Nurit Stadler
Nurit Stadler, is a professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the Humboldt award prize winner (2025) and the Sarah Allen Shaine Professor of Anthropology & Sociology.
Her research interests include Ultraorthodox community, fundamentalism, Greek-Orthodox and Catholic rituals in Jerusalem, text-based communities, The veneration of Mary in Israel/Palestine and Catholic Europe, sacred places, and womb tomb sacred architypes, the study of iconography and religious art .
Stadler is the author of three books: Yeshiva Fundamentalism: Piety, Gender and Resistance in the Ultra-Orthodox World published with New York University Press, in 2008. This book is an analysis of the reconstruction of masculine in the fundamentalist world as a result of the challenges of modernity. It addresses these questions through an investigation of the redefinition of the family, work, the army and civil society in the Ultra-Orthodox yeshiva world in Israel. Stadler is also the author of A Well-Worn Tallis for a New Ceremony (2012) with Academic Studies Press (Brighton, MA). In this book she explored new aspects of voluntarism, citizenship, family life and the concept of freedom in the ultraorthodox culture today. Her third book Voices of the Ritual (Oxford University Press 2020) analyzes the revival of and manifestation of rituals at female saint shrines in the Holy Land.
Since 2012 she is involved with the project on sacred shrines in Israel/Palestine. In this project she study various aspect of pilgrimage and veneration of sacred shrines, especially female shrines. Her comparative study of these shrines opens a set of questions about the centrality of fertility cults and female landscape at the age of modernity and technology of reproduction.
Stadler is directing an Ethnographic Lab on issues of religion, sacredness, politics, borders and the nation state. In this, project students and researchers from around the world participate in studying and comparing ethnographies of sacred places.
Her research interests include Ultraorthodox community, fundamentalism, Greek-Orthodox and Catholic rituals in Jerusalem, text-based communities, The veneration of Mary in Israel/Palestine and Catholic Europe, sacred places, and womb tomb sacred architypes, the study of iconography and religious art .
Stadler is the author of three books: Yeshiva Fundamentalism: Piety, Gender and Resistance in the Ultra-Orthodox World published with New York University Press, in 2008. This book is an analysis of the reconstruction of masculine in the fundamentalist world as a result of the challenges of modernity. It addresses these questions through an investigation of the redefinition of the family, work, the army and civil society in the Ultra-Orthodox yeshiva world in Israel. Stadler is also the author of A Well-Worn Tallis for a New Ceremony (2012) with Academic Studies Press (Brighton, MA). In this book she explored new aspects of voluntarism, citizenship, family life and the concept of freedom in the ultraorthodox culture today. Her third book Voices of the Ritual (Oxford University Press 2020) analyzes the revival of and manifestation of rituals at female saint shrines in the Holy Land.
Since 2012 she is involved with the project on sacred shrines in Israel/Palestine. In this project she study various aspect of pilgrimage and veneration of sacred shrines, especially female shrines. Her comparative study of these shrines opens a set of questions about the centrality of fertility cults and female landscape at the age of modernity and technology of reproduction.
Stadler is directing an Ethnographic Lab on issues of religion, sacredness, politics, borders and the nation state. In this, project students and researchers from around the world participate in studying and comparing ethnographies of sacred places.
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יחד עם תלמידיי ותלמידותיי ראיינתי בשנים אלו צליינים וצלייניות הפוקדים
את קברה, צפיתי בתהלוכות הרחוב לעבר קברה של מרים והשתתפתי
בטקסים המגוונים במקום שבו על פי המסורות השונות, נרדמה מרים ועלתה
לשמים. טקסים המוקדשים למרים בארץ הקודש נחקרו מעט מאוד מן הזווית
האנתרופולוגית , ובעבודה זו אבקש להרחיב את הניתוח של הטקס באמצעות
העיון ברכיביו הפנימיים ולנתח את רבדיו השונים בהקשר הירושלמי. מן הניתוח
ומן האתנוגרפיה עולה כי רבדיה של הטקסיות האורתודוקסית בירושלים מגוונים
ורבי–מופעים. בהמשך לגישתו של דון הנדלמן ולהצעתו לחקור את המבנה
הפנימי של הטקס ואת משמעויותיו האנדמיות, אנתח את טקסי מרים ואסביר
את רכיביהם . כפי שעולה מן האתנוגרפיה בירושלים, טקסי מרים בתהלוכה
השנתית ובמערה שבכנסיית גת שמנים כוללים ארבעה מאפיינים: טקסי גוף,
טקסים מימטיים, טקסי ניגוד וטקסי אדמה. הביטויים הללו שלובים כמובן זה
בזה בטקס, אך בהמשך אנתח אותם בנפרד כדי לשפוך אור על ייחודו של הטקס
הירושלמי.
