“In this exciting new book Yakir Englander and Avi Sagi break new ground in treating contemporary religious-Zionism in Israel as a community with particular religious and spiritual inclinations and a complex relationship to modernity. Focusing on religious and halakhic questions around the body and in particular sexual ethics, and including an important discussion of how the Internet has changed halakhic adjudication, Englander and Sagi argue that this community has integrated a personalistic dimension to sexual practices and approaches to the body.”
— Shaul Magid, Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Chair in Jewish Studies, Indiana University

“Numerous studies have shown how secular Zionism undertook a revolution with respect to sexuality and the body. But until now, no systematic work has examined religious-Zionism on these questions. Sagi and Englander’s book not only reveals the dynamic way that religious-Zionism has created its own bodily revolution, but also how much contemporary religious discourse around sexuality owes to “virtual Halakhah” on the Internet. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the world of Orthodox Judaism today.”
— David Biale, Emanuel Ringelblum Professor of Jewish History, Chair, Department of History, University of California, Davis

The questions raised by the volume are important. … Yakir Englander and Avi Sagi have made a substantive contribution to what is now unabashedly called ‘Israel studies,’ an area of study bounded not only by geography but also by mindset.

— Sander Gilman, author of The Jew’s Body

Avi Sagi is Professor of Philosophy and founder of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar-Ilan University as well as a faculty member at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He has written and edited many books and articles in philosophy and Jewish thought, among them Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd, Jewish Religion after Theology, and Tradition vs. Traditionalism.

Yakir Englander is a visiting scholar at the Divinity School at Harvard University. His book The Perception of the Male Body in Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodox Society During the Last Sixty Years (in Hebrew) is forthcoming.

Acknowledgments 8 Introduction 9 Chapter 1. The New Religious-Zionist Halakhah: A Conceptual Outline 18 Chapter 2. The Shift in the Discourse: Autarchic Male Sexuality 26 Mapping Reactions 34 The Pastoral Discourse 52 A Haredi Alternative 70 Chapter 3. The Shift in the Discourse: Autarchic Female Sexuality 78 Female Sexuality: Masturbation and Lesbianism 79 Mapping Reactions 85 The Effects of the Value Discourse on Halakhic Rulings 93 Chapter 4. Real and Imagined Women 120 Defining Women 123 The Conflict Discourse 135 Excluding Real Women 166 The Female Refusal 180 On Female Sexuality 183 Chapter 5. The Other Voice 193 Attitudes toward Homosexuality and Lesbianism in the New Discourse 194 The Haredi Responsum 200 The Religious Protest 206 Looking Back 214 Chapter 6. Concluding Reflections: From a Realist Disposition to an Imagined Realm 231 Appendix. The Discourse on Sexuality, Metaphysics, and Messianism 243 Bibliography 276 Index 293