(Van Leer Institute Press and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2021, Hebrew)

WOMEN, SECULARISM AND BELIEF: A SOCIOLOGY OF BELIEF IN THE JEWISH-ISRAELI SECULAR LANDSCAPE

Women, Secularism and Belief is an original and groundbreaking book that traces the supposed “anomaly” of secular Jewish Israeli women who believe in god by combining the knowledge areas of sociology, Jewish and Christian theology, religion studies, and feminist thought. The book points out the relatively large extent of the secular-believer phenomenon (according to a rough estimate, secular-believers constitute about one-quarter of the Jewish population in Israel), identifies new feminist voices of secular-believer women, and brings their stories to the fore. It demonstrates convincingly that secular belief is not a social anomaly. Instead, it is a component of identity that is quite common in Israel but has not been studied until now because of the uncritical clinging to the customary epistemic assumptions, primarily the assumption that religion and secularism, or belief and secularism, are contrary categories.