Page 114 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

neiro, São Paulo, Santiago, Caracas, and Buenos Aires. But these are directed
inevitably at middle-class people, and operate in a parochial Jewish cultural ¤eld
in the diaspora, not in a national cultural space as is possible in Israel. Indeed,
it is striking that Chabad, though it has extensive operations in Israel, including
an entire settlement known as Kfar Chabad, and although its methods have
been borrowed by sections of the t’shuva movement (especially the Or HaChay-
yim educational network which is closely identi¤ed with Shas), does not have
a high pro¤le there—for example, in radio or other media. The Israeli t’shuva
movement, in contrast, has developed not just as a “conversion” (or “reversion”)
movement but also as a form of cultural dissidence vis-à-vis the Ashkenazi
secular elite, and with Shas as its vanguard and political wing has been able to
marshal an ethnically based electorate and large-scale state ¤nance to fuel its
advance.
The con®uence of popular culture, religious renewal, and multimedia inter-
vention is well represented in the ¤gure of Amnon Yitzchak. Yitzchak is a one-
man road show: his cassettes are distributed for free at street intersections; he
makes CDs of his appearances in Israel, England, and the U.S.; and his personal
appearances in Israel seem calculated to challenge or offend the country’s cul-
tural elite. Like evangelists in other religious traditions and other places (Bir-
man and Lehmann 1999), he uses shock tactics in a symbolic anti-elitist cru-
sade, for example, by hiring venues usually occupied by symphony orchestras
and international theater groups. When he hired Tel-Aviv’s Hichal Hatarbut
(Temple of Culture) legal challenges were (unsuccessfully) taken right up to the
Supreme Court to stop his appearance there, and the audience at his—by now
unchallenged—appearance in the equally highbrow Jerusalem Theater audito-
rium in November 2001 were gleefully treated to a video of those very protests.
To support his campaign against television, another symbol of Israeli secular
culture, Yitzchak promises that anyone who throws out his or her TV will re-
ceive a free copy of the Babylonian Talmud (Talmud Babli), and to demonstrate
the success of his evangelizing campaign, he exhibits a box of earrings and
ponytails discarded by women and men (respectively) who have converted at
his public meetings. (“Throwing the television out” is a metaphor, or at least
a rhetorical device: ultra-Orthodox people still watch approved videos, for ex-
ample, in community centers. Yitzchak’s target audience, however, are people
who still have a long way to go before their “conversion” has reached the point
of literally throwing out the television.)
Yitzchak’s Yemeni origin is central to his mediatic persona: his accent iden-
ti¤es him with that underprivileged and Oriental sector of society, and he wears
a djellaba with unique accoutrements, including a skull cap which he jokingly
refers to as his “antenna.” He litters his addresses with wordplay, talking of the
“temblevisia” instead of the “televisia”—an allusion to the mind-numbing ef-
12
fects of television —and likening (George W.) Bush’s name to the Hebrew word
for embarrassment—busha. Yitzchak manages to soften stark choices and thick
boundaries, presenting t’shuva as a gradual puri¤cation of social relations, with
an emphasis on joining a new community rather than on breaking bonds with

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