Abstract
While the tense coexistence of civil and Jewish law precludes an encompassing recognition of same-sex parenthood, change might come from an unexpected direction. Indeed, heated struggles over homosexuality are currently fought within Orthodox Judaism. This chapter addresses these struggles to add a still understudied component to the scholarship on medically assisted reproductive technologies in Israel, which has largely focused on the translation of religious principles into national legislation and medical practice. It addresses the other side of the coin and shows that Orthodox Judaism itself has not remained untouched by this translation processes. Rather, confronted with the increasing visibility of lesbians and gay men in the religious public and in Orthodox institutions, homosexuality has become a new locus for observant Jews to ask what role secular values and new forms of identity play for the regeneration of Orthodox Judaism.
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Notes
- 1.
It is interesting, however, that some of my research participants have used the very same line of argument to explain their decision to have their children circumcised (see Chap. 5).
- 2.
The concept of “religious Zionist” (dati leumi in Hebrew) usually refers to Orthodox Jews. In Israel, “the term religious is synonymous with Orthodox, religious Jew with Orthodox Jew” (Liebman 1998, 407).
- 3.
As Liebman (1998, 408) has made clear, in Israel, modern Orthodoxy was long associated with the cause of religious Zionism. And while there is today a common understanding that there are also Zionist Ultra-Orthodox Jews, in popular speech, the term dati-leumi (religious-national) usually does not refer to the Ultra-Orthodox. In turn, some institutions use the term “modern Orthodox” to distinguish themselves from (right-wing) religious Zionism, that is, to emphasize their openness to the non-Jewish world or to argue on behalf of greater individual autonomy.
- 4.
The term poskim highlights the efforts to determine halakha in practice. A rabbi is a posek if he does not study halakha for its own sake but applies his knowledge to decision-making in concrete and practical cases.
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Lustenberger, S. (2020). Transformations from Within. In: Judaism in Motion. Contemporary Anthropology of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55104-9_6
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