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Item Hoover's Judeo-Christians: Jews, Judaism, and Communism in the Cold War(University of California Press, 2017) Imhoff, SarahThe FBI's approach to Jews and Judaism during the Hoover era was shaped not only by a suspicion of Jews as potential communists bur also by the image of America as a land of equality and religious tolerance. In the years after World War II, the link between Jews, Judaism, and communism was fraught. On the one hand, being Jewish was prima facie evidence that one may be communist; on the other hand, Judaism played an essential role in the concept of a religious America.Item Book Review of "Gender, Memory, and Judaism edited by Judit Gaszi, Andrea Peto, and Zsuzsanna Toronyi"(Gender Forum, 2009) Imhoff, SarahAlthough research on Jewish women in Europe has grown quickly in the last two decades, both theoretical and geographical lacunae remain. Apart from the recent memoir collection Hungarian Jewish Women Remember the Holocaust, Hungary remains one of these geographic gaps in English-language scholarship. The road to such scholarship has proven a difficult one for several reasons. First because of an academic stumbling block: according to editor Andrea Peto, “gender studies are unknown in Hungary” (43). Second has been a reticence of non-Jewish feminists to engage seriously with committed Jewish women. Furthermore, since 1989 major religious institutions, both Jewish and Christian, have emerged from Hungary’s Communist years with traditionally minded rather than forward-looking attitudes toward women and gender roles. Despite these academic and political challenges, in 2006 a group of academics and activists organized a conference to consider the lives of Jewish women in historical perspective. The conference provided the genesis for the edited volume under review, entitled Gender, Memory, and Judaism, a text which both addresses and at times is subject to the aforementioned scholarly limitations.Item Book Review of "Jewish/Christian/Queer: Crossroads and Identities, edited by Frederick Roden"(Gender Forum, 2010) Imhoff, Sarah“The power of ‘queer’ is its breadth,” writes editor Frederick Roden in his introduction to Jewish/Christian/Queer. The volume takes advantage of—and pushes the boundaries—of that wide vastness of possibility for the signifier “queer.” Although the disparity of historical and disciplinary approaches of the essays sometimes threatens to pull the collection apart at the seams, its threads never quite break. And in the end, the risk of pulling apart is worth the reward of a better garment. Few scholars will be familiar with all of the material here: it ranges from a textual analysis of Pauline scripture to a psychoanalytic reading of Freud’s relationship to Rome to an architectural and theological argument for the queerness of Queen Anne Churches, to name a few. A queer group indeed. The radical diversity of material, however, undeniably demonstrates the versatility of queer theories. Ultimately, therein lies the lasting argument of the volume: Queer theory can and should touch religious studies scholarship across discipline and material. Jewish/Christian/Queer becomes Joseph’s coat: Jewish, Christian, contested, beautiful, and queer.Item Book Review of "Women Remaking American Judaism by Riv Ellen Prell"(Practical Matters, 2009) Imhoff, SarahItem The Man in Black: Matisyahu, Identity, and Authenticity(Religion and Culture Web Forum, 2010) Imhoff, SarahCritics and fans have already written much about the life, music, and performance of Matisyahu, the most prominent Hasidic reggae musician, and his visibility is still growing.Item Book Review of "Urban Origins of American Judaism by Deborah Dash Moore"(History of Religions, 2017) Imhoff, SarahTrends in the study of history have seen a recent turn toward urban history, both as a feature of particular geographical and ethnic fields, and also as a field of its own. Urban historians pay particular attention to things like the relationship of the built environment to people and the multiple layers of the social construction of space. Urban history has its own historiography and set of canonical theorists, such as Lewis Mumford, Henri Lefebvre, Peter Hall, and Saskia Sassen. Urban Origins of American Judaism occasionally flirts with this literature, but it never joins the crowd. Rather, it situates itself much more inside the bounds of the field of American Jewish history than the field of urban history.Item Book Review of "The Figural Jew by Sarah Hammerschlag"(Journal of Religion, 2012) Imhoff, SarahWho is a Jew? In recent years, the question has arisen in discussions about Israeli citizenship and the "right of return," British schools, and even kosher food in American prisons. These recent battles over who can legitimately call herself a Jew have been fought on the grounds of halakhah, religious observance, ethnicity, and bloodlines.Item Book Review of "The Status of Women in Jewish Tradition by Isaac Sassoon(Journal of Religion, 2011) Imhoff, SarahItem My Sons Have Defeated Me: Walter Lippmann, Felix Adler, and Secular Moral Authority(The Journal of Religion, 2012) Imhoff, SarahIn his 1929 A Preface to Morals, American journalist and political philosopher Walter Lippmann wrote, “Modern man who has ceased to believe, without ceasing to be credulous, hangs, as it were, between heaven and earth, and is at rest nowhere." The secular Lippmann located the source of this feeling of unmooredness in the particulars of modernity, where the religions of the past were no longer credible, but men (and also, although not in an identical way, women) still sought something to believe in. If the acids of modernity—in his famous phrase—had dissolved the worldviews that made religions plausible, they had not dissolved the human needs that religion had fulfilled.Item Book Review of "Jews and the American Soul by Andrew Heinze"(The Journal of Religion, 2006) Imhoff, SarahItem Half-Jewish, Just Jewish, and the Oddities of Religious Identifications(Journal of Religion and Society, 2016) Imhoff, SarahDrawing on recent sociological studies, this article shows the complexity of Jewish identifications in the United States. It discusses five criteria for identifying who is a Jew: halakhah, Reform and Reconstructionist criteria, certain strands of Christian theology, ethnicity or race, and genetics. Then it shows how, when American Jews think about their own Jewishness, they slide among these criteria, notwithstanding the contradictions among them. Studying American Jews, then, shows the ways that religion, ethnicity, race, and genetics are profoundly but often invisibly entangled. It concludes by suggesting that attention to this