Michal Kravel Tovi

Small things loom large as a distinct category in social and cultural analysis. However, the social construction and effects of this idiom of scale commonly remain vague and underexplored. Bringing the literature on quantification in conversation with the literature on scale-making, this article offers a theoretically-informed analysis of how smallness consolidates as a publicly salient social attribute, and how it feeds collective narratives. The empirical focus is on American Jewry-an ethnoreligious minority group whose leaders and experts have invested in its quantification, including its representation as a small population. Drawing on a variety of texts and images, as well as on interviews and fieldwork, I show that American Jewish research bodies and public figures engage in a myriad of comparative arithmetic exercises and spectacles of scale to assert the smallness of the population. Deploying smallness as a generative narrative tool allows them to engage with the ambivalences implicated in the American-Jewish post-Holocaust, minority, and diasporic experience. In particular, exercises around notions of numerical negligibility, disproportional success, and numerical inferiority elicit protean narratives around endangerment, power, and a questioned diasporic future. The broader theoretical intervention of this article is to offer scalemaking as a valuable prism for understanding the narrative potency and poignancy of arithmetically-based constructs such as smallness. Instead of emphasizing the assumed epistemological strengths of numbers, this article considers the narrative work that statistics do when they lend themselves to multimodal scaling. It argues that through scaling, statistics are infused with perspective, relevance and meaning, descriptively and prescriptively.

This article employs the prism of gift-exchange to analyse the marginalised status of singles within social relations. We trace an emerging critique voiced by single women, who challenge the unilateral etiquette of gifting marital and family-making celebrations. While dominant social norms normalise gift-giving at weddings and subsequent family-related occasions, there are no commensurable opportunities for singles to receive back their accumulative investments in the life events of others. Drawing on various online sources, we explore the discursive articulations through which single women highlight the unfairness that underpins their position as constant givers. We show how single women manage the social risks that such public complaints entail, and how they claim to be worthy receivers themselves. This article offers singlehood as a valuable case study for engaging with broader questions concerning reciprocity-specifically, what happens when reciprocal gifting is not an established norm within ostensibly reciprocal social relations.

Over the last three decades, the American Jewish communal public sphere has been flooded with sociodemographic concerns about numerical decline, and a sense of threatened ability to maintain a vibrant collective life. This article argues that this discursive site functions as a means, or technique, for the emotionalisation of Jewish identity and citizenship in the community. The article shows that public discourses on what is known by now as 'the Jewish continuity crisis' are shaped by an emotionalising feature of anxiety. Anxiety serves, all at once, as a tone-setter, an anchor of communal identity, and an object of debate: it sets an intensified volume, assigns its interlocutors particular emotionalised tags, and has also provoked its own fire as an emotional style. On the one hand, the organised community struggles with-that is, it suffers from-deeply entrenched anxieties about how to secure the future of American Jewry. On the other hand, the organised community struggles with having anxiety as such a defining position from which to work towards continuity and to articulate Jewishness. Ultimately, continuity is often taken as a communal struggle, with demographic and affiliation trends, but anxiety is in itself a source of struggle as well. I analyse this double-edged public dynamic, and argue that emotionality in itself constitutes a key component of involvement in the Jewish community. This component develops not only along and against the grain of anxiety, but also against the grain of indifference.

Over the last three decades, the organized American-Jewish community has preoccupied itself with socio-demographic concerns regarding maintenance of a viable Jewish life in the United States. In this article, I study a key dimension of this preoccupation with population trends: the quantity of the Jewish population, that is, the number of Jews. I show the centrality of this dimension in shaping a cluster of anxious discourses and interventionist engagements directed toward stemming numerical decline. Analyzing this policy world in terms of a “Jewish biopolitics,” I assess how the voluntary nature of American
Jewry has shaped a distinct biopolitical field, reliant on “making Jews” by both biological and cultural reproduction, enmeshing dimensions of quantity and quality. Juxtaposing this Jewish biopolitical engagement with the one exercised by the Israeli state, I flesh out broader considerations and contributions, and introduce the exploratory concept of “minority community biopolitics.” The article is grounded in an anthropological study of policy, including fieldwork, interviews,
and a review of the flurry of archival and public materials related to the topic.

