Please join us for our upcoming CJH Seminar in Jewish History on Thursday, February 7, from 4-6pm, featuring Brett Levi’s project:

Between Enchantment and Estrangement: The Construction of the Postwar Haredi Landscape in the West Bank and the Swiss Alps

Brett’s paper analyzes the post-World War II history of Haredi (“ultra-Orthodox”) engagement with geography and the Haredi production of space. Ideology and strategy, in concert with demographic, economic, and political factors, propelled the development of a vast transnational Haredi landscape, an imagined and concrete network of neighborhoods, towns, institutions, and leisure spaces wherein internal cultural norms and external relations could be managed. Brett will evaluate tensions in Haredi spatial thought by juxtaposing two seemingly unrelated cases: Haredi debates over establishing Haredi towns in the West Bank, and the postwar history of rabbinic vacations in the Swiss and Austrian Alps. The Biblically-resonant landscapes of the West Bank and the resort villages of the Alps have at least two common characteristics: large numbers of postwar Haredim encountered both these areas as residents and seasonal visitors, respectively, and Haredim have articulated both enchantment with and estrangement from both places. Haredi writings about the West Bank and Switzerland reveal ways in which Haredim have constituted symbolic and tangible space and grappled with the importance of religious and political geography. Exploring internal Haredi discussions about the limits of Haredi space in places as disparate as the West Bank and Switzerland offers a lens with which to understand the broader postwar spatial development of the global Jewish population’s fastest growing segment.

Ayala Fader, Professor of Anthropology at the Fordham University, will respond to the paper.

Brett Levi is a PhD candidate in the Department of Hebrew & Judaic Studies and Taub Center for Israel Studies at New York University. He holds a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied History, Jewish Studies, and History of Art, and a master’s degree from Harvard University, where he was awarded the Center for Middle Eastern Studies 2013 prize for best master’s thesis for his paper “Hasidic Geopolitics and the Greater Land of Israel: Israeli Hasidic Rebbes Encounter the West Bank, Gaza, and Territorial Withdrawal, 1982–2013.” Brett is a Graduate Research Fellow at the Center for Jewish History in the 2018-19 academic year.

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