Keywords:
Decolonization, Colonial Settlers Society, urban religion, Ethnocracy, Mixed City, Acre, Lababidi Mosque
study focuses on Chabad, a Jewish ultra-Orthodox movement, and follows webmasters of three key websites to uncover how they distribute religious knowledge over the Internet. Through an ethnographic approach that included interviews with over 30 webmasters, discussions with key informants, and observations of the websites themselves, the study uncovered webmaster’s strategies to foster solidarity within their community, on one hand, while also proselytizing their outlook on Judaism, on the other. Hence, the study sheds light on how a fundamentalist society has strengthened its association with new media, thus facilitating negotiation between modernity and religious piety.
יחד עם תלמידיי ותלמידותיי ראיינתי בשנים אלו צליינים וצלייניות הפוקדים
את קברה, צפיתי בתהלוכות הרחוב לעבר קברה של מרים והשתתפתי
בטקסים המגוונים במקום שבו על פי המסורות השונות, נרדמה מרים ועלתה
לשמים. טקסים המוקדשים למרים בארץ הקודש נחקרו מעט מאוד מן הזווית
האנתרופולוגית , ובעבודה זו אבקש להרחיב את הניתוח של הטקס באמצעות
העיון ברכיביו הפנימיים ולנתח את רבדיו השונים בהקשר הירושלמי. מן הניתוח
ומן האתנוגרפיה עולה כי רבדיה של הטקסיות האורתודוקסית בירושלים מגוונים
ורבי–מופעים. בהמשך לגישתו של דון הנדלמן ולהצעתו לחקור את המבנה
הפנימי של הטקס ואת משמעויותיו האנדמיות, אנתח את טקסי מרים ואסביר
את רכיביהם . כפי שעולה מן האתנוגרפיה בירושלים, טקסי מרים בתהלוכה
השנתית ובמערה שבכנסיית גת שמנים כוללים ארבעה מאפיינים: טקסי גוף,
טקסים מימטיים, טקסי ניגוד וטקסי אדמה. הביטויים הללו שלובים כמובן זה
בזה בטקס, אך בהמשך אנתח אותם בנפרד כדי לשפוך אור על ייחודו של הטקס
הירושלמי.
Keywords:
Decolonization, Colonial Settlers Society, urban religion, Ethnocracy, Mixed City, Acre, Lababidi Mosque
study focuses on Chabad, a Jewish ultra-Orthodox movement, and follows webmasters of three key websites to uncover how they distribute religious knowledge over the Internet. Through an ethnographic approach that included interviews with over 30 webmasters, discussions with key informants, and observations of the websites themselves, the study uncovered webmaster’s strategies to foster solidarity within their community, on one hand, while also proselytizing their outlook on Judaism, on the other. Hence, the study sheds light on how a fundamentalist society has strengthened its association with new media, thus facilitating negotiation between modernity and religious piety.
The texts, for the most part previously untranslated, reflect commonalities within the region as well as its great diversity. Thus, while Islam is a common reference for most of our authors, the selections point to its varied invocations in the interest of differing political ends. Others write from a Christian or Jewish perspective, or subscribe to non-religious intellectual traditions. They range from premodern Muslim jurisprudents and philosophers to Ottoman statesmen, Arab socialist and nationalist intellectuals of the interwar period, Iranian revolutionaries, Israeli novelists, and finally, post-secular intellectuals, lay and religious, predominantly from the former Islamic heartland: modern Arab states and Iran. Several introductions weave together the swathe of topics raised in the discussions, beginning with a schematic presentation of the concerns that undergird the volume’s organization.
The ultra-Orthodox yeshiva, or Jewish seminary, is a space reserved for men, and for a focus on religious ideals. Fundamentalist forms of piety are usually believed to be quite resistant to change. In Yeshiva Fundamentalism, Nurit Stadler uncovers surprising evidence that firmly religious and pious young men of this community are seeking to change their institutions to incorporate several key dimensions of the secular world: a redefinition of masculinity along with a transformation of the family, and participation in civic society through the labor market, the army, and the construction of organizations that aid terror victims. In their private thoughts and sometimes public actions, they are resisting the demands placed on them to reject all aspects of the secular world.
Because women are not allowed in the yeshiva setting, Stadler's research methods had to be creative. She invented a way to simulate yeshiva learning with young yeshiva men by first studying with an informant to learn key religious texts, often having to do with family life, sexuality, or participation in the larger society. This informant then invited students over to discuss these texts with Stadler and himself outside of the yeshiva setting. This strategy enabled Stadler to gain access to aspects of yeshiva life in which a woman is usually unable to participate, and to hear "unofficial" thoughts and reactions which would have been suppressed had the interviews taken place within the yeshiva.
