M Kravel-Tovi
Biographic Data
| ID | 58347 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Kravel-Tovi |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Kravel-Tovi |
| SIGNATURE | KRAVEL-TOVI M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tel Aviv University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1465-4086 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 144 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land, By Lea Taragin-Zeller
Unorthodox Alliances at the Margins of the State: Haredi Jews, the Israeli State, and the Collaborative Battle Against Sexual Violence
Over the last decade, ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jewish society in Israel has witnessed an unprecedented attempt to place sexual violence high on the agenda, calling for concerted communal action and assistance to individuals in need. Based on a long-term anthropological fieldwork, I explore in this article how this revolution from within the Haredi sector catalyzes and is further solidified by unorthodox alliances with various agencies of the Israe…
Self-suasion: Agents of Jewish conversion in Israel in search of religious sincerity
The title of this essay is intended as ironic. The irony resides in the fact that while the agents of state-run Jewish conversion in Israel are preoccupied with the sincerity of conversion candidates, they are also troubled by the sincerity of their own religious belief and conduct. This essay will explore ethnographically how these religiopolitical actors engage with semiotic and interactive strategies of self-suasion in order to reconcile their…
It Goes with(out) Saying: How Haredi Jews in Israel “Break the Silence” of Sexual Violence
Purge the Evil From Your Midst: Material Cancel Culture Among Religiously Observant Jews
This article explores cancel culture as a material endeavor on the ground. We draw on ethnographic tools to call attention to formative material dimensions of canceling and employ the conceptual lens of material culture to analyze rationales and practices around the canceling of objects. The case study concerns how ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel manage allegations of sexual abuse against a beloved author by engaging in a myriad of material-canceli…
Making a Difference: The Political Life of Religious Conversion
This article reviews the anthropological scholarship that engages with religious conversion as a political phenomenon, broadly defined. It develops the idea of making a difference as an overarching framework with a double meaning. First, this idiom captures how, by framing religious conversion in political terms, anthropologists have claimed to have substantially intervened-have made a difference, so to speak-in the discussion of conversion. Seco…
Ambivalences of smallness: Population statistics and narratives of scale among American Jewry
It Is My Turn Now: How and Why 'Single' Women Complain about Non-Reciprocal Gift-Giving
This article employs the prism of gift-exchange to analyse the marginalised status of singles within social relations. We trace an emerging critique voiced by single women, who challenge the unilateral etiquette of gifting marital and family-making celebrations. While dominant social norms normalise gift-giving at weddings and subsequent family-related occasions, there are no commensurable opportunities for singles to receive back their accumulat…
Struggling with anxiety: Demographic statistics and an emotionalised American Jewish public sphere
Over the last three decades, the American Jewish communal public sphere has been flooded with sociodemographic concerns about numerical decline, and a sense of threatened ability to maintain a vibrant collective life. This article argues that this discursive site functions as a means, or technique, for the emotionalisation of Jewish identity and citizenship in the community. The article shows that public discourses on what is known by now as ‘the…
Happily-ever after: Self-marriage, the claim of wellness, and temporal ownership
The phenomenon commonly described as self-marriage is an exponentially growing trend in which individuals, mostly women, marry themselves. Drawing on a textual analysis of self-marriage accounts in online media, we argue that this concept denotes a new form of self-love and self-commitment - at the heart of which lies a wellness program, rather than a legal contract. This article explores this emergent concept, focusing on a notable, though not e…
The Specter of Dwindling Numbers: Population Quantity and Jewish Biopolitics in the United States
Over the last three decades, the organized American-Jewish community has preoccupied itself with sociodemographic concerns regarding maintenance of a viable Jewish life in the United States. In this article, I study a key dimension of this preoccupation with population trends: the quantity of the Jewish population, that is, the number of Jews. I show the centrality of this dimension in shaping a cluster of anxious discourses and interventionist e…
