While scholars have highlighted how science communication reifies forms of structural inequality, especially race and gender, we examine the challenges science communication pose for religious minorities. Drawing on the disproportionate magnitude of COVID-19-related morbidity on Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox Jews, we examined their processes of COVID-19 health decision making. Survey results show that both religious and health-related justifications were common for personal decisions, yet a disparity was found between the ways social distancing guidelines were perceived in the general education context compared with the religious context, signaling the importance for inclusive models of science communication that account for religious sensibilities and state-minority relations.

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This article examines the varying ways religious devotees utilize, negotiate, embrace, and reject religious authorities in their everyday lives. Ethnographically exploring the ways that Orthodox Jews share reproductive decisions with rabbinic authorities, I demonstrate how some sanctify rabbinic rulings, while others dismiss them, or continue to “shop around” until they find a rabbinic opinion that resonates with their personal desires. These negotiations of religious authority and ethical freedom are worked out across a biographical trajectory, opening new possibilities to explore how religious authority fluctuates and changes over the life course. I argue that analysis of engagement with rabbis without attention to the inner diversity of interpretations and practices perpetuates a hegemonic and overly harmonious picture of religious authority. Highlighting these variations, I show how the process of consultation was more significant than mere submission to religious rulings. Religious consultation, in itself, then constitutes a significant node for making an ethical Jewish life. Attending to these aspects of religious authority has great potential to further develop and contextualize the field of ethical freedom while complicating binary models of submission versus resistance. My approach demonstrates the need to broaden our anthropological tools to better understand the ways individuals share everyday decisions with mediators of authoritative knowledge. [religious authority, ethics, reproduction, gender, Judaism]