Mennonite Life partners with the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies to host a lecture about media and the role of women in two conservative communities. Held in the Chapel at Brethren Village, Lititz, PA, this event is complimentary and requires no registration.
Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities are associated with religious observance, a renunciation of worldly things, and an obedience of women to men. Women’s relationship to media in these communities, however, reveals a more nuanced picture of the boundaries at play and women’s roles in negotiating them. In this talk, Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar will draw on her extensive interviews with women in both traditions to explain and compare how they use – and don’t use – contemporary media technology. By exhibiting a deep awareness of how media can be managed, these women prompt us to reconsider outmoded understanding of Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, the role that women play in these communities as agents of change, and our own relationship to media today.
Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar is a senior lecturer at Sapir Academic College in Sderot, Israel, where she teaches communications, religion, and gender. She received her doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has been a Fulbright post-doctoral fellow. Her book Strictly Observant: Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Women Negotiating Media is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press.
