Orit Avishai
Biographic Data
| ID | 192088 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Orit Avishai |
| GIVEN NAMES | Orit |
| FAMILY NAME | Avishai |
| SIGNATURE | AVISHAI O |
| AFFILIATIONS | Fordham University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2483-5566 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 380 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Roundtable: Reflecting on Concepts and Challenges after Fifteen Years of Religion and Gender Scholarship
In Religion and Gender ’s fifteenth year, this roundtable piece by the editors reflects on our history and the times in which we are working. The piece responds to three questions: 1) How has the scholarly field developed during the first fifteen years of Religion and Gender ? 2) How can we respond to the current economic and political context? 3) What challenges and opportunities does the future hold for religion and gender scholarship, and for …
Reconceptualizing Western European Religion, Gender, and Race
This review essay of Nella van den Brandt’s Religion, Gender, and Race in Western Europe discusses how the volume explores the construction, destabilization, and reimagining of Western European concepts of religion, gender, and race, as well as the ethical responsibilities inherent in critically engaging with these frameworks
Religion Goes Back to School
State legislatures and education officials are rapidly advancing policies that increase religious influence in American public schools. Considering both sides of the debate uncovers a deeper conflict about who is entitled to constitutional protections
How LGBTQ+ People are Creating Change in Their Faith Communities
For LGBTQ+ people, religion can be a source of oppression as well as a source of healing and inspiration. Within three socially conservative religious traditions, the authors uncover LGBTQ+ adherents’ efforts to make their faiths more inclusive
Stained Glass Ceilings: How Evangelicals Do Gender and Practice Power, by Lisa Weaver SWARTZ
Journal Article Stained Glass Ceilings: How Evangelicals Do Gender and Practice Power, by LISA WEAVER SWARTZ Get access Stained Glass Ceilings: How Evangelicals Do Gender and Practice Power, by LISA WEAVER SWARTZ. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2023, 186 pp.; $29.95. Orit Avishai Orit Avishai Fordham University, USA [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2483-5566 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google…
Religion and Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism. Edited by Atalia Omer and Joshua Lupo
Journal Article Religion and Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism. Edited by Atalia Omer and Joshua Lupo Get access Religion and Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism. Edited by Atalia Omer and Joshua Lupo. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022. 171pp. $35.00 paper. Orit Avishai Orit Avishai Fordham University New York, New York, USA [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2483-5566 …
Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel
Offers a compelling look at how Orthodox Jewish LGBT persons in Israel became more accepted in their communities. Until fairly recently, Orthodox people in Israel could not imagine embracing their LGBT sexual or gender identity and staying within the Orthodox fold. But within the span of about a decade and a half, Orthodox LGBT people have forged social circles and communities and become much more visible. This has been a remarkable shift in a re…
Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel
Offers a compelling look at how Orthodox Jewish LGBT persons in Israel became more accepted in their communities. Until fairly recently, Orthodox people in Israel could not imagine embracing their LGBT sexual or gender identity and staying within the Orthodox fold. But within the span of about a decade and a half, Orthodox LGBT people have forged social circles and communities and become much more visible. This has been a remarkable shift in a re…
Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam
Addicted to Lust: Pornography in the Lives of Conservative Protestants, by Samuel L. Perry
Conservative Protestants have a fraught relationship with pornography: thought leaders, pastors, and the rank and file all agree that porn is a uniquely grave sexual sin but they consume it anyway, at rates only slightly lower than other Americans. In addition, they suffer uniquely deleterious consequences. Samuel L. Perry’s Addicted to Lust explores how these paradoxes shape the spiritual lives, relationships, and mental health of a slice of con…
Religious Queer People Beyond Identity Conflict: Lessons from Orthodox LGBT Jews in Israel
