A Response to Elihu Katz's "Two Dilemmas of Religious Identity and Practice Among Israeli Jews."

A response to Elihu Katz's Marshall Sklare Award address, "Two Dilemmas of Religious Identity & Practice among Israeli Jews," points out difficulties surrounding the meaning of the term "religious identity" & problematic aspects of attempting to empirically measure r...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Contemporary Jewry 2007-10, Vol.27 (1), p.170-171
Main Author: Klausner, Samuel Z.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Israel
Jews
Religiosity
Religious Behavior
Religious identity
Religious practices
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Summary:A response to Elihu Katz's Marshall Sklare Award address, "Two Dilemmas of Religious Identity & Practice among Israeli Jews," points out difficulties surrounding the meaning of the term "religious identity" & problematic aspects of attempting to empirically measure religious observance. The validity of dissonance theory is also challenged, contending that dissonance tends to be in the mind of the researcher just as often as it is in the mind of the research subject. It is suggested that religiousness & observances might better be conceptualized in terms of Max Weber's classic theory of types of action & legitimation of an order. A look at Katz's use of the Guttman Scale to rank his typologies notes that the types being ranked had been preconstructed by combining a religious-identity element with a religious-observance element; however, it is the correlation between these elements that should be scaled rather than the ordering among them because the pre-structuring of the types conceals that correlation. The need for more non-Jewish researchers of Jewish religious behavior is discussed. J. Lindroth
ISSN:0147-1694
1876-5165
DOI:10.1007/BF02965551