This ethnographic article complicates the common wisdom that the American Jewish elite cares " obsessively " about its constituents' numbers. The article shows the ways in which population numbers matter to American Jewish leaders but also how they matter differently to various sectors of the community. Alongside those who are eager speakers of the language of quantification, there are those who feel unease with what, they feel, creates a reductive and irrelevant conversation about Jewish life in the United States. The article argues that by using the language of numbers and debating affectively over its value, American Jews debate who they are as a collective and struggle to define what counts for the future of the community as a highly diverse, shifting, and assimilating minority group. Building on the metaphor of " accounting of the soul " —one prevalent in religious and public discourses calling to Jews to look at their inner-soul workings—the article suggests that numbers serve as an effective and affective proxy for divergent communal calculations and reflections. American Jewry presents a compelling case study with which to think through the affective attitudes toward quantification, the cultural value of numbers, and the polyvalent work that they do for collectives.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Jewish conversion agents and activists in Israel between 2004 and 2007, this article argues that state-run Jewish conversion provides a constructive institutional arena for religious Zionists to rework their active citizenship, in both the Israeli state and the religious Zionism movement. To the extent that Israel offers a compelling case for understanding how and why the politics of religious conversion intersect with the legal and bureaucratic dynamics of the modern nation-state, it also allows us to unpack the identity work of those who take it upon themselves to embody the morals and ambitions of the Jewish state. I draw on anthropological writing on the state and citizenship to argue that, by working institutionally on behalf of the state and investing itself in a goal assumed to secure its future, the religious Zionist community attempts to reaffirm the idea of " national responsibility " —a discursive construct that underwrites its interdependent relationship with the Israeli state. Such a reaffirmation is of particular importance in light of the volatile struggles it has had with and within the state over Israel's political and religious policies. [The Over the last two decades, Jewish giyyur (conversion) policy in Israel has become popularly identified as a " national mission " —an urgent, Zionist-driven, state-endorsed endeavor. This concept was first formally introduced into the bureaucratic, political, and public discourses on conversion in 2003, when the then prime minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, used it to frame the conversion of non-Jewish immigrants who had arrived en masse from the former Soviet Union (FSU), naturalizing as Israeli citizens under the expanded repatriation law. Although the involvement of the Israeli state in the conversion of newcomers is not new, it was only in the wake of extensive waves of non-Jewish FSU immigration to Israel in the late 1980s and 1990s that this involvement in Jewish conversion took on the scale and meaning of a highly prioritized, proconversion national mission. Interestingly, the vast majority of conversion agents and activists attending to, and speaking in the name of, Israel's conversion national mission are identified as religious Zionists. Within this rubric, they work as civil servants on behalf of the state's policy, while investing themselves in a goal that they believe will benefit Israel as a Jewish and Zionist state. The dominance of religious Zionism in this framework is reflected in the sociological makeup of the government institutions in charge of conversion (i.e., conversion courts, conversion schools, ritual baths, and various government ministries), as well as at the grassroots level: volunteer rabbis and public figures, nonprofit associations, and the host families and communities who support candidates throughout the conversion process. In this article, I draw attention to the evident dominance of religious Zionism in this state policy field, and ask how and why members of this particular group have taken it upon themselves to operationalize the national mission, and to embody the ambitions of

The idea that Jewish conversion might be unessential seems both provocative and counterintuitive. After all, within the dictates of Jewish law (halakha), conversion is the single path to Jewish belonging and recognition. And from Jewish perspectives (those of the Jewish state, Jewish communities, authorities, institutions, and families), conversion is often construed as an indispensable policy route. Yet, in this short essay I suggest that in contemporary Jewish life, formal conversion is in the process of losing its role as an exclusive or even dominant ticket to Jewish identity and inclusion. By juxtaposing two prime settings in which Jewish conversion is intensely debated and enacted, the Israeli and the American-Jewish, I hope to show how, under fading boundaries and shifting realities of Jewish belonging, formal conversion begins to lose its criticality. I choose to focus on these particular settings because of their centrality in Jewish politics, religion, and demography, as well as because of their remarkably different circumstances: The Israeli context of the nation-state, where religious conversion is embedded within state bureaucracy, and the American-Jewish context, the largest diasporic Jewish community, where Jewish conversion is linked with voluntarism. To begin with, why does conversion matter or why is it considered essential? From the point of view of non-Jews or aspiring converts, the stakes attached to conversion are considerable. In Israel, the stakes are particularly high, as conversion involves state-endorsed bureaucratic and

