It Goes with(out) Saying: How Haredi Jews in Israel “Break the Silence” of Sexual Violence

“Breaking the silence” is a rallying cry commonly adopted for activist causes. Seeking to unpack this opaque trope, this article asks what happens when dismantling silence is desired but at the same time obstructed by compromised sociolinguistic resources and incompatible language ideologies. I draw on an ethnographic study of the emergent and underresearched anti–sexual violence undertaking among Haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) in Israel to demonstrate the analytic value of a linguistic anthropological approach to “breaking the silence.” While Haredi activists and professionals raise this banner, they face pragmatic dilemmas concerning how exactly to speak modestly about an unspeakable and “immodest” subject. Thus, they strategically propagate the imperative to speak up while adapting their talk by both sanitizing relevant discourses and engaging intensively with metatalk. Theirs is a formidable effort to “break the silence” without breaking core rules of Haredi talk. I suggest that to understand this labor, we should not only focus on the Haredi cultural morals of modesty and sexuality but also consider the cultural morals about speaking itself. The broader intervention is the argument that the way people feel and think about language and idealize themselves as speaking people shapes the manners in which they break the silence.