Name Tamar Or | Role Author | |
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Books Educated and Ignorant: Ultraorthodox Jewish Women and Their World, Next Year I Will Know More | ||
Tamar El-Or (born in 1955) is an Israeli sociologist and author holding the Sarah Allen Shaine chair of sociology and anthropology at the Hebrew University.
Contents
Research
El-Or's Ph.D. dissertation was a study of ultra-Orthodox women in Israel. The research was published as a book, Educated and Ignorant, in both Hebrew and English. In this book, El-Or discusses the possibility of educating for ignorance: teaching certain groups (in this case, girls and women) to expect and respect intellectual restrictions. This research in gender and religion debated feminist questions of choice, empowerment, and resistance via the life of Orthodox women.
The fieldwork and findings on the ultra-Orthodox community led to research on the modern (national) Orthodox community in Israel, and to the book Next year I will know more. This book describes and analyzes a feminist revolution via knowledge among young women from the modern Orthodox community.
A third project followed these two and was conducted among the Sphardi Mizrahi community, thus covering all three major communities that form Israeli Orthodoxy. This researched turned into another book, Reserved Seats: gender ethnicity and religion in Israel. It examines questions of class and ethnicity among women from the Sphardi and Orthodox communities, and those that revolve around orthodoxy. These monographs form a trilogy on gender, religion, and the meanings of knowing.
In 2009-2010, El-Or wrote a short essay on the pedagogy of Tania learning among women from the Hasidic sect of Chabad (Lubavitz), as well as a theoretical comparative work on veiling in Israel, France, Turkey, Belgium, and Morocco.
El-Or has numerous articles on issues related to her main research fields, as well as articles on other issues, such as Israeli motherhood, anthropological methodology, sociological aspects of literature and the plastic arts, etc.