Most scholarship on Jewish conversion in Israel emphasizes the precarious entanglement between the process and the politics of the Jewish State. This article, instead, unpacks the uncertain modes of converts’ belonging from an unexplored yet central angle – that of a Jewish habitus. I trace the challenging apprenticeship that aspiring converts undertake in developing a Jewish habitus, and the deeply
ambiguous modes of belonging that such an apprenticeship shapes. By evaluating ethnographically the discourses and practices that aspiring converts are introduced to, this article detects how attempts to help them adopt the Jewish insiders’ embodied dispositions and materially embedded engagements simultaneously, albeit inadvertently, mark them as profoundly outsiders. The case study of Jewish conversion in Israel offers a compelling example with which to consider the
conceptual links between belonging, habitus and conversion.

Anthropologists have long displayed interest in the tension between choice and coer-cion in processes of religious conversion. In this article, I draw from ethnographic work in contemporary Israel to explore the ways in which this tension animates pedagogic formations of Orthodox Jewish conversion. I argue that conversion teachers' concerns are rooted in the tension they identify between the religious ideal scripts of Jewish conversion, as an individual voluntary act, and governing religiopolitical state structures of conversion. I show how teachers insist on the image of the willing convert, while simultaneously considering, albeit with limited effect, the withered resonance that these images hold in the lived experience of their students. By contextualizing and analyzing the 'problem of choice' besetting conversion teachers, this article sheds light on some of the underlying forces that influence how non-Jews become Jews in the Jewish state.

Viewing religious conversion through the lens of exchange rather than change calls attention to the web of interactions, practices, and discourses that constitute conversion as a relational domain. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork that straddles the institutionalized interface of state-run Jewish
conversion in Israel, I show how the conversion process constitutes a reciprocal transaction by which each party to the exchange—the state and its subjects—provides the other with national recognition while also receiving and thus validating
its own national identity. I trace the historical and political circumstances that have entangled the Jewish state and a significant cohort of Jewish converts within this reciprocal relationship. In doing so, I identify the biopolitical, moral, and
bureaucratic frameworks that bear on this institutional transaction. [conversion, reciprocity, exchange, biopolitics, bureaucracy, ethnography of the state, Jews, Israel]

Gauri Viswanathan’s notion of religious conversion as an ‘unsettling’ political event has recently figured prominently in the scholarship on conversion. However, although numerous scholars have productively applied Viswanathan’s understanding in their work, primarily in the context of
conversion to religious minorities within the nation-state, to focus too heavily on conversion’s unsettling effects risks overlooking political constellations in which it might have rather settling effects. In contrast to the scholarly focus on conversion’s disruptive qualities, this article offers an
ethnographic account of the ‘settling’ ambitions and logics that underwrite the state politics of Jewish conversion (giur) in contemporary Israel. By looking ethnographically into the mundane discursive, pedagogic, and bureaucratic processes through which the Jewish state converts non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, I demonstrate how religious conversion works to restore the bureaucratic logic of Israeli nationalism, thereby reinstating unambiguous forms of
Jewish belonging. Religious conversion can also be an act of taxonomic repair.

On the basis of an ethnographic analysis of the state-run Jewish conversion project in Israel, I address the question of how bureaucrats come to know the subjects they serve. By analyzing how state agents construct the bureaucratic encounter with converts as a dramaturgical exchange, I
theorize performance as an institutional mechanism
through which bureaucratic knowledge is produced.
The notion of “dramaturgy” sheds light not only on
the everyday practices of state governmental power
but also on the fragile, collaborative dynamics that
underwrite the bureaucratic encounter. Such an
analysis offers to complicate the notion of “power/knowledge” so often associated with bureaucratic institutions. [bureaucracy, ethnography of the state, Israel, passing, performance, power/knowledge, religious conversion]

A large number of non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union have arrived in Israel since the late 1980s. This article explores how the Israeli State has responded to this perceived demographic threat by endorsing a pro-Jewish conversion policy targeted at this population of new citizens. By analysing a variety of ethnographic and textual materials,
I trace the organizational processes and discursive practices through which conversion has been crafted into a ‘national mission’: an all encompassing state endeavour whose impetus is a national-Zionist biopolitics. The Foucauldian concept of biopolitics offers a novel way to understand the interface between religious conversion and the nation state.
Specifically, it positions the concept of population as a primary
analytical category, thereby enabling us to understand religious conversion as a mechanism of national population policy.