A key thread of research on how lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) persons of faith navigate and make sense of gender and sexual identities and desires that defy their religious traditions' teachings focuses on identity conflict, management, negotiation, and reconciliation. Drawing on interviews with 64 Orthodox Jewish same-sex attracted persons in Israel, supplemented by physical and digital ethnographic data, I argue that t…
"Saving Marriage Culture "One Marriage at a Time: Relationship Education and the Reinstitutionalization of Marriage in an Era of Individualism
Bifurcated Conversations in Sociological Studies of Religion and Gender
Feminist sociologists claim that while feminist insights have been incorporated in sociological paradigms and women sociologists have been well-integrated into academia, sociological frameworks have not been transformed, a process known as the missing feminist revolution. Yet, few have examined how the missing feminist revolution operates in specific subdisciplines and the mechanisms that sustain it. This article undertakes these tasks by analyzi…
Paging God: Religion in the Halls of Medicine
Theorizing Gender from Religion Cases: Agency, Feminist Activism, and Masculinity
This symposium considers the potential of religion cases for social theory. I approach this question from the perspective of a subdiscipline that has been relatively successful at this endeavor—scholarship on gender and religion. I trace the history of this research and then discuss three bodies of scholarship that engage core concerns in gender studies: agency, feminist activism, and masculinity. I organize my discussion as “lessons” for gender …
A Gender Lens on Religion
This special issue is the result of concerns about the marginalized status of gender within the sociology of religion. The collection of exciting new research in this special issue advocates for the importance of a gender lens on questions of religion in order to highlight issues, practices, peoples, and theories that would otherwise not be central to the discipline. We encourage sociologists who study religion to engage more in interdisciplinary…
What to do with the Problem of the Flesh: Negotiating Orthodox Jewish Sexual Anxieties
Feminist and queer assessments of religion and sexuality often assume that regulation and affirmation of sexuality are incompatible. This article provides an alternative perspective. The article discusses three orthodox Jewish responses to the “problem of the flesh” – a purported incompatibility of carnality/desire and piety/religiosity: a traditionalist approach that sanctifies sexuality but problematizes desire; a pragmatic stance that desancti…
Toward a Feminist Ethnography of Feminist Ethnography: A Response
The Feminist Ethnographer's Dilemma: Reconciling Progressive Research Agendas with Fieldwork Realities
In this article, we use three case studies of conservative field sites to consider the dilemma faced when feminist analytic perspectives clash with observations. We note that feminism can operate as a blinder, limiting our ability to see and interpret empirical realities that do not conform with feminist expectations. Using our research on orthodox Jewish women's practices of menstrual purity, evangelical ex-gay ministries, and state-sponsored ma…
Halakhic Niddah Consultants and the Orthodox Women’s Movement in Israel: Evaluating the story of enlightened progress
This article takes a critical look at the story of enlightened progress that has informed analyses of Israeli Orthodoxy in recent years. Celebrating the successes of Orthodox reformists, this narrative brands resistance to challenges to traditional institutions, authority structures and cultural norms as unenlightened fundamentalism, patriarchal backlash or unreflexive apologetics. The article offers a more nuanced interpretation through an analy…
Doing Religion' In a Secular World: Women in Conservative Religions and the Question of Agency
Sociological studies of women's experiences with conservative religions are typically framed by a paradox that ponders women's complicity. The prevailing view associates agency with strategic subjects who use religion to further extra-religious ends and pays little attention to the cultural and institutional contexts that shape 'compliance.' This paper suggests an alternative framing. Rather than asking why women comply, I examine agency as relig…
Imagining ?The Orthodox? in Emuna Elon's Heaven Rejoices: Voyeuristic, Reformist, and Pedagogical Orthodox Artistic Expression
What does it mean to be religious in a secular, western, modern society? Emuna Elon's novel, Heaven Rejoices, engages this question through a story of two intertwined love affairs: one thwarted—a previously orthodox mother's youthful unconsummated love for a future rabbi and leader in the settler community, and one realized—her orthodox daughter's love for his son. This paper first identifies three categories of cultural expression among orthodox…
Managing The Lactating Body: The Breast-Feeding Project and Privileged Motherhood
Doing Religion' In a Secular World: Women in Conservative Religions and the Question of Agency