Jews by choice? Orthodox conversion, the problem of choice, and Jewish religiopolitics in the Israeli state
Anthropologists have long displayed interest in the tension between choice and coercion in processes of religious conversion. In this article, I draw from ethnographic work in contemporary Israel to explore the ways in which this tension animates pedagogic formations of Orthodox Jewish conversion. I argue that conversion teachers' concerns are rooted in the tension they identify between the religious ideal scripts of Jewish conversion, as an indi…
Accounting of the Soul: Enumeration, Affect, and Soul Searching among American Jewry
This ethnographic article complicates the common wisdom that the American Jewish elite cares "obsessively" about its constituents' numbers. The article shows the ways in which population numbers matter to American Jewish leaders but also how they matter differently to various sectors of the community. Alongside those who are eager speakers of the language of quantification, there are those who feel unease with what, they feel, creates a reductive…
As If It Was Ours All Along: Precarious Belonging, Jewish Habitus and the Materialisation of Conversion in Israel
Most scholarship on Jewish conversion in Israel emphasises the precarious entanglement between the process and the politics of the Jewish State. This article, instead, unpacks the uncertain modes of converts' belonging from an unexplored yet central angle - that of a Jewish habitus. I trace the challenging apprenticeship that aspiring converts undertake in developing a Jewish habitus, and the deeply ambiguous modes of belonging that such an appre…
When the State Winks: The Performance of Jewish Conversion in Israel
When the State Winks traces the performance of state-endorsed Orthodox conversion in Israel. Michal Kravel-Tovi complicates the popular perception that it is a "wink-wink" relationship in which both sides agree to treat pretenses of faith as real, developing new ways to think about the connection between religious conversion and the nation-state
Corrective conversion: Unsettling citizens and the politics of inclusion inIsrael
GauriViswanathan's notion of religious conversion as an 'unsettling' political event has recently figured prominently in the scholarship on conversion. However, although numerous scholars have productively appliedViswanathan's understanding in their work, primarily in the context of conversion to religious minorities within the nation-state, to focus too heavily on conversion's unsettling effects risks overlooking political constellations in whic…
Bureaucratic gifts: Religious conversion, change, and exchange in Israel
Viewing religious conversion through the lens of exchange rather than change calls attention to the web of interactions, practices, and discourses that constitute conversion as a relational domain. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork that straddles the institutionalized interface of state-run Jewish conversion in Israel, I show how the conversion process constitutes a reciprocal transaction by which each party to the exchange-the state and its subj…
Rite of passing: Bureaucratic encounters, dramaturgy, and Jewish conversion in Israel
On the basis of an ethnographic analysis of the state-run Jewish conversion project in Israel, I address the question of how bureaucrats come to know the subjects they serve. By analyzing how state agents construct the bureaucratic encounter with converts as a dramaturgical exchange, I theorize performance as an institutional mechanism through which bureaucratic knowledge is produced. The notion of "dramaturgy" sheds light not only on the everyda…
National mission: Biopolitics, non-Jewish immigration and Jewish conversion policy in contemporary Israel
A large number of non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union have arrived in Israel since the late 1980s. This article explores how the Israeli State has responded to this perceived demographic threat by endorsing a pro-Jewish conversion policy targeted at this population of new citizens. By analysing a variety of ethnographic and textual materials, I trace the organizational processes and discursive practices through which conversion has…
To see the invisible messiah: Messianic socialization in the wake of a failed prophecy in Chabad
The study explores how the meshichistim (messianics) among the Jewish ultra-orthodox Chabad(Lubavitch) Hasidim manage the rupture entailed by the death of their leader, the Rebbe, whom they uphold as the King Messiah. Based on ethnographic research of contemporary pilgrimage to the Rebbe's court in Brooklyn, whose rituals and pedagogical framework are constructed by the meshichistim, the study problematizes the functional assumptions and implicat…
