From Jerusalem to Côte d'Ivoire-Rachel Feldman Talk

From Jerusalem to Côte d'Ivoire:The Post-Colonial Afterlives of Rebbe Nachman and the Theo-Politics of Hasidic Joy

Feldman explores the postcolonial afterlives of Rebbe Nachman of Breslev (1772–1810) through ethnographic research conducted with communities reviving Breslev Hasidism in Montréal, Paris, Jerusalem, and Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. In the twenty-first century, digital platforms have facilitated the emergence of a transnational Francophone Breslev movement, generating new religious identities among French Sephardic Jews and West African converts alike—communities shaped by the enduring legacies of French colonial rule.

Across these settings, Rebbe Nachman’s eighteenth-century teachings are reinterpreted as practices of spiritual repair that respond to histories of religious and cultural erasure, whether through French laïcité, racialization, or Christian missionization. Breslev joy (simḥah) is discursively configured as “anti-Occident,” imagined as the antithesis of French secular modernity and mobilized as a theo-political resource. Dr. Rachel Z. Feldman is an Associate Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College. She specializes in the anthropology of Judaism, messianic movements, digital religion, contemporary Israel/Palestine, and gender studies.

Her book Messianic Zionism in the Digital Age: Jews, Noahides, and the Third Temple Imaginary (Rutgers University Press, 2024) received a Book Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion from the American Academy of Religion (2025), as well as a Jordan Schnitzer First Book Award (2023) from the Association for Jewish Studies