Jewish Geographies: Spatial Narratives of Orthodox Jewish Leavetakers in Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Through interviews with twenty self-described leavetakers from a wide range of Orthodox Jewish lifestyles in Toronto, Canada, this dissertation argues that leavetaking from normative Orthodox Judaism does not mean exiting Judaism or even stopping observance completely. Study data illustrates how leavetakers instead embark on individual journeys towards what they perceive as greater personal Jewish authenticity. They do so by restructuring their Jewishness from a perspective coloured anew by their leavetaking trajectories. Their experiences living in their old normatively Orthodox community, leaving these communities, and returning to Jewish Toronto post-disaffiliation to maintain contact with their families of origin all contribute to their new Jewish identities. Using a framework highlighting the effects of spatial and social Jewish Geography on disaffiliation and identity change, I adapt sociologist Wayne Brekhus’ typologies of gay identity disclosure in my investigation of Orthodox leavetaking trajectories. In addition, by expanding inclusion criteria to include both Haredi and other observant leavetakers towards a broader “Orthodox” participant sample, this research addresses a wider discourse on permeable religious boundaries than existing scholarship on leaving Judaism typically offers. My analysis uncovers a variety of local models for changing religiosity, from firm rejection of normative observance to break-taking and eventual return to an amended Orthodoxy and beyond. Leavetakers seek out and develop for themselves an adjacent “other Jewishness” sometimes still within observant Judaism but distinctly different from normative Orthodoxy, finding that established denominational categories do not correspond with their reconstituted Judaism. These narratives offer profound insights into what post-leavetaking Judaism looks like for disaffiliates who find themselves in indeterminate spaces still within Judaism—not outside of it.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".