The work of the present: Constructing messianic temporality in the wake of failed prophecy among Chabad Hasidim
Temporal issues have remained relatively unelaborated in the rich body of research that applies cognitive dissonance theory to millenarian movements following a failed prophecy. We engage these issues by exploring how themeshichistim(messianists) among the Jewish ultraorthodox Chabad (Lubavitch) Hasidim employ temporal categories to deal with the crisis entailed in the death of their leader, the expected Messiah. In messianic Chabad, a double-edg…
The work of the present: Constructing messianic temporality in the wake of failed prophecy among Chabad Hasidim
Temporal issues have remained relatively unelaborated in the rich body of research that applies cognitive dissonance theory to millenarian movements following a failed prophecy. We engage these issues by exploring how themeshichistim(messianists) among the Jewish ultraorthodox Chabad (Lubavitch) Hasidim employ temporal categories to deal with the crisis entailed in the death of their leader, the expected Messiah. In messianic Chabad, a double-edg…
Rite of passing: Bureaucratic encounters, dramaturgy, and Jewish conversion in Israel
On the basis of an ethnographic analysis of the state-run Jewish conversion project in Israel, I address the question of how bureaucrats come to know the subjects they serve. By analyzing how state agents construct the bureaucratic encounter with converts as a dramaturgical exchange, I theorize performance as an institutional mechanism through which bureaucratic knowledge is produced. The notion of "dramaturgy" sheds light not only on the everyda…
National mission: Biopolitics, non-Jewish immigration and Jewish conversion policy in contemporary Israel
A large number of non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union have arrived in Israel since the late 1980s. This article explores how the Israeli State has responded to this perceived demographic threat by endorsing a pro-Jewish conversion policy targeted at this population of new citizens. By analysing a variety of ethnographic and textual materials, I trace the organizational processes and discursive practices through which conversion has…
Accounting of the Soul: Enumeration, Affect, and Soul Searching among American Jewry
This ethnographic article complicates the common wisdom that the American Jewish elite cares "obsessively" about its constituents' numbers. The article shows the ways in which population numbers matter to American Jewish leaders but also how they matter differently to various sectors of the community. Alongside those who are eager speakers of the language of quantification, there are those who feel unease with what, they feel, creates a reductive…
To see the invisible messiah: Messianic socialization in the wake of a failed prophecy in Chabad
The study explores how the meshichistim (messianics) among the Jewish ultra-orthodox Chabad(Lubavitch) Hasidim manage the rupture entailed by the death of their leader, the Rebbe, whom they uphold as the King Messiah. Based on ethnographic research of contemporary pilgrimage to the Rebbe's court in Brooklyn, whose rituals and pedagogical framework are constructed by the meshichistim, the study problematizes the functional assumptions and implicat…
Corrective conversion: Unsettling citizens and the politics of inclusion inIsrael
GauriViswanathan's notion of religious conversion as an 'unsettling' political event has recently figured prominently in the scholarship on conversion. However, although numerous scholars have productively appliedViswanathan's understanding in their work, primarily in the context of conversion to religious minorities within the nation-state, to focus too heavily on conversion's unsettling effects risks overlooking political constellations in whic…
As If It Was Ours All Along: Precarious Belonging, Jewish Habitus and the Materialisation of Conversion in Israel
Most scholarship on Jewish conversion in Israel emphasises the precarious entanglement between the process and the politics of the Jewish State. This article, instead, unpacks the uncertain modes of converts' belonging from an unexplored yet central angle - that of a Jewish habitus. I trace the challenging apprenticeship that aspiring converts undertake in developing a Jewish habitus, and the deeply ambiguous modes of belonging that such an appre…
Bureaucratic gifts: Religious conversion, change, and exchange in Israel
Viewing religious conversion through the lens of exchange rather than change calls attention to the web of interactions, practices, and discourses that constitute conversion as a relational domain. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork that straddles the institutionalized interface of state-run Jewish conversion in Israel, I show how the conversion process constitutes a reciprocal transaction by which each party to the exchange-the state and its subj…
