Dinsdag 7 mei 2024 om 20.00 uur
Ass. Prof. Dr. Jessica Roda (Georgetown University)
Lezing in het Engels. Deze lezing gaat online door (via Zoom).
Inschrijven voor deze lezing: per e-mail naar ijs@uantwerpen.be.
Mainstream portrayals of ultra-Orthodox religious women often frame their faith as oppressive: they are empowered only when they leave their community. Jessica Roda’s most recent book For Women and Girls Only flips this notion on its head. Drawing on six years of fieldwork between New York and Montreal, Roda examines modern performances on the stage and screen directed by and for ultra-Orthodox women. Their incredibly vibrant Jewish artistic scenes defy stereotypes that paint these women as repressed, reclusive to their shtetl, and devoid of creativity and agency.
In this lecture, Jessica Roda will argue that access to technology has completely transformed how ultra-Orthodox women express their way of being religious and that the digital era has enabled them to create an alternative entertainment market outside of the public, male-dominated one. She will show how the arts expressed by all these women offer a means of not only social but also economic empowerment in their respective worlds.
Her book offers a groundbreaking reversal of mainstream portrayals of ultra-Orthodox religious women, and of those who have left the community yet maintain ties to it. It is the first work to focus on the ultra-Orthodox female art scene in music, film, and dance across North America and on social media.
Jessica Roda is Assistant Professor of Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. After a first book on the political implications of Sephardic music in France (Se réinventer au present. Les Judéo-Espagnols de France, PUR 2018), she wrote a second monograph telling the captivating stories of ultra-Orthodox Jewish women, as well as the ones who broke away from religion, and their use of the arts, the digital, and technology to reshape Orthodoxy (For Women and Girls Only: Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy through the Arts in the Digital Age (NYU Press, 2024)).