“Mobile internet is worse than the internet; it can destroy our community„
Old Order Amish and Ultra-Orthodox women’s responses to cellphone and smartphone use
This research explores exposure patterns and perceptions of cellphone and smartphone use among Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jewish women, while examining symbolic meanings these non-users might attribute to these devices.
Triangulation of participant observations, interviews, and a survey, serve to demonstrate that although these populations differ in their cellphone use (the Amish mostly don’t use them and the Ultra-Orthodox only use those deemed to be ‘kosher’), they concur in their non-use of smartphones, deriving from their perception (shared among many religious communities), that smartphone content is impure.
Implicit in statements made by these women is the notion that the medium itself is more dangerous than the message. They argue that the smartphone disconnects people from their communities, friends and family, and that it interferes with a person’s relationship with him or herself, and even more importantly – with God.
“My religious-feminist journey„
The lecture will explore my personal religious-feminist journey, addressing the question of what it means to be an academic as well as a religious woman. Is it possible to combine religious belief and commitment with a secular, critical, and feminist academic life? Does it make sense to define myself as a radical feminist observant Jew?
I have navigated religion and gender conflicts my entire life, having grown up in a Jewish nationalist-Ultra-Orthodox settlement in the Gaza Strip. My feminist sensibilities began to emerge in middle school, studying Torah and arguing with the teacher about Eve’s creation. “Ha, we have here a little feminist,” she ridiculed me, though she would not explain what a feminist was, only saying something about crazy women who want to imitate men. Eleven years later, as a 23-year-old social worker, married, pregnant, and an MA student at The Hebrew University, I decided to find out who those crazy women were. I took all the Women’s Studies courses the university offered.
A class on Advanced Feminist Theories helped me articulate a long-sensed relationship between religion, body, and sexuality. The concept of the male gaze made me realize that from early childhood I had been taught that it was my responsibility to be covered to protect men. I began to ask myself: Should I really choose to hide my body? Did I want my second child at 26, when I was struggling to complete my MA? Why do I, together with other religious women, partake in these practices? I cried uncontrollably at times: the daughter, granddaughter, and wife of rabbis, I understood that religion controlled every vein in my body. These feelings helped me join the Shira Hadasha (“New Song”). This community was formed in Jerusalem as an Orthodox feminist alternative in a city where religious extremism is spreading. I am an active member of this community and a partner in social change and the creation of a religious-feminist alternative for women and men.
My unfinished business took me directly to the strictest community I knew – the Ultra-Orthodox. My PhD dissertation was on Ultra-Orthodox women’s media exposure patterns and reading behaviors. This taught me what agency was: Even the most devoted women were decision-makers in their families. I uncovered how they critiqued the texts they read and circumvented their community’s expectations. My work in women, gender, and religion has not been limited to the classroom. While pursuing my MA and PhD, to support my family I worked as a social worker with religious women. My work showed me the practical utility of thinking as a feminist. These women with full-time jobs and eight children taught me not only about juggling, but also to pay attention to the subtle tensions between their words and their deeds. My political journey from the right-wing to the Left helped me to decide to serve as a facilitator for Jewish-Palestinian and religious-secular discussion groups. This experience taught me how religion both helps and hinders women’s efforts to work across national, gender, and class boundaries.
After completing my PhD, I was a Fulbright post-doctoral fellow and scholar-in-residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, where I worked on a project about new and renewed rituals created by women. My unfinished business with strict religious communities then led me to a comparison of Amish and Ultra-Orthodox women. I argue that studying how these women navigate and cope with their surrounding societies and media technology can shed light on questions about the social world, and reframes our understanding of negotiation of continuity and change.
Following the feminist motto “the personal is political,” the lecture will explore my and my generation’s personal, political, religious, academic, and feminist contexts. The audience will be tasked with dealing with the conflicts of a female researcher with an unmistakably religious appearance, still trying to find the meaningful answer to the question, “What does it really mean to be an academic and a religious woman?”
A Day in the Life of a Woman in the Old Order Amish Community
Between 2012 and 2017 I conducted an anthropological study among women of the Old Order Amish community in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The study included participant observations, in-depth interviews, and distribution of questionnaires. I spent eight stretches of time on the farm of an Amish family, participating as much as possible in their daily activities. A personal relationship marked by openness and trust evolved between the family and me. One reason for this was our special bond as people with religious beliefs. They were respectful and appreciative of the fact that as a religious Jew I observed the Sabbath and the dietary rules of kashrut.
I took part in most housekeeping chores, especially washing dishes and folding laundry. Since the Old Order Amish are forbidden to drive or own a car, I often drove the women of the family, and sometimes female neighbors and friends as well. I was invited to an end-of-school picnic, to church, to youth groups – and I was asked to teach the children at the local school the Hebrew alphabet.
In the course of my observations, I accompanied the mother of the family for the duration of one day, starting at 4:15, when she gets up to prepare meals, until 22:00, when she goes to sleep. My lecture offers a look at the intensive routine that I observed and in which I participated, and attempts to sketch an outline toward analysis and conclusion. So – how does it look – an Amish woman’s daily schedule? Dozens of pictures from the farm’s life, kitchen, and garden will take you to a different world, where the laundry takes four hours and schedules are determined by the harvest.
“There is one small mouse there„
Old Order Amish and Jewish ultra-Orthodox women’s responses to the media
The lecture explores how women in two devout religious communities cope with the media and its apparent incompatibility with their communities’ values and practices. Two groups were chosen as the appropriate populations for my research, carried out between 2012 and 2018: Old Order Amish and Lithuanian and Hassidic Jewish ultra-Orthodox, both “mainstream” sub-communities that are generally familiar with the media but limit their use of it. Participants in the study (82, approximately half from each community), answered questionnaires comprised of closed and open-ended questions.
Although their discourses included similar framings of danger and threat from the media, the two groups manifested different patterns of media use (or nonuse). Rigorous adherence to religious dictates, the “strict life,” is greatly admired in these communities, and the women in both take considerable pride in manipulating their status in them. If the coins of modern societies are what their citizens have and use, the coins of these women are what they don’t have and don’t use. 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.
About
Dr. Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar is a Ruth Melzer fellow at Katz center for advanced Judaic Studies at Penn University. She is a senior lecturer at Sapir Academic College in Sderot, Israel, where she teaches courses on research methods, communication, religion, and gender. She is also a scholar at the Israel Democracy Institute, where she studies media usage among the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.
Dr. Neriya Ben-Shahar investigates mass media from the perspectives of religion and gender. Her research addresses the tensions existing between religious values and new technologies among women in Old Order Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. Her book, “Strictly Observant: Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Women Negotiating Media“, was published by Rutgers University Press in 2024.