Sociological studies of women's experiences with conservative religions are typically framed by a paradox that ponders women's complicity. The prevailing view associates agency with strategic subjects who use religion to further extra-religious ends and pays little attention to the cultural and institutional contexts that shape 'compliance.' This paper suggests an alternative framing. Rather than asking why women comply, I examine agency as relig…
A Gender Lens on Religion
This special issue is the result of concerns about the marginalized status of gender within the sociology of religion. The collection of exciting new research in this special issue advocates for the importance of a gender lens on questions of religion in order to highlight issues, practices, peoples, and theories that would otherwise not be central to the discipline. We encourage sociologists who study religion to engage more in interdisciplinary…
Managing The Lactating Body: The Breast-Feeding Project and Privileged Motherhood
The Feminist Ethnographer's Dilemma: Reconciling Progressive Research Agendas with Fieldwork Realities
In this article, we use three case studies of conservative field sites to consider the dilemma faced when feminist analytic perspectives clash with observations. We note that feminism can operate as a blinder, limiting our ability to see and interpret empirical realities that do not conform with feminist expectations. Using our research on orthodox Jewish women's practices of menstrual purity, evangelical ex-gay ministries, and state-sponsored ma…
Theorizing Gender from Religion Cases: Agency, Feminist Activism, and Masculinity
This symposium considers the potential of religion cases for social theory. I approach this question from the perspective of a subdiscipline that has been relatively successful at this endeavor—scholarship on gender and religion. I trace the history of this research and then discuss three bodies of scholarship that engage core concerns in gender studies: agency, feminist activism, and masculinity. I organize my discussion as “lessons” for gender …
Bifurcated Conversations in Sociological Studies of Religion and Gender
Feminist sociologists claim that while feminist insights have been incorporated in sociological paradigms and women sociologists have been well-integrated into academia, sociological frameworks have not been transformed, a process known as the missing feminist revolution. Yet, few have examined how the missing feminist revolution operates in specific subdisciplines and the mechanisms that sustain it. This article undertakes these tasks by analyzi…
Religious Queer People Beyond Identity Conflict: Lessons from Orthodox LGBT Jews in Israel
A key thread of research on how lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) persons of faith navigate and make sense of gender and sexual identities and desires that defy their religious traditions' teachings focuses on identity conflict, management, negotiation, and reconciliation. Drawing on interviews with 64 Orthodox Jewish same-sex attracted persons in Israel, supplemented by physical and digital ethnographic data, I argue that t…
Halakhic Niddah Consultants and the Orthodox Women’s Movement in Israel: Evaluating the story of enlightened progress
This article takes a critical look at the story of enlightened progress that has informed analyses of Israeli Orthodoxy in recent years. Celebrating the successes of Orthodox reformists, this narrative brands resistance to challenges to traditional institutions, authority structures and cultural norms as unenlightened fundamentalism, patriarchal backlash or unreflexive apologetics. The article offers a more nuanced interpretation through an analy…
Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam
What to do with the Problem of the Flesh: Negotiating Orthodox Jewish Sexual Anxieties
Feminist and queer assessments of religion and sexuality often assume that regulation and affirmation of sexuality are incompatible. This article provides an alternative perspective. The article discusses three orthodox Jewish responses to the “problem of the flesh” – a purported incompatibility of carnality/desire and piety/religiosity: a traditionalist approach that sanctifies sexuality but problematizes desire; a pragmatic stance that desancti…
Imagining ?The Orthodox? in Emuna Elon's Heaven Rejoices: Voyeuristic, Reformist, and Pedagogical Orthodox Artistic Expression
What does it mean to be religious in a secular, western, modern society? Emuna Elon's novel, Heaven Rejoices, engages this question through a story of two intertwined love affairs: one thwarted—a previously orthodox mother's youthful unconsummated love for a future rabbi and leader in the settler community, and one realized—her orthodox daughter's love for his son. This paper first identifies three categories of cultural expression among orthodox…
