Dr. Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar is a senior lecturer at Sapir Academic College in Sderot, Israel, where she teaches courses on research methods, communication, religion, and gender. She is also a scholar at the Israel Democracy Institute, where she studies media usage among the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. In 2024-2025, she was a Ruth Melzer fellow at Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Ben-Shahar investigates mass media from the perspectives of religion and gender. Her research addresses the tensions existing between religious values and new technologies among women in Old Order Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. 

The Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities have typically been associated with strict religious observance, a renunciation of worldly things, and an obedience of women to men. Women’s relationship to media in these communities, however, betrays a more nuanced picture of the boundaries at play and women’s roles in negotiating them. Strictly Observant: Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Women Negotiating Media presents a compelling ethnographic study of the complex dynamic between women in both the Pennsylvanian Old Order Amish and Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities and contemporary media technologies. These women regularly establish valuable social, cultural, and religious capital through the countless decisions for use and nonuse of media that they make in their daily lives, and in ways that challenge the gender hierarchies of each community. By exhibiting a deep awareness of how media can be managed to increase their social and religious reputations, these women prompt us to reconsider our outmoded understanding of the Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, the role that women play in these communities as agents of change, and our own relationship to media today.