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Gender and the (In)divisibility of Contested Sacred Places: The Case of Women for the Temple

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 May 2017

Lihi Ben Shitrit
Lihi Ben Shitrit*
Affiliation:
The University of Georgia
*
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Lihi Ben Shitrit, The University of Georgia, School of Public and International Affairs, 204 Candler Hall, Athens, GA 30602. E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

Contested sacred sites, over which different religious groups assert claims to exclusivity, have drawn scholarly attention to the spatial interaction between religion and politics. However, the gendered dimensions of inter-communal religious-political disputes over sacred space, and women's roles in these site-specific conflicts, have been largely neglected. Using a case study of Orthodox Jewish women's activism for access to Temple Mount al-Haram al-Sharif, this article demonstrates how attention to gender and to women's engagement in inter-communal conflict over sacred places can illuminate unique intra-communal processes that aim to make a contested sacred site increasingly indivisible for parties to the conflict.

Type
Articles
Information
Politics and Religion , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , December 2017 , pp. 812 - 839
Copyright
Copyright © Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association 2017 

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Footnotes

I would like to thank the Sarah H. Moss Fellowship at the University of Georgia, and the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa for supporting the fieldwork for this article. Thank you also to Mona Tajali, Mahmoud Jaraba, Jan Feldman, Heidi Basch-Harod, Margaret Brabant, Irem Güney-Frahm, Ron Hassner, Isak Svensson, the participants in the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies 2017 seminar, and the three anonymous reviewers for their feedback.

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