entanglement will help illuminate not only Jews but many others in the American religious landscape.Item The Myth of American Jewish Feminization(Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society, 2016) Imhoff, SarahHistorians, sociologists, and contemporary critics have used the trope of the “feminization of the synagogue” to describe and critique gendered changes in American Judaism. Yet, given its many usages, the concept has proven too ambiguous and wide-ranging to function as a useful analytical description. This article begins by parsing the multiple uses of the term feminization: Who uses it, and what might they mean? Equipped with this map of the many meanings of the concept, the article then takes the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a case study. In this period, there is little historical evidence to support the idea that a single, identifiable phenomenon we should call feminization of the synagogue occurred. The persistence of the scholarly trope of feminization of the synagogue, despite the uneven evidence and slipperiness of the term, suggests the need for greater specifi city and clarity in scholarly use.Item Lineage Matters: DNA, Race, and Gene Talk in Judaism and Messianic Judaism(Published as Lineage Matters: DNA, Race, and Gene Talk in Judaism and Messianic Judaism Sarah Imhoff, Hillary Kaell. Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, Vol. 27 No. 1, Winter 2017; (pp. 95-127) DOI: 10.1525/rac.2017.27.1.95. © 2017 by the Regents of the University of California. Copying and permissions notice: Authorization to copy this content beyond fair use (as specified in Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law) for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the Regents of the University of California for libraries and other users, provided that they are registered with and pay the specified fee via Rightslink® or directly with the Copyright Clearance Center., 2017) Imhoff, SarahBased on ethnographic and archival research conducted on North American Judaism and Messianic Judaism, this article argues that each group uses DNA in what appear to be sociologically similar ways but that actually differ profoundly at the theological level. Our analysis moves beyond DNA testing per se to focus on what anthropologist Kim Tallbear calls “gene talk,” referring to “the idea that essential truths about identity inhere in sequences of DNA.” Contrasting Jews and Messianic Jews, we demonstrate clearly what scholars have only begun to recognize: how theological commitments may drive investments in genetic science and interpretations of it. Further, we show how religiously significant identities associated with race, ethnicity, or lineage interact with DNA science, coming to be viewed as inalienable qualities that reside in the self but move beyond phenotype alone. Finally, we argue that gene talk in these contexts is a religiously inflected practice, which serves to binds communities and (implicitly or explicitly) authorize existing theological ideals.Item Study of the therapeutic effects of proximal intercessory prayer (STEPP) on auditory and visual impairments in rural Mozambique(Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2010-09) McClymond, Michael J.; Williams, Rebecca; Mory, Stephen C.; Brown, Candy GuntherBackground. Proximal intercessory prayer (PIP) is a common complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapy, but clinical effects are poorly understood partly because studies have focused on distant intercessory prayer (DIP). Methods. This prospective study used an audiometer (Earscan 3) and vision charts (40 cm, 6 m “Illiterate E”) to evaluate 24 consecutive Mozambican subjects (19 males/5 females) reporting impaired hearing (14) and/or vision (11) who subsequently received PIP interventions. Results. We measured significant improvements in auditory (p < 0.003) and visual (p < 0.02) function across both tested populations. Conclusions. Rural Mozambican subjects exhibited improved audition and/or visual acuity subsequent to PIP. The magnitude of measured effects exceeds that reported in previous suggestion and hypnosis studies. Future study seems warranted to assess whether PIP may be a useful adjunct to standard medical care for certain patients with auditory and/or visual impairments, especially in contexts where access to conventional treatment is limited.Item Touch and American Religions(John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2009-06-09) Brown, Candy GuntherThe sense of touch plays an important role in many American religious practices. Yet dismissals of touch as an inferior mode of perception and reliance on textual sources that ignore touch have shaped research agendas. This essay identifies theories articulated by philosophical phenomenologists, students of ritual and performance studies, historians and anthropologists of art and architecture, neuroscientists, and feminist scholars that envision touch as a unique mode of gaining knowledge about the world and oneself and stimulating ethical behavior by working directly on the emotions to motivate empathetic, compassionate concern for others. The essay suggests how touch-oriented theories can aid the development of research areas in American religions where scholars have already begun fruitful explorations of tactility: studies of religious embodiment and ritual and of pain and its alleviation through divine healing or Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM).Item Chiropractic and Christianity: The Power of Pain to Adjust Cultural Alignments(American Society of Church History, 2010-03) Brown, Candy GuntherItem Touch and American Religions(Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) Brown, Candy GuntherThe sense of touch plays an important role in many American religious practices. Yet dismissals of touch as an inferior mode of perception and reliance on textual sources that ignore touch have shaped research agendas. This essay identifies theories articulated by philosophical phenomenologists, students of ritual and performance studies, historians and anthropologists of art and architecture, neuroscientists, and feminist scholars that envision touch as a unique mode of gaining knowledge about the world and oneself and stimulating ethical behavior by working directly on the emotions to motivate empathetic, compassionate concern for others. The essay suggests how touch-oriented theories can aid the development of research areas in American religions where scholars have already begun fruitful explorations of tactility: studies of religious embodiment and ritual and of pain and its alleviation through divine healing or Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM).