The papers in this panel explore legal narratives and formations that push back against authoritative structures in unexpected ways, with implications to the construction of ritual, gender, and domesticity. The first paper posits that the revisionist literary-historical narrative mode allowed R. Yosef Yitzchak to record a radical halakhic (Jewish legal) position towards women and Torah study. The second paper considers halakhic reconstruction from the perspective of Deborah Marcus Melamed’s theological primer, which figures the Jewish home as the determinative arena of Jewish spiritual life. The third paper considers Reb Shayele, a figure who has become a populist patron saint of protection for Hasidic men in everyday encounters with the police, alongside a political theology of care and hospitality. Taken together, these papers engage with figures who are mobilized to challenge authorities of various forms – state agents, legal arbiters, and communal leaders.
There is a vast scholarly literature on how Orthodox Jews have grappled with the "woman question" in modernity, particularly when it comes to the permissibility of women studying the Oral Law. Texts which have not received enough attention from scholars writing on this topic include the literary-historical narratives written by R. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, the sixth rebbe of Chabad-Lubavitch. My paper will fill this gap by considering some of the halakhic ramifications of R. Schneersohn's deceptively straightforward stories. Specifically, I will consider how one of R. Yosef Yitzchak's narratives laid the foundation for his son-in-law R. Menachem Mendel Schneersohn's revolutionarily permissive discourses exhorting women to engage in the study of the Oral Law without any limitations. I will argue that R. Yosef Yitzchak's use of his chosen genre creates space within halakhic discourse for radical opinions that could not possibly be articulated within the entrenched, formal modes of discussing halakha.
In view of both the intellectual firepower behind its production and its mass distribution among the laity, Deborah Melamed’s *The Three Pillars: Thought, Worship and Practice for the Jewish Woman* (1927) is a major but largely forgotten site of American Judaism’s theoretical articulation. At once a Jewish legal (*halakhic*) digest and a theological primer, *Pillars* aims to reconstruct what its creators take to be the determinative arena of Jewish spiritual life -- namely, the Jewish home. Long after the collapse of the autonomous pre-modern Ashkenazi community (*kehila*), *Pillars* enjoins its readers to reinscribe the *kehila*'s socially constructed ritual realities upon the controllable walls of the nuclear family home. *Pillars* is a work of enduring importance to anyone interested in the family home as a crucial theater of religious life, or in the gradual movement of Jewish women into the historically male domains of Jewish learning and legal authority.
I focus on a transnational, masculinist Hasidic revival movement centered on The Kerestirer Rebbe (“Shayele”), a Hungarian “miracle-worker” who died in 1925. His iconic portrait is often used to ward off rodents in Jewish homes and businesses. I reveal how this is only one small piece of his current appeal, however. Drawing upon pilgrimage ethnography, hagiographies, and Hasidic social media, I argue that he operates as a patron saint of protection against other “intruders” in everyday Hasidic life (e.g. police and inspectors). In summoning a dead Hasidic master, his followers critique both the authority of the state and their own living Hasidic leaders. Indeed, Shayele’s revival is a product of this political moment. His male followers exhibit ideological affinities with the Alt-Right. In the last section, I argue that Shayele's tertiary attributes of "care" and "hospitality" are central to understanding how he performs protection for his followers.