Constructing Orthodoxy


 

Publication Date: January 1981

Publisher: Transaction Publishers

Author(s): Samuel C. Heilman

Research Area: Culture and religion

Keywords: American Jews; Religious denominations

Type: Report

Coverage: United States

Abstract:

The purpose of this article is to examine a critical dimension of the mechanisms by which modern Orthodox Jews have carried out their cosmological oscillations: reinterpretation. The increased mobility, education, and accompanying general involvement of Orthodox Jews in contemporary America, along with a "contraacculturative" trend toward flamboyant and aggressive assertions of ethnic Orthodoxy, placed such reinterpretation of past and present and the continuity it allows among perhaps the most crucial ideological tasks for the traditionalist moderns.