Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:
- The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Belgium’s ban on the wearing of partial and full-face veils in public places does not contravene the European Convention on Human Rights, citing the importance of “living together” in its opinion.
- A new Michigan law imposes tough penalties on doctors who perform female genital mutilation procedures as well as the victims’ parents.
- The Indian Supreme Court has halted the implementation of the federal government’s proposed ban on the selling of cows for slaughter, which was widely seen as targeting Muslims.
- Malta has legalized gay marriage.
- A South African investigative commission has recommended that religious practice be strictly regulated, although several religious organizations have indicated that they will challenge any such laws in the country’s highest court if necessary.
- Police in the Philippines have discussed issuing identity cards to Muslims as government forces continue to besiege a city seized by Islamists loyal to ISIS.
How did American Jewish men experience manhood, and how did they present their masculinity to others? In this distinctive book, Sarah Imhoff shows that the project of shaping American Jewish manhood was not just one of assimilation or exclusion. Jewish manhood was neither a mirror of normative American manhood nor its negative, effeminate opposite. Imhoff demonstrates how early 20th-century Jews constructed a gentler, less aggressive manhood, drawn partly from the American pioneer spirit and immigration experience, but also from Hollywood and the YMCA, which required intense cultivation of a muscled male physique. She contends that these models helped Jews articulate the value of an acculturated American Judaism. Tapping into a rich historical literature to reveal how Jews looked at masculinity differently than Protestants or other religious groups, Imhoff illuminates the particular experience of American Jewish men.
of Jews left the Jewish fold—by becoming Christians or, in liberal states, by intermarrying. Telling the stories of both famous and obscure individuals, Leaving the Jewish Fold explores the nature of this drift and defection from Judaism in Europe and America from the eighteenth century to today. Arguing that religious conviction was rarely a motive for Jews who became Christians, Todd Endelman shows that those who severed their Jewish ties were driven above all by pragmatic concerns—especially the desire to escape the stigma of Jewishness and its social, occupational, and emotional burdens.