Degrees of Separation: Patterns of Personal Identity Formation beyond the Boundaries of Ultra-Orthodox Judaism

• In Event: 427 - Regular Session. Narrative, Biography, and Culture 2

Abstract

When people choose to distance themselves from the community of their birth, they cross a boundary, often physical, always emotional and social. While sociologists are ware that boundary crossing can be fraught and complex, an assumption persists that people who make the decision to cross the boundary can and will ultimately do so in a complete, clearly identifiable way. That is to say, communal affiliation is assumed to be binary: one is either an insider or an outsider. My interview-based study of a group of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men and women who have distanced themselves from the community in which they were raised challenges this assumption.

Despite many successful efforts to separate themselves from their community, their boundary crossing was never complete. The persistence of their religious identity, trained bodily responses to communal taboos, denigration of outsiders to the community, attitudes towards the community’s leader and protectiveness of the community’s public image, and even some spiritual beliefs and practices of the community all defy a binary characterization of their relationship to the community. Extensive interviews with these subjects reveal strategies of gradual distancing from the community while simultaneously remaining connected to it. This in-between state, on the interstices between ultra-Orthodox Judaism and the broader society, has been almost entirely ignored in sociology, and my research problematizes the narrow extant view of the boundaries of religious communities today.

Author

• Schneur Zalman Newfield, New York University