The Specter of Dwindling Numbers: Population Quantity and Jewish Biopolitics in the United States
Over the last three decades, the organized American-Jewish community has preoccupied itself with sociodemographic concerns regarding maintenance of a viable Jewish life in the United States. In this article, I study a key dimension of this preoccupation with population trends: the quantity of the Jewish population, that is, the number of Jews. I show the centrality of this dimension in shaping a cluster of anxious discourses and interventionist e…
Jews by choice? Orthodox conversion, the problem of choice, and Jewish religiopolitics in the Israeli state
Anthropologists have long displayed interest in the tension between choice and coercion in processes of religious conversion. In this article, I draw from ethnographic work in contemporary Israel to explore the ways in which this tension animates pedagogic formations of Orthodox Jewish conversion. I argue that conversion teachers' concerns are rooted in the tension they identify between the religious ideal scripts of Jewish conversion, as an indi…
Making a Difference: The Political Life of Religious Conversion
This article reviews the anthropological scholarship that engages with religious conversion as a political phenomenon, broadly defined. It develops the idea of making a difference as an overarching framework with a double meaning. First, this idiom captures how, by framing religious conversion in political terms, anthropologists have claimed to have substantially intervened-have made a difference, so to speak-in the discussion of conversion. Seco…
It Is My Turn Now: How and Why 'Single' Women Complain about Non-Reciprocal Gift-Giving
This article employs the prism of gift-exchange to analyse the marginalised status of singles within social relations. We trace an emerging critique voiced by single women, who challenge the unilateral etiquette of gifting marital and family-making celebrations. While dominant social norms normalise gift-giving at weddings and subsequent family-related occasions, there are no commensurable opportunities for singles to receive back their accumulat…
Struggling with anxiety: Demographic statistics and an emotionalised American Jewish public sphere
Over the last three decades, the American Jewish communal public sphere has been flooded with sociodemographic concerns about numerical decline, and a sense of threatened ability to maintain a vibrant collective life. This article argues that this discursive site functions as a means, or technique, for the emotionalisation of Jewish identity and citizenship in the community. The article shows that public discourses on what is known by now as ‘the…
Unorthodox Alliances at the Margins of the State: Haredi Jews, the Israeli State, and the Collaborative Battle Against Sexual Violence
Over the last decade, ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jewish society in Israel has witnessed an unprecedented attempt to place sexual violence high on the agenda, calling for concerted communal action and assistance to individuals in need. Based on a long-term anthropological fieldwork, I explore in this article how this revolution from within the Haredi sector catalyzes and is further solidified by unorthodox alliances with various agencies of the Israe…
Self-suasion: Agents of Jewish conversion in Israel in search of religious sincerity
The title of this essay is intended as ironic. The irony resides in the fact that while the agents of state-run Jewish conversion in Israel are preoccupied with the sincerity of conversion candidates, they are also troubled by the sincerity of their own religious belief and conduct. This essay will explore ethnographically how these religiopolitical actors engage with semiotic and interactive strategies of self-suasion in order to reconcile their…
Ambivalences of smallness: Population statistics and narratives of scale among American Jewry
Happily-ever after: Self-marriage, the claim of wellness, and temporal ownership
The phenomenon commonly described as self-marriage is an exponentially growing trend in which individuals, mostly women, marry themselves. Drawing on a textual analysis of self-marriage accounts in online media, we argue that this concept denotes a new form of self-love and self-commitment - at the heart of which lies a wellness program, rather than a legal contract. This article explores this emergent concept, focusing on a notable, though not e…
The work of the present: Constructing messianic temporality in the wake of failed prophecy among Chabad Hasidim
Temporal issues have remained relatively unelaborated in the rich body of research that applies cognitive dissonance theory to millenarian movements following a failed prophecy. We engage these issues by exploring how themeshichistim(messianists) among the Jewish ultraorthodox Chabad (Lubavitch) Hasidim employ temporal categories to deal with the crisis entailed in the death of their leader, the expected Messiah. In messianic Chabad, a double-edg…
