CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Sarah Bunin Benor (Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion): "Hyperaccommodation, Avoidance, and the 'Bungee Effect': Language Socialization Among Newly Orthodox Jews" November 14, 2007, 5pm. Place: Haines Hall 332.

Jews who choose to become Orthodox as adults (known as BTs) are positioned in a cultural borderlands between the non-Orthodox communities they have left and the lifelong Orthodox Jews they can never become. Based on ethnographic and sociolinguistic fieldwork in a strictly Orthodox community in Philadelphia, this paper examines cultural strategies BTs use to negotiate their liminal state as they progress throgh stages of socialization into Orthodox communities. Language plays a major role in their integration process, as they selectively deploy elements of the ethno-religious linguistic repertoire available to Orthodox Jews: English with influences from Yiddish and Hebrew.