Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse

Erik H. Cohen (PhD University of Nanterre, France), is an associate professor at the School of Education at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and at several local colleges. He is the director of Research & Evaluation, an independent group of researchers which has conducted numerous international studies, and is a member of the Facet Theory Association and served as its secretary for two years (2001-2003). He is the author of half a dozen books in English, French and Hebrew, and has been widely published in refereed academic journals. He has edited books on the topics of Jewish identity, education, tourism, methodology and other related subjects. He serves on a number of scientific committees, as a consulting editor for two journals, and has launched the International Journal of Jewish Education Research (IJJER) as co-editor.

“In this exciting new book Yakir Englander and Avi Sagi break new ground in treating contemporary religious-Zionism in Israel as a community with particular religious and spiritual inclinations and a complex relationship to modernity. Focusing on religious and halakhic questions around the body and in particular sexual ethics, and including an important discussion of how the Internet has changed halakhic adjudication, Englander and Sagi argue that this community has integrated a personalistic dimension to sexual practices and approaches to the body.”

• Acknowledgments 8 Introduction 9 Chapter 1. The New Religious-Zionist Halakhah: A Conceptual Outline 18 Chapter 2. The Shift in the Discourse: Autarchic Male Sexuality 26 Mapping Reactions 34 The Pastoral Discourse 52 A Haredi Alternative 70 Chapter 3. The Shift in the Discourse: Autarchic Female Sexuality 78 Female Sexuality: Masturbation and Lesbianism 79 Mapping Reactions 85 The Effects of the Value Discourse on Halakhic Rulings 93 Chapter 4. Real and Imagined Women 120 Defining Women 123 The Conflict Discourse 135 Excluding Real Women 166 The Female Refusal 180 On Female Sexuality 183 Chapter 5. The Other Voice 193 Attitudes toward Homosexuality and Lesbianism in the New Discourse 194 The Haredi Responsum 200 The Religious Protest 206 Looking Back 214 Chapter 6. Concluding Reflections: From a Realist Disposition to an Imagined Realm 231 Appendix. The Discourse on Sexuality, Metaphysics, and Messianism 243 Bibliography 276 Index 293