Judaism Mediated
Learning About Jewishness Through the Cultural Arts
Sharon Avni author Laura Yares author
Format:Paperback
Publisher:New York University Press
Publishing:4th Aug '26
£26.99
This title is due to be published on 4th August, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Explores how Jews and non-Jews come to learn about Jews and Judaism through leisure-time entertainment
Judaism Mediated explores how Jews and non-Jews learn about Judaism through participation in cultural, digital, and leisurely spaces. Most work on religious education has focused on institutional learning, like religious classrooms and houses of worship, or on the transmission of religious values at home. And most studies focus on youth and how they become socialized into their religious traditions. But, looking specifically at Judaism, Judaism Mediated argues that this focus overlooks how engagement with the arts, such as theatre or museums or music, influences how adults learn about religion.
Laura Yares and Sharon Avni examine audience engagements with five different Jewish cultural arts settings–museums, web-based performances, streaming television, concerts, and live theatre. They show that depictions of Jewish people and topics in these cultural spaces can create powerful learning experiences. However, learning about Judaism through the arts can also be mis-educative, reinforcing stereotypes or creating misunderstandings.
At its core, this book makes the case that adult audiences learn about Judaism and Jewishness in significant ways when they experience Jewish culture, and that we need to expand our understanding of where and how religious education happens. The volume shows not only that religious learning happens in diverse spaces, but that learning in leisure time can take on social, cognitive, and affective dimensions, too. Judaism Mediated offers compelling case studies of contemporary American religion relevant for readers interested in how people enact religion in everyday life
"Yares and Avni break new ground in our understanding of how people learn about Judaism. By centering social media, museums, theater, and streaming programming, they expand the parameters of Jewish learning to include many emerging sites. And they did so by developing an array of innovative methods invented to track learning as it happens. Judaism Mediated is a model for future studies of Jewish learning." - Ari Y. Kelman, Jim Joseph Professor of Education and Jewish Studies, Stanford University
"In this signal achievement for Jewish cultural studies, Yares and Avni demonstrate Jewish learning is a powerful leisure time pursuit for American Jews. Visiting a museum exhibit, having a social media interaction, or debating a TV show allows Jews to affirm their Judaism while navigating their Jewishness. Judaism Mediated carefully shows how serious Jewish thinking exists outside Jewish institutions. It happens whenever someone says. "from here, I learn."" - Kathryn Lofton, Yale University
"How do Americans, Jewish and otherwise, learn what it is to be Jewish as consumers of culture and the arts? Anyone who has hummed a Gershwin tune, seen an MGM movie, or enjoyed a deli sandwich on rye has been a student of Jewish America, wittingly or not. In the quotidian American encounter with Jewishness Laura Yares and Sharon Avni identify "a rich and ambiguous middle space" where religion is lived beyond the familiar divides of affiliation and non-affiliation, belief and culture, and sacred and secular, a space so generative and capacious it might lead us to ask whether these dichotomies have ever told us much about lived religion at all. A feat of ethnographic depth and pandemic-era ingenuity, Judaism Mediated offers a richly rewarding meditation on Jewish cultural arts and a genuinely new approach to the study of religion in the present." - Tracy Fessenden, author of Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature
ISBN: 9781479838561
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
256 pages