To see the invisible messiah: Messianic socialization in the wake of a failed prophecy in Chabad
The study explores how the meshichistim (messianics) among the Jewish ultra-orthodox Chabad(Lubavitch) Hasidim manage the rupture entailed by the death of their leader, the Rebbe, whom they uphold as the King Messiah. Based on ethnographic research of contemporary pilgrimage to the Rebbe's court in Brooklyn, whose rituals and pedagogical framework are constructed by the meshichistim, the study problematizes the functional assumptions and implicat…
Rite of passing: Bureaucratic encounters, dramaturgy, and Jewish conversion in Israel
On the basis of an ethnographic analysis of the state-run Jewish conversion project in Israel, I address the question of how bureaucrats come to know the subjects they serve. By analyzing how state agents construct the bureaucratic encounter with converts as a dramaturgical exchange, I theorize performance as an institutional mechanism through which bureaucratic knowledge is produced. The notion of "dramaturgy" sheds light not only on the everyda…
National mission: Biopolitics, non-Jewish immigration and Jewish conversion policy in contemporary Israel
A large number of non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union have arrived in Israel since the late 1980s. This article explores how the Israeli State has responded to this perceived demographic threat by endorsing a pro-Jewish conversion policy targeted at this population of new citizens. By analysing a variety of ethnographic and textual materials, I trace the organizational processes and discursive practices through which conversion has…
Bureaucratic gifts: Religious conversion, change, and exchange in Israel
Viewing religious conversion through the lens of exchange rather than change calls attention to the web of interactions, practices, and discourses that constitute conversion as a relational domain. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork that straddles the institutionalized interface of state-run Jewish conversion in Israel, I show how the conversion process constitutes a reciprocal transaction by which each party to the exchange-the state and its subj…
Corrective conversion: Unsettling citizens and the politics of inclusion inIsrael
GauriViswanathan's notion of religious conversion as an 'unsettling' political event has recently figured prominently in the scholarship on conversion. However, although numerous scholars have productively appliedViswanathan's understanding in their work, primarily in the context of conversion to religious minorities within the nation-state, to focus too heavily on conversion's unsettling effects risks overlooking political constellations in whic…
When the State Winks: The Performance of Jewish Conversion in Israel
When the State Winks traces the performance of state-endorsed Orthodox conversion in Israel. Michal Kravel-Tovi complicates the popular perception that it is a "wink-wink" relationship in which both sides agree to treat pretenses of faith as real, developing new ways to think about the connection between religious conversion and the nation-state
Accounting of the Soul: Enumeration, Affect, and Soul Searching among American Jewry
This ethnographic article complicates the common wisdom that the American Jewish elite cares "obsessively" about its constituents' numbers. The article shows the ways in which population numbers matter to American Jewish leaders but also how they matter differently to various sectors of the community. Alongside those who are eager speakers of the language of quantification, there are those who feel unease with what, they feel, creates a reductive…
As If It Was Ours All Along: Precarious Belonging, Jewish Habitus and the Materialisation of Conversion in Israel
Most scholarship on Jewish conversion in Israel emphasises the precarious entanglement between the process and the politics of the Jewish State. This article, instead, unpacks the uncertain modes of converts' belonging from an unexplored yet central angle - that of a Jewish habitus. I trace the challenging apprenticeship that aspiring converts undertake in developing a Jewish habitus, and the deeply ambiguous modes of belonging that such an appre…
Jews by choice? Orthodox conversion, the problem of choice, and Jewish religiopolitics in the Israeli state
Anthropologists have long displayed interest in the tension between choice and coercion in processes of religious conversion. In this article, I draw from ethnographic work in contemporary Israel to explore the ways in which this tension animates pedagogic formations of Orthodox Jewish conversion. I argue that conversion teachers' concerns are rooted in the tension they identify between the religious ideal scripts of Jewish conversion, as an indi…
