Performing Orthodoxy at Yeshiva University: Theoretical and Religious Implications of Impression Management in the YU Pride Alliance Conflict

• In Event: Queering Jewish and Israeli Identities

Abstract

Recent scholarly work from Coley (2018), Burrow Branine (2021), and Avishai (2023) respectively uses social movement theory, Foucauldian Counter-Conduct, and a broader Queer theory framework to understand how LGBTQ+ people who wish to remain in a socially conservative, religious milieu navigate their Queer and religious identities. This scholarship challenges assumptions about religion and sexuality and the ways in which LGBTQ+ individuals who wish to remain in socially conservative, religious settings navigate their Queer and religious identities and their places within communities of faith.
My work builds on existing scholarship about queer experiences and advocacy in religious spaces to examine the ongoing conflict between Yeshiva University’s administration and the YU Pride Alliance, Yeshiva University’s unofficial LGBTQ+ affinity group. In this piece, I focus on a uniquely Jewish theoretical interpretation of Erving Goffman’s concept of impression management, its’ relationship to the religious concept of Marat Ayin, and how the YU Pride Alliance members, as well as the YU administration “perform Orthodoxy” in the public sphere.
While The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), and much of Goffman’s other work on human behavior, does not explicitly deal with Jewish life and culture, I argue that impression management is built into Orthodox Jewish life in the form of Marat Ayin, and in the ways Jewish communal cohesion and continuity take on symbolic capital in Modern Orthodox life, which leads to social regulation and sets specific roles for community members if they wish to remain Orthodox or within Orthodox communities. This content analysis based examination will use interviews from student newspapers such as The YU Commentator and The YU Observer alongside mainstream and Jewish press coverage of the YU Pride Alliance conflict to consider the ways in which YU Pride Alliance members publicly perform Orthodox identity and use Jewish texts, scholars, and concepts to argue for a more inclusive Yeshiva University that shifts the habitus without destroying it.
Ideally this analysis will contribute and expand the fields of Jewish Studies and Jewish Education because it challenges assumptions about queer and religious identities and bridges gaps between theoretical and theological scholarship across disciplines.

Author

• Lindsay Metzker, Temple University