Page 104 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

tion of Shas as embedded within a broader t’shuva movement or of t’shuva as
embedded within the ethnic renewal, which Shas has led. In common with so-
cial movements generally, the t’shuva movement uses multifarious means of
communication and organization—adopting a capillary approach to social mo-
bilization as opposed to the hierarchical methods used by conventional politi-
cal parties or trade unions, or the Ashkenazi haredim—whose communal ac-
tivity is much more subject to rabbinical control and therefore leaves less space
5
for initiative and entrepreneurship (El-Or 1994). This t’shuva movement lives
by trusting its emissaries, and by drawing them from its “target population.”
A movement spreads by capitalizing on points of commonality with a range
of constituencies as much as by broadcasting a message. Thus the emissaries
or activists of Shas have a language in common with the second- and third-
generation Sephardim, but they also have a common taste in Oriental popular
music with some, and a common taste in Oriental liturgical music with others;
with some they may share a hostility to the secular establishment, with others
to the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) establishment; they develop characteristic ways
of dressing, characteristic headgear (black velvet skull caps), and, as Nissim
Leon (1999, 2000, 2001) explains, a characteristic language so that gradually
people ¤nd multiple ways of joining, of being part of the ®ow. In all these niches
of social life the movement’s activists introduce an unfamiliar innovative set of
signs, symbols, emblems, and markers, by joining a haredi motif with elements
of secular Israeli culture which have been kept at arm’s length by the Ashkenazi
haredim: they bring in army slang; they bring in the jargon of t’shuva (with, for
example, special terms to describe newcomers, the ones who “need strengthen-
ing,” the ones whose strength “is con¤rmed”); they adopt slight but signi¤cant
variations in speech, accentuating Sephardi, or conceivably pseudo-Sephardi,
pronunciation (Leon 2000).
The pattern can be described as the conformation of a movement’s identity
by the creation of unaccustomed, innovative symbolic and behavioral allu-
sions across previously or otherwise watertight boundaries, and this is facili-
tated by the recourse to the media. The role of the broadcast media in promoting
the movement arises not only, perhaps not principally, from the size of their
audience, especially in this case where television is excluded for reasons of re-
ligious principle, and where the radios are mostly shoestring operations that rely
heavily on phone-in programs and have a limited range. Rather, the media pro-
vide more markers for the movement and its followers: the regularity of pro-
grams, the consistent tone or content of programs broadcast at certain times of
the day on certain frequencies, the differentiation of the audience into t’shuva-
de¤ned segments, and, perhaps above all, the bridge provided by these media
between public and private spheres, all contribute in making radio stations and
cassettes integral parts of the movement of ethnic and religious renewal.
Stated more simply, the use of media characteristic of popular culture, namely,
radio and cassette tapes, of itself provides an interface between religion and the
ethnic group most identi¤ed with “the popular” in Israel. In appealing to Se-
phardim, and among them often to young people whom they regard as mired

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