Yoel Finkelman

National Library of Israel, Collections, Faculty Member

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Papers by Yoel Finkelman

Strictly Kosher Reading: Popular Literature and the Condition of Contemporary Orthodoxy

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Can American Orthodoxy Afford to have its Best and Brightest (Not) Make Aliya

Religious Zionism Post Disengagement: Future Directions, 2008

meets each year to consider major issues of concern to the Jewish community. Forum participants f... more meets each year to consider major issues of concern to the Jewish community. Forum participants from throughout the world, including academicians in both Jewish and secular fields, rabbis, rashei yeshivah, Jewish educators, and Jewish communal professionals, gather in conference as a think tank to discuss and critique each other's original papers, examining different aspects of a central theme. The purpose of the Forum is to create and disseminate a new and vibrant Torah literature addressing the critical issues facing Jewry today.

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Relationships between Schools and Parents in Haredi Popular Literature in the United States

Jewish Day Schools, Jewish Communities

This chapter examines how the new family–community model is reflected in popular Haredi ... more This chapter examines how the new family–community model is reflected in popular Haredi educational discourse in the United States. In recent decades, an extensive English-language Haredi popular literature has developed. This literature has been bitterly attacked by several modern Orthodox intellectuals, but it has not been adequately mined as a resource for understanding the ways in which Haredi Jewry negotiates its complex relationship with general culture and tries to mould the character, values, and social alliances of its members. The chapter examines this literature's portrayal of the relationships between schools and families, arguing that it presents conformity between schools and homes as an ideal, and that it calls upon parents to heed the rabbis and educators who can teach them how to build homes that live up to Haredi standards. Yet, in addition to describing this hegemonic ideal, the popular literature also reveals places where actual practice does not live up to that ideal, and raises resistant voices that question aspects of the ideal itself.

Medium and Message in Contemporary Ḥaredi Adventure Fiction

The Torah U Madda Journal, 2005

Adventure Fiction F earful that emancipation and modernity would undermine Jewish observance, h .... more Adventure Fiction F earful that emancipation and modernity would undermine Jewish observance, h . aredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jewry has tried to shore up tradition through strict adherence to Halakhah, distinctive dress, deep-seated religious conservatism, social isolationism, and opposition to interaction with the non-h . aredi world. Tracing its roots to the antimodernistic ideology of R. Moshe Sofer (H . atam Sofer) and his students in mid-nineteenth century Hungary, h . aredi Jewry has spread from Eastern Europe to Israel, the United States, and around the globe. It consciously rejects the non-Orthodox branches of Judaism that modernity has sprouted, as well as more liberal Orthodoxy, which it sees as an inadequate compromise with the threats of secular culture. From the outside, h . aredi society appears to be homogeneous and static, an anachronistic throwback to the Middle Ages that has somehow survived into modernity. This perception is reinforced by h . aredi selfperception as the voice of an age-old Judaism that stands in lonely opposition to modern heresy and religious confusion. In fact, however, h . aredi society remains in a constant and tension-filled dialogue with modernity and it has changed dramatically over time in response to ongoing historical, social, economic, and ideological pressures. In every YOEL FINKELMAN teaches Talmud and Jewish Thought at Midreshet Lindenbaum and is Project Coordinator at ATID, a Jerusalem-based foundation that provides resources and training for Jewish educational leadership. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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The Ambivalent Haredi Jew

Israel Studies, 2014

When Haredi Jews talk ideology, they talk with enormous self-confidence and single-mindedness. Ye... more When Haredi Jews talk ideology, they talk with enormous self-confidence and single-mindedness. Yet, when one scratches underneath the surface of Israeli Haredi rhetoric, one discovers enormous ambivalence: ambivalence about Zionism, ambivalence about the State of Israel, ambivalence about secular Jews, ambivalence about isolationism, ambivalence about Torah- only education, ambivalence about Israel’s multiculturalism, ambivalence about poverty and the kollel life, and even ambivalence about gender roles and rabbinic authority. Haredi ambivalence in Israel stems from the complexities of trying to implement dogmatic isolationism in the context of a modern, open Jewish society and from the odd situation of being economically and militarily dependent on a State the existence of which Haredi ideology opposes. Borrowing models of sociological ambivalence from the writings of Robert Merton, Zygmunt Bauman, and Victor Turner, this article suggests that “ambivalence” is central to understanding the complex relationship between mainstream Israeli Haredim and the State of Israel. Furthermore, I argue that the current narrative that dominates Israeli studies of Haredi society—the narrative of Israelization—does not succeed in capturing the complexity and multidimensionality of the Haredi encounter with the State.

The Kollel Movement in the State of Israel: A Pedagogic and Ideological Typology

Israel Studies Review, 2014

ABSTRACT In Israel, the contemporary Haredi kollel (institute for advanced Torah study for adult ... more ABSTRACT In Israel, the contemporary Haredi kollel (institute for advanced Torah study for adult men) is caught between two institutional visions: one sees the kollel as a selective, temporary framework to train future educators, rabbis, and leaders, while the other views the kollel as a non-selective phenomenon of indefinite study for people who have few career options. This tension has resulted in several types of contemporary kollels and a number of religious ideologies that promote full-time study for adult men. The article examines three different models of Haredi kollels and analyzes how they manage the friction between temporary and permanent kollel study. It articulates an abstract typology of ideological justifications that are advanced to support long-term kollel study.

