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Vol. 21 No. 1 (2024)
Educational Review: International Journal

Articles

Religious Socialization and Female Subjectivity: Religious-Zionist Adolescent Girls in Israel

Published 2025-11-02

  • Tamar Rapoport
    • ,
  • Yoni Garb
    • ,
  • Anat Penso

Tamar Rapoport
Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Yoni Garb
Jewish history and Middle Eastern studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Anat Penso
Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Abstract

A study examined the link between religiosity, gender and subjectivity in religious Zionist education in Israel. The analysis revealed that the girls' daily experiences of modesty and their anticipated experience of being wives and mothers shaped a religious subjectivity that is subject to divine law and the male world. Judaism, like other religious-cultural contexts, plays a pivotal role in shaping girlhood-womanhood by means of its educational institutions and socialization practices. The religious understanding of gender and female sexuality in Judaism and its constraints on girls and women are diffused by such all-encompassing institutions and practices. This fact raises the issue of how religious conceptions, as transmitted by these socialization agencies, are embedded in the everyday experiences and subjectivity of girls. Specifically, the study presented in this article explored how adolescent religious girls in Israel translate the conception of girlhood and womanhood, as filtered through their religious-Zionist education, into their selfhood and how they contend with it.

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