Religious Materiality, Sensational Forms, and Counter- Counterpublics: Films By and For Jewish Women Only

• In Event: New Directions in Studies of Orthodoxy

Abstract

This paper explores the genre of films being produced by Orthodox Jewish women and intended to be viewed only by other women as a key form of “sensational" religious materiality and a counter- counterpublic sphere of religious action. These films not only encapsulate the key elements of religion, including myth, ritual, and moral values (Lyden 2003), but also present “sensational forms,” or, experiences that “induce religious modes of sensing, feeling, and making sense that effect the very ‘beyond’ that is posited and form the people addressed as believers” to audiences (Meyer 2015). Sensational films thus work “to render tangible and accessible a professed transcendent and situate it in the world” (Meyer 2020). Focusing on religious films as a key form of and forum for religious materiality moves us away from not only a Protestant-style bias focused on the role of interior belief and disregard for “entertainment” media, but also a simple “religion and [+] media” instrumentalist approach.

Further, films produced by and for Orthodox Jewish women, while broadly part of the religious counterpublic media of Orthodox Jewry, are specifically centered in a gendered, COUNTER- counterpublic sphere of Orthodoxy. Shown at gender segregated spaces at Jewish film festivals, described in Jewish newspapers, and available online for purchase, this media is intended to stand apart from the media found in both a secular public sphere and the media sphere of Orthodox Jewish men.


Among the best-known and most successful producers of these films in the United States is Robyn Garbose. In this paper I describe the highlights and messages within her three feature films, all enacted by young women from Garbose’s religiously-observant Jewish drama school Kol Neshama (founded in 2000 in Los Angeles). The films include A Light for Greytowers (2007), The Heart that Sings (2011), and Operation: Candlelight (2014). These films speak to the sensational religiosity experienced by the actors and audiences alike in the counter- counterpublic of Orthodox Jewish women.

Author

• Celia Rothenberg, McMaster University