildren, the more the commandment is fulfilled. Mrs. Schwartz gave birth 18 times, but lost two children in the Holocaust and one in a summer camp accident here.

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Labels: children, family size, Judaism, religion

posted by Eve at 5:36 PM VOTE

Two National Rabbinic Groups Issue Religious Ban on Voting for Pro-Homosexual Agenda Politicians: Press release

states:

In light of recent developments in the ongoing push to legislate a Federal Hate Crimes Bill in Congress and same gender marriage legislation in New York and other states, Rabbi Yehuda Levin, spokesman for the 65 year old Orthodox Jewish national Rabbinic organization Rabbinical Alliance of America, surrounded by Rabbis, issued a religious ban on voting for any politician or office holder who supports any aspect of the homosexual political agenda.

Go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8VkYFAGR9I to see the actual video of the statement.

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Labels: gay marriage, homosexuality, Judaism, religion

posted by Imapp Staff at 12:21 PM VOTE

Don't vote your conscience on marriage

By David Benkof
DavidBenkof@aol.com

I've been corresponding with a liberal Jewish supporter of same-sex marriage. He recently wrote me that he expects me and all other Orthodox Jews to support "equal civil rights for all citizens" with regard to marriage, even if our religious beliefs cause us not to extend those rights in our religious communities.

First off, I do support equal civil rights for all citizens. Gay men and lesbians can and do get married - to members of the opposite sex. I was once gay-identified, and I hope to marry someday. But marriage is by definition a union of a man and a woman. A gay person cannot marry a same-sex person, just as he cannot marry a tomato. Both kinds of unions are completely alien to the longstanding understanding of what marriage is.

Furthermore, my religion teaches me that same-sex marriage is immoral, and calls upon me to fight it. But because my correspondent disagrees, he can demand that I vote against my conscience? I thought this was a democracy.

Liberal Jews have often expressed the opinion that prayer has no place in public schools. Well, what if I told one of them that I expect him to support a constitutional amendment guaranteeing "equal civil rights for all citizens" to pray in school if they so desire - even if his personal beliefs cause him not to choose to pray in school himself?

The two situations are precisely parallel.

Labels: Judaism, Marriage

posted by David Benkof at 4:30 AM VOTE