Thursday, October 29, 12noon-1:30pm, this on-line event requires advance registration

From Orthodox Protestants in The Netherlands to Amish and Orthodox Jews in the USA, lower-level vaccination coverage among religious minorities in the global north has emerged as a major public health challenge. Recent measles epidemics, too, have raised questions about managing religious difference or “exemption” in liberal societies, notably concerning legislation and mandates in the USA. Yet, to what extent is it appropriate to conceptualise this issue as a case of “religious opposition” to vaccination?

Drawing on an ethnographic study of vaccine decision-making among Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel-Palestine, this paper explores how vaccines are entangled in contested and shifting ideas of religious transgression and authenticity. Whereas parents broadly condemned non-vaccination as a transgression of Jewish law, parents who refused vaccines on the grounds of safety consolidated their positions by drawing on the same laws to frame non-vaccination as a religious imperative. Common criticism surrounding biomedical technologies then discursively “converts” in religiously Orthodox settings, producing evolving claims of moral opposition and rights to religious freedom.

Dr. Ben Kasstan is a Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a Research Associate in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex. A medical anthropologist with a research background in global and public health, he has conducted fieldwork in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Israel, Lesotho, The Gambia and Nigeria. Dr. Kasstan’s first book, Making Bodies Kosher: The Politics of Reproduction among Haredi Jews in England, examines the ways in which Haredi Jews negotiate healthcare services; Making Bodies Kosher is available as an open-access publication through the publisher, Berghahn Books.

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Sponsored by OSU Center for the Study of Religion.