Volume 20, Number 2, 2023

EN:

This paper examines the genre of films being produced by Orthodox Jewish women and intended to be viewed only by other women [i.e., Orthodox Jewish women] as a key form of “sensational" religious materiality and a counter-counterpublic sphere of religious action. Religious materiality is all that makes religious sentiment, knowledge, and practice knowable; it is the “stuff” of religious life and belief. These films present “sensational forms” of religious materiality, or, in other words, experiences that “induce religious modes of sensing, feeling, and making sense that effect the very ‘beyond’ that is posited and form the people addressed as believers” to audiences (Meyer 2015). Focusing on religious films as a key form of and forum for sensational religious materiality moves away from not only a Protestant-style bias focused on the role of interior belief and disregard for “entertainment” media, but also a simple “religion and [+] media” instrumentalist approach. Further, films produced by and for Orthodox Jewish women, while broadly part of the religious counterpublic media of Orthodox Jewry, are further located in a gendered location; the films are thus productively described as located in a counter [read: religious]- counterpublic [read: gendered] sphere of Orthodoxy.

EN:

This article reads Norma Rosen’s 1982 novel At the Center, a novel set in an abortion clinic, as articulating the ethical complexity of abortion for American Jews in the years following abortion legalization. It argues that the novel presents legal abortion as morally complex. Given the harm of dangerous illegal abortion, providing legal abortion makes the world safer. But the fear of abortion becoming illegal again is ever-present. The increased availability of abortion can lead to it being conducted without grappling with the morality of ending a potential life. Jews must also negotiate the probable comparisons of abortion to Nazism. The article first shows how abortion is presented in Rosen’s journalism from the late-1970s before explicating how At the Center presents the central moral issues of abortion through analyzing the novel’s central characters.

EN:

The chapter describes Madeleine Lucette Ferraille, who later changed her name to Ruth Ben David/Blau, during World War Two in France. When the war broke, Lucette was married to a handsome French soldier and gave him a son, but she wanted more out of life than was within easy reach—more, indeed, than the Vichy regime encouraged. By 1943, she was divorced, with a BA from the University of Toulouse. That year, she also helped a female Jewish refugee escape deportation and certain death. Recruited by the Resistance in early 1944, Lucette, who was beautiful as well as brilliant, made her way into the heart of the local Gestapo by becoming the mistress of a Waffen-SS officer, continuing to spy on the Nazi headquarters just a few months before D-Day.

EN:

The article examines the depiction of female Baghdadi Jewish characters in three works: Gay Courter’s English novel Flowers in the Blood (2002), Saadat Hasan Manto’s Urdu short story Mozelle (1951), and Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay’s Bengali story Makorshar Rosh (1933). It explores a murder case from Calcutta Jewry through the eyes of Courter’s protagonist Dinah Sassoon, a prevalent vice among the poorer Baghdadis through the character of a Jewish prostitute, Mozelle, and the role of Baghdadis in drug-trafficking through the character of Rebecca Light. The 21st century novel offers a nuanced understanding of characters, while the earlier short stories reflect their authors’ stereotypical understanding of their contemporary society.