The study explores how the meshichistim (messianics) among the Jewish ultra-orthodox Chabad (Lubavitch) Hasidim manage the rupture entailed by the death of their leader, the Rebbe, whom they uphold as the King Messiah. Based on ethnographic research of contemporary pilgrimage to the Rebbe’s court in Brooklyn, whose rituals and pedagogical framework are constructed by the meshichistim, the
study problematizes the functional assumptions and implications of the rich literature on failed
prophecies in millenarian movements, a literature heavily influenced by the theoretical model of cognitive dissonance. The case of Chabad meshichistim suggests that a millenarian group can reinvent itself through multifaceted cultural, pedagogical and ritual endeavors that are rife with internal
contradictions. Moreover, these endeavors reveal that the rupture has not been balanced, regularized or
normalized, but rather expresses the continuous complexity of life in its shadow.

leaves explicitly undecided whether Paul wrote them as private correspondence or whether they envision public reading (which may affect one's interpretation and application). The commentary, accordingly, is philologically and theologically focused. Here, readers could have benefited from excursuses discussing the historical and rhetorical situations in which the words were written (e.g., cultural issues that may have occasioned 1 Tim 2:9-12). In all, this will be helpful for an audience looking to preach on the words of the text. But it leaves many important stones unturned that could aid preachers by giving thicker context to what the words were meant to communicate.

In her stimulating and engrossing book, Michal Kravel-Tovi deploys the classic anthropological concept of "winking," of signaling to others solicitation to be complicit in a performance, that while not sincere or real, is "sincere" or "real" enough to be treated as if it is. The study is an ethnography of the encounter between two deeply conflicted types of actors: 1) agents of the State of Israel, torn between a desire to increase the proportion of citizens that can be counted as Jewish, and a commitment to maintain the halachically based integrity of a "united" Jewish people; and 2) recruits for conversion to the status of countable Jews, torn between the desire to integrate more successfully into Israeli society, and resistance to following a strictly orthodox life style to which they must commit despite their resistance to doing so and their belief that they will almost certainly not follow through on the commitment.

One of social science's leading-and most complex-tasks is to question the habitual, expose the phenomenologically obvious, and isolate the events, life dynamics," and "essential" positions which have come to seem natural. This last is crucial because the transformation of an object, subjectivity, event, or mentality into what is "natural" dramatically enables the kind of control that establishes-and maintains-the most stable of personal and social orders. Carrying out their mission requires of social scientists extraordinary intellectual acumen and research ability. In her thoroughly documented, mesmerizingly

-  Honorable Mention and a Second Prize, 2018 Clifford Geertz Prize, Society for the
Anthropology of Religion Section of the American Anthropological Association
- Winner, 2018 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award, Association for Jewish Studies


Religious conversion is often associated with ideals of religious sincerity. But in a society in which religious belonging is entangled with ethnonational citizenship and confers political privilege, a convert might well have multilayered motives. Over the last two decades, mass non-Jewish immigration to Israel, especially from the former Soviet Union, has sparked heated debates over the Jewish state’s conversion policy and intensified suspicion of converts’ sincerity. When the State Winks carefully traces the performance of state-endorsed Orthodox conversion to highlight the collaborative labor that goes into the making of the Israeli state and its Jewish citizens.

In a rich ethnographic narrative based on fieldwork in conversion schools, rabbinic courts, and ritual bathhouses, Michal Kravel-Tovi follows conversion candidates—mostly secular young women from a former Soviet background—and state conversion agents, mostly religious Zionists caught between the contradictory demands of their nationalist and religious commitments. She complicates the popular perception that conversion is a “wink-wink” relationship in which both sides agree to treat the converts’ pretenses of observance as real. Instead, she demonstrates how their interdependent performances blur any clear boundary between sincere and empty conversions. Alongside detailed ethnography, When the State Winks develops new ways to think about the complex connection between religious conversion and the nation-state. Kravel-Tovi emphasizes how state power and morality is managed through “winking”—the subtle exchanges and performances that animate everyday institutional encounters between state and citizen. In a country marked by tension between official religiosity and a predominantly secular Jewish population, winking permits the state to save its Jewish face.

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