Strictly Kosher Reading

Strictly Kosher Reading: Popular Literature and the Condition of Contemporary Orthodoxy

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Jewish Political Studies Review 162 ULTRA-ORTHODOXY ’ S POROUS CULTURAL BORDER Strictly

Reviewed by Haim Chertok Strictly speaking, Strictly Kosher Reading, Yoel Finkelman's highly orig... more Reviewed by Haim Chertok Strictly speaking, Strictly Kosher Reading, Yoel Finkelman's highly original study is misleadingly subtitled: its focus is not on Orthodoxy per se but, as we soon learn, upon Haredim. More specifically, it is about the predicament facing America's ultra-Orthodox communities as though it were a disease or impairment rather than some amorphous "condition." But more later about Finkelman's linguistic condition. The author's premise is shrewd and original: to shed light, as he puts it, on "the tension between isolation and acculturation in American Haredi culture" by means of a close examination of the popular literature it has engendered. Finkelman, a lecturer on Jewish thought at Bar-Ilan University, describes in detail the recent ArtScroll, Feldheim, and Targum publishing explosion of translations and Torah commentaries for both in-group adepts and recruits to the world of ultra-Orthodoxy. These are user-friendly, attractively packaged, and authoritative but, being translations of their kind, are viewed by the American Haredi core as dumbed-down redactions, each designed to attract the maximum sales in a growth sector of the religious book market. In addition, this niche marketmuch of it directed at women-includes halachically sanctioned self-help books, parenting, marriage, and health guides, and endless inspirational works such as hagiographic biographies of venerated rabbis of the past. The market for fiction, which began with the children's books, then extended itself to titles for teens-Haredi adventure for boys, cloistered "romances" for girls, and most recently novels for adults, albeit with sexuality airbrushed out. Who would have imagined a Haredi technological thriller fiction dealing with hacker terrorists who can shut down America's airports and penetrate its nuclear arsenal? Some of these novels explore Haredi issues such as how technology impinges on and threatens but simultaneously sustains this highly insular world. Taken together, this popular literature is, as Finkelman puts it, "a wonderful tool with which to examine a nexus of Haredi values that does not derive directly from the formal Jewish canon of texts...." Indeed this popular literature, a mirror image of the secular culture that Haredim habitually deplore and whose very existence may be viewed as a standing rebuke to the Haredi tenet that everything worth knowing may be found in Torah, in Finkelman's competent hands turns into a fascinatingly fruitful resource. In his opening chapters the author describes how Haredi writers negotiate the paradox of living apart from but simultaneously embedded in the very secular society and

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Religion and Public Life in the Thought of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik views religion as a private affair, which occurs in the intimate relati... more Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik views religion as a private affair, which occurs in the intimate relations between the I, the Thou, and the Eternal Thou. He consistently denies or de-emphasizes the public or coercive role of Judaism and halakhah. Yet Soloveitchik has trou ble justifying his private religion with Jewish tradition and with the relatively expansive self-understanding of halakhah. This trouble is reflected in a number of contradictions about the nature and func tion of Judaism and halakhah, both in general and in the State of Is rael.

A Reply to Yoel Finkelman

his response to my essay, Yoel Finkelman disagrees with my interpretation of the Rav's views ... more his response to my essay, Yoel Finkelman disagrees with my interpretation of the Rav's views on religion and public life, as well as with my description of the history of the United States with regard to this issue. I will briefly address each of these contested areas. Let me begin with the Rav. Finkelman's central complaint appears to be that my essay focuses on the Rav's written instructions in "On Interfaith Relationships," rather than the Rav's other writings. Finkelman refers to "On Interfaith Relationships" as a "policy statement," but of course, it is more than policy: it is pesak. These guidelines, as I noted in my essay, were printed as an open letter in the Rabbinical Council of America Record. By expressing his views in that particular medium, the Rav, as the posek par excellence of the Rabbinical Council of America, set out in precise terms, to Jewish Orthodoxy and to the world, the nature, goals and limits of the RCA's i...

Medium and Message in Contemporary H. aredi Adventure Fiction

Fearful observance, haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jewry has tried to shore up tradition through strict ... more Fearful observance, haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jewry has tried to shore up tradition through strict adherence to Halakhah, distinctive dress, deep-seated religious conservatism, social isolationism, and opposition to interaction with the non-haredi world. Tracing its roots to the antimodernistic ideology of R. Moshe Sofer (Hatam Sofer) and his students in mid-nineteenth century Hungary, haredi Jewry has spread from Eastern Europe to Israel, the United States, and around the globe. It consciously rejects the non-Orthodox branches of Judaism that modernity has sprouted, as well as more liberal Orthodoxy, which it sees as an inadequate compromise with the threats of secular culture. From the outside, haredi society appears to be homogeneous and static, an anachronistic throwback to the Middle Ages that has somehow survived into modernity. This perception is reinforced by haredi selfperception as the voice of an age-old Judaism that stands in lonely opposition to modern heresy and religiou...

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The Secret of Jewish Masculinity

Love, Marriage, and Jewish Families