"Saving Marriage Culture "One Marriage at a Time: Relationship Education and the Reinstitutionalization of Marriage in an Era of Individualism
Toward a Feminist Ethnography of Feminist Ethnography: A Response
Imagining ?The Orthodox? in Emuna Elon's Heaven Rejoices: Voyeuristic, Reformist, and Pedagogical Orthodox Artistic Expression
What does it mean to be religious in a secular, western, modern society? Emuna Elon's novel, Heaven Rejoices, engages this question through a story of two intertwined love affairs: one thwarted—a previously orthodox mother's youthful unconsummated love for a future rabbi and leader in the settler community, and one realized—her orthodox daughter's love for his son. This paper first identifies three categories of cultural expression among orthodox…
Managing The Lactating Body: The Breast-Feeding Project and Privileged Motherhood
Halakhic Niddah Consultants and the Orthodox Women’s Movement in Israel: Evaluating the story of enlightened progress
This article takes a critical look at the story of enlightened progress that has informed analyses of Israeli Orthodoxy in recent years. Celebrating the successes of Orthodox reformists, this narrative brands resistance to challenges to traditional institutions, authority structures and cultural norms as unenlightened fundamentalism, patriarchal backlash or unreflexive apologetics. The article offers a more nuanced interpretation through an analy…
Doing Religion' In a Secular World: Women in Conservative Religions and the Question of Agency
Sociological studies of women's experiences with conservative religions are typically framed by a paradox that ponders women's complicity. The prevailing view associates agency with strategic subjects who use religion to further extra-religious ends and pays little attention to the cultural and institutional contexts that shape 'compliance.' This paper suggests an alternative framing. Rather than asking why women comply, I examine agency as relig…
What to do with the Problem of the Flesh: Negotiating Orthodox Jewish Sexual Anxieties
Feminist and queer assessments of religion and sexuality often assume that regulation and affirmation of sexuality are incompatible. This article provides an alternative perspective. The article discusses three orthodox Jewish responses to the “problem of the flesh” – a purported incompatibility of carnality/desire and piety/religiosity: a traditionalist approach that sanctifies sexuality but problematizes desire; a pragmatic stance that desancti…
Toward a Feminist Ethnography of Feminist Ethnography: A Response
The Feminist Ethnographer's Dilemma: Reconciling Progressive Research Agendas with Fieldwork Realities
In this article, we use three case studies of conservative field sites to consider the dilemma faced when feminist analytic perspectives clash with observations. We note that feminism can operate as a blinder, limiting our ability to see and interpret empirical realities that do not conform with feminist expectations. Using our research on orthodox Jewish women's practices of menstrual purity, evangelical ex-gay ministries, and state-sponsored ma…
A Gender Lens on Religion
This special issue is the result of concerns about the marginalized status of gender within the sociology of religion. The collection of exciting new research in this special issue advocates for the importance of a gender lens on questions of religion in order to highlight issues, practices, peoples, and theories that would otherwise not be central to the discipline. We encourage sociologists who study religion to engage more in interdisciplinary…
Paging God: Religion in the Halls of Medicine
Theorizing Gender from Religion Cases: Agency, Feminist Activism, and Masculinity
This symposium considers the potential of religion cases for social theory. I approach this question from the perspective of a subdiscipline that has been relatively successful at this endeavor—scholarship on gender and religion. I trace the history of this research and then discuss three bodies of scholarship that engage core concerns in gender studies: agency, feminist activism, and masculinity. I organize my discussion as “lessons” for gender …
Bifurcated Conversations in Sociological Studies of Religion and Gender
Feminist sociologists claim that while feminist insights have been incorporated in sociological paradigms and women sociologists have been well-integrated into academia, sociological frameworks have not been transformed, a process known as the missing feminist revolution. Yet, few have examined how the missing feminist revolution operates in specific subdisciplines and the mechanisms that sustain it. This article undertakes these tasks by analyzi…
"Saving Marriage Culture "One Marriage at a Time: Relationship Education and the Reinstitutionalization of Marriage in an Era of Individualism
Religious Queer People Beyond Identity Conflict: Lessons from Orthodox LGBT Jews in Israel