Yeshiva Fundamentalism provides an intriguing — and at times surprising — glimpse inside the all-male world of the ultra-orthodox yeshivas in Israel, while providing insights relevant to the larger context of transformations of fundamentalism worldwide. While there has been much research into how contemporary feminism has influenced the study of fundamentalist groups worldwide, little work has focused on ultra-Orthodox men's desires to change, as Stadler does here, showing how fundamentalist men are themselves involved in the formulation of new meanings of piety, gender, modernity and relations with the Israeli state.
This project consists of an analysis of many sites (and counting) of worship. In each of the sites, we examine numerous topics among them: the manner in which devotees and other players reconstruct the features of the site; their criticism and redefinition of religiosity; the ways different religious groups approach the same site, the politics of the changing cultural sacred landscape. This multi-sited study combines several methods: in-depth interviews with pilgrims, visitors, and ‘various impresarios’; textual analysis of books, manuals, newspaper articles, religious decrees, official public statements and more; participant observations on regular and special occasions; analyses of visual content (i.e., DVDs, films, photos, and maps).
This project emerged from our joined research interests, indeed passion, revolving around religious phenomena, sacred landscapes and transformations in sacred sites in contemporary societies. We come from different perspectives, anthropology of religion (Stadler) and cultural geography (Luz), but in this project and our on-going collaboration we opened up new ways of thinking religion and religiosity which we find highly productive. We were fortunate to discover that others (colleagues and laymen) are also interested in our work and thus the idea of this site emerged as a way to share our work and promote future collaborations and dialogue. We invite you to explore it, write to us, comment, suggest new ideas and surely enjoy our work.
Current Objectives of the Project
Following our objective to develop a comparative methodology and theoretical framework for studying incipient Christian, Jewish, and Muslim shrines in Israel/Palestine we wish to shed light on four major analytic issues that pertain mainly to the fields of sociology, anthropology, and geography of religion:
(1) Religious revival: The past few decades have borne witness to new forms of spiritualism, piety, charismatic groups, and syncretism as well as wide-scale conversion and radical interpretations of scripture. This project will contribute to the literature on this ‘reawakening,’ especially the transformations that inform various aspects of modern-day pilgrimage.
(2) Comparative religion: Building on the existing research, our objective is to illuminate comparable elements of enchanted places in Israel within the context of the country’s socio-political life. To date, researchers have tended to focus on a specific religion or site. By comparing a horde of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish sites, we hope to remove some of the ambiguity surrounding the creation of sacred places.
(3) The political and contested nature of holy sites: Following recent discussions in cultural geography and anthropology of religion on the contested nature of sacred places our comparative analysis promises to shed light on the friction, factionalism, and antipathy within and between assorted religious groups as well as the impact of this strife on their culture and belief systems. Furthermore, this multi-sited approach enables us to track the ways in which alternative meanings are embedded into the landscape.
(4) Exploring Religious landscape: our exploration into types of worship and transformations in sacred places in Israel wishes to further our understanding in theoretical discussion on the n nature of religious landscape as a socio-political medium. Following we want to add to current discussions concerning the impact of these sites on different aspects of Israeli society, foremost among them politics, identity, the economy, and culture.
We hope to better understand the ways these heavily contested and divided places are interpreted and used by different players, pilgrims, visitors, and other social and political agents. Thus, the ultimate aim of our project is engage in allowing better access to scholars and laypersons alike to the lives and meanings assigned to and fought on in the plethora of sacred sites we study, explore and analyze.
and University of Tsukuba
JSPS Core-to-Core Program A. Advanced Research Networks “International Research Network for Ancient West Asian Studies”
Center for Interdisciplinary Study of Monotheistic Religions (CISMOR), Doshisha University
Research Center for West Asian Civilization, University of Tsukuba
have been a number of striking changes in terms of quality, even breaks. In order to explore these
phenomena, which are highly revealing for the religious-spiritual and ideological field in Europe,
we invite you to a three-day conference in Donauwörth, a centuries-old pilgrimage centre. The aim
is to explore questions of the sociology of religion and their interfaces to psychological, theological
and touristic perspectives. The conference will take place as part of the 5th Donauwörth Pilgrimage
Days. The event is organized by the Sociology of Religion Section of the German Sociological
Association in cooperation with the Municipal Tourist Information Donauwörth/VHS and other
supporters from the pilgrim scene. Through responses, the contributions are embedded in further
research and their significance for practice is revealed. This enables researchers to expand their
contacts with the field.