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The article explores interreligious encounters between Orthodox Jewish and Christian communities in the U.S., focusing on gender and the influence of illiberal religious ideologies. Topics include the adaptation and critique of non-Jewish self-help materials within Orthodox Jewish circles, the role of rabbinic mediation in shaping these exchanges, and the broader implications for political and cultural alliances.

"Breaking the silence" is a rallying cry commonly adopted for activist causes. Seeking to unpack this opaque trope, this article asks what happens when dismantling silence is desired but at the same time obstructed by compromised sociolinguistic resources and incompatible language ideologies. I draw on an ethnographic study of the emergent and underresearched anti–sexual violence undertaking among Haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) in Israel to demonstrate the analytic value of a linguistic anthropological approach to "breaking the silence." While Haredi activists and professionals raise this banner, they face pragmatic dilemmas concerning how exactly to speak modestly about an unspeakable and "immodest" subject. Thus, they strategically propagate the imperative to speak up while adapting their talk by both sanitizing relevant discourses and engaging intensively with metatalk. Theirs is a formidable effort to "break the silence" without breaking core rules of Haredi talk. I suggest that to understand this labor, we should not only focus on the Haredi cultural morals of modesty and sexuality but also consider the cultural morals about speaking itself. The broader intervention is the argument that the way people feel and think about language and idealize themselves as speaking people shapes the manners in which they break the silence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing numbers of ultra-Orthodox Jews are flocking to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to participate in Amish country tourism and to consume kosher dairy products, sometimes produced through economic collaborations between Orthodox Jews and local Amish/Mennonite farmers. Through an ethnographic examination of these phenomena, we demonstrate how Amish tourism fosters illiberal interreligious encounters among the triangle of ultra-Orthodox Jewish tourists, Amish/Mennonite farmers, and Christian tour guide mediators. Whereas historically tourism to the Amish was driven by white nostalgic longings for a European peasant past and the American frontier, Orthodox Jews project a nostalgic vision of the Eastern European shtetl onto the Amish and their dairy products. We borrow the concept of political temporalities (Little 2022) to explore an illiberal political temporality formed by the encounter among illiberal religious groups in a recreational tourist setting. Despite different nostalgic projections, these religious groups converged over their visions of an American religious present and future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An ethnographic and linguistic research conducted in a Brooklyn from 1995 through 1997 to examine socialization routines in which Hasidic children display culturally unacceptable ways of speaking like questioning, requesting, or challenging authority figures. Through appeals to a higher authority, essentializing difference and morality, silence, shaming, or threat of exclusion, caregivers try to socialize Hasidic children to reject certain ways of knowing, speaking, and being.

This article presents information on the Jewish Children's Museum in Crown Heights in Brooklyn, New York City. This museum opened in December 2004 and is a project of the Lubavitcher Hasidic community. The museum is notable in the Jewish community because it has developed a distinctive museology through the process of adapting museological techniques. It discusses the nature of this museology by exploring how it materializes religion. It explains that the museum is an outgrowth of Tzivos Hashem Jewish Children International.