Happily-ever after: Self-marriage, the claim of wellness, and temporal ownership
The phenomenon commonly described as self-marriage is an exponentially growing trend in which individuals, mostly women, marry themselves. Drawing on a textual analysis of self-marriage accounts in online media, we argue that this concept denotes a new form of self-love and self-commitment - at the heart of which lies a wellness program, rather than a legal contract. This article explores this emergent concept, focusing on a notable, though not e…
The Specter of Dwindling Numbers: Population Quantity and Jewish Biopolitics in the United States
Over the last three decades, the organized American-Jewish community has preoccupied itself with sociodemographic concerns regarding maintenance of a viable Jewish life in the United States. In this article, I study a key dimension of this preoccupation with population trends: the quantity of the Jewish population, that is, the number of Jews. I show the centrality of this dimension in shaping a cluster of anxious discourses and interventionist e…
Struggling with anxiety: Demographic statistics and an emotionalised American Jewish public sphere
Over the last three decades, the American Jewish communal public sphere has been flooded with sociodemographic concerns about numerical decline, and a sense of threatened ability to maintain a vibrant collective life. This article argues that this discursive site functions as a means, or technique, for the emotionalisation of Jewish identity and citizenship in the community. The article shows that public discourses on what is known by now as ‘the…
It Is My Turn Now: How and Why 'Single' Women Complain about Non-Reciprocal Gift-Giving
This article employs the prism of gift-exchange to analyse the marginalised status of singles within social relations. We trace an emerging critique voiced by single women, who challenge the unilateral etiquette of gifting marital and family-making celebrations. While dominant social norms normalise gift-giving at weddings and subsequent family-related occasions, there are no commensurable opportunities for singles to receive back their accumulat…
Purge the Evil From Your Midst: Material Cancel Culture Among Religiously Observant Jews
This article explores cancel culture as a material endeavor on the ground. We draw on ethnographic tools to call attention to formative material dimensions of canceling and employ the conceptual lens of material culture to analyze rationales and practices around the canceling of objects. The case study concerns how ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel manage allegations of sexual abuse against a beloved author by engaging in a myriad of material-canceli…
Making a Difference: The Political Life of Religious Conversion
This article reviews the anthropological scholarship that engages with religious conversion as a political phenomenon, broadly defined. It develops the idea of making a difference as an overarching framework with a double meaning. First, this idiom captures how, by framing religious conversion in political terms, anthropologists have claimed to have substantially intervened-have made a difference, so to speak-in the discussion of conversion. Seco…
Ambivalences of smallness: Population statistics and narratives of scale among American Jewry
Unorthodox Alliances at the Margins of the State: Haredi Jews, the Israeli State, and the Collaborative Battle Against Sexual Violence
Over the last decade, ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jewish society in Israel has witnessed an unprecedented attempt to place sexual violence high on the agenda, calling for concerted communal action and assistance to individuals in need. Based on a long-term anthropological fieldwork, I explore in this article how this revolution from within the Haredi sector catalyzes and is further solidified by unorthodox alliances with various agencies of the Israe…
Self-suasion: Agents of Jewish conversion in Israel in search of religious sincerity
The title of this essay is intended as ironic. The irony resides in the fact that while the agents of state-run Jewish conversion in Israel are preoccupied with the sincerity of conversion candidates, they are also troubled by the sincerity of their own religious belief and conduct. This essay will explore ethnographically how these religiopolitical actors engage with semiotic and interactive strategies of self-suasion in order to reconcile their…
It Goes with(out) Saying: How Haredi Jews in Israel “Break the Silence” of Sexual Violence
The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land, By Lea Taragin-Zeller
Sociology (17 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Politics (13 works) · History (11 works) · Jewish Identity and Society (11 works) · Judaism (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works)