A key thread of research on how lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) persons of faith navigate and make sense of gender and sexual identities and desires that defy their religious traditions' teachings focuses on identity conflict, management, negotiation, and reconciliation. Drawing on interviews with 64 Orthodox Jewish same-sex attracted persons in Israel, supplemented by physical and digital ethnographic data, I argue that t…
Addicted to Lust: Pornography in the Lives of Conservative Protestants, by Samuel L. Perry
Conservative Protestants have a fraught relationship with pornography: thought leaders, pastors, and the rank and file all agree that porn is a uniquely grave sexual sin but they consume it anyway, at rates only slightly lower than other Americans. In addition, they suffer uniquely deleterious consequences. Samuel L. Perry’s Addicted to Lust explores how these paradoxes shape the spiritual lives, relationships, and mental health of a slice of con…
Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel
Offers a compelling look at how Orthodox Jewish LGBT persons in Israel became more accepted in their communities. Until fairly recently, Orthodox people in Israel could not imagine embracing their LGBT sexual or gender identity and staying within the Orthodox fold. But within the span of about a decade and a half, Orthodox LGBT people have forged social circles and communities and become much more visible. This has been a remarkable shift in a re…
Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam
Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel
Offers a compelling look at how Orthodox Jewish LGBT persons in Israel became more accepted in their communities. Until fairly recently, Orthodox people in Israel could not imagine embracing their LGBT sexual or gender identity and staying within the Orthodox fold. But within the span of about a decade and a half, Orthodox LGBT people have forged social circles and communities and become much more visible. This has been a remarkable shift in a re…
How LGBTQ+ People are Creating Change in Their Faith Communities
For LGBTQ+ people, religion can be a source of oppression as well as a source of healing and inspiration. Within three socially conservative religious traditions, the authors uncover LGBTQ+ adherents’ efforts to make their faiths more inclusive
Stained Glass Ceilings: How Evangelicals Do Gender and Practice Power, by Lisa Weaver SWARTZ
Journal Article Stained Glass Ceilings: How Evangelicals Do Gender and Practice Power, by LISA WEAVER SWARTZ Get access Stained Glass Ceilings: How Evangelicals Do Gender and Practice Power, by LISA WEAVER SWARTZ. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2023, 186 pp.; $29.95. Orit Avishai Orit Avishai Fordham University, USA [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2483-5566 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google…
Religion and Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism. Edited by Atalia Omer and Joshua Lupo
Journal Article Religion and Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism. Edited by Atalia Omer and Joshua Lupo Get access Religion and Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism. Edited by Atalia Omer and Joshua Lupo. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022. 171pp. $35.00 paper. Orit Avishai Orit Avishai Fordham University New York, New York, USA [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2483-5566 …
Reconceptualizing Western European Religion, Gender, and Race
This review essay of Nella van den Brandt’s Religion, Gender, and Race in Western Europe discusses how the volume explores the construction, destabilization, and reimagining of Western European concepts of religion, gender, and race, as well as the ethical responsibilities inherent in critically engaging with these frameworks
Religion Goes Back to School
State legislatures and education officials are rapidly advancing policies that increase religious influence in American public schools. Considering both sides of the debate uncovers a deeper conflict about who is entitled to constitutional protections
Roundtable: Reflecting on Concepts and Challenges after Fifteen Years of Religion and Gender Scholarship
In Religion and Gender ’s fifteenth year, this roundtable piece by the editors reflects on our history and the times in which we are working. The piece responds to three questions: 1) How has the scholarly field developed during the first fifteen years of Religion and Gender ? 2) How can we respond to the current economic and political context? 3) What challenges and opportunities does the future hold for religion and gender scholarship, and for …
Sociology (19 works) · Gender Studies (18 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Religious studies (8 works) · Social science (8 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (7 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (7 works)