july 28th 2012 - the economist · july 28th 2012 special report ... population of the new state of...

July 28th 2012

S P E C I A L R E P O R T

J U D A I S M A N D T H E J E W S

Alive and well

JUDAISM.indd 1 16/07/2012 15:35

JUDAISM IS FLOURISHING, both in Israel, where 43% of the world’sJews now live, and throughout the Jewish diaspora. The Jews as a nationare �ourishing too. Israelis, for all their problems, are the 14th-happiestpeople in the world, happier than the British or the French, according to arecent global happiness report commissioned by the UN. In the diasporaJewish life has never been so free, so prosperous, so unthreatened.

In America an observant Jew, Senator Joseph Lieberman, ran forvice-president in 2000. With AlGore as candidate for president,he nearly made it. His Jewish faithwas no drawback, he says; rather,it appealed to many Christianvoters who take their own reli-gion seriously. Mr Lieberman andhis wife, Hadassah, �were dream-ing of a large suka� (a rustic hutcovered with branches in whichJews eat and entertain during theSukot harvest festival) in thegrounds of the vice-president’sresidence. �We felt we could beourselves.� Had he had gone onto run for the White House, as hehoped, �I’d have been observantthere, too.�

�Jewish is cool in America,�says J.J. Goldberg, a writer. �Ce-lebrities used to change theirnames to hide their Jewish identi-ty. Now they talk on televisionabout how they try to instil Jew-

ish identity into their half-Jewish children. Take [the actress] GwynethPaltrow. Her father is a descendant of rabbis; her mother is a Protestantfrom middle America. She writes in her food blog about her favourite ko-sher recipes for the seder [the family prayer-dinner celebrating the Pass-over spring festival]. Seders are popular with non-Jewish people. Bar-mitzva [the coming-of-age-ceremony] has become stylish, too. Kids see iton television; they see their friends having it�and they want it as well.�

In the smaller diaspora communities, too, Jews are prospering,though there is nowhere quite that same sense of complete, seamless be-longing as in America. In Russia and Ukraine, where Judaism and Zion-ism were repressed in communist times, Jews are prominent in business.Jewish philanthropy is rebuilding community life for those who opted tostay rather than emigrate to Israel or the West.

Israel and the Jewish diaspora, moreover, are in strong and loyalalignment. Diaspora Jews, broadly speaking, love and cherish Israel.They support it against its enemies, real and perceived, they back its gov-ernment and they resent its critics.

None of this could have been predicted just a few decades ago. Hit-ler had wiped out one-third of the Jewish people. A thousand years ofJewish civilisation in central and eastern Europe had been swept away.Fortunately for Jewish survival, the Nazis’ ��nal solution� had been pre-ceded by a �urry of pogroms across the then-tsarist empire that started60 years earlier, sending waves of mass Jewish emigration westward. Bythe time Hitler struck, some 6m Jews were safe in North and South Amer-

Alive and well

Judaism is enjoying an unexpected revival, says David Landau.

But there are deep religious and political divisions, mostly

centred on Israel

1

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

CONTENT S

Many people provided generous help

in the preparation of this report. In

addition to those mentioned in the

text, the author’s sincere thanks go

to: Marc Baker, Jonathan Boyd,

Micha Brumlik, James Carroll,

Maurice Dahan, Noach Dear, Motti

Friedman, Malcolm Hoenlein, Shahar

Ilan, Howard Jacobson, Laura

Janner-Klausner, Anthony Julius,

Matt King, Leya Landau, Orna

Landau, Jeremy Leigh, Gideon

Lich�eld, Vernen Lieberman, Ruth

Liechtenstein, Michael Melchior,

Jeremy Newmark, Daniella Peled,

George Rohr, Thierry Roos, Shmuel

Rosner, Christian Schuler-Beigang,

Zalman Shmotkin, Barry Shrage,

Lindsay Simmonds, Iz Stein, Roz

Stein, Dov Waxman, Ra� Zarum and

Mort Zuckerman. Special thanks to

Assaf Uni.A list of sources is at

Economist.com/specialreports

An audio interview with

the author is at

Economist.com/audiovideo/

specialreports

4 Judaism in the diasporaA bu�et to suit all tastes

6 Hospitality abroadAn open invitation

7 Judaism in IsraelTalmud and cheesecake

8 Israeli politicsMore Jewish than thou

10 Ideological divisionsWho is a Jew?

12 Looking aheadA Jewish spring?

SPECIAL REPORT

JUDAISM AND THE JEWS

2 The Economist July 28th 2012

2 ica and in Britain, with 3m more living in the Soviet Union.Traditional religious learning and observance had been on

the defensive in central and eastern Europe for 150 years, sincepolitical emancipation in parts of the region opened the gates ofghettoes and tradition in the shtetls (small Jewish communities)was shaken up. Now the old life was annihilated, along withmuch of modern, liberal Jewish culture. The Sephardic commu-nities of north Africa and the Levant, long a minority within Jew-ry, gained new numerical signi�cance. Together with the pitiful-ly few survivors of Nazi-occupied Europe, they became the corepopulation of the new state of Israel.

Ben-Gurion’s error

Its founding fathers, socialist-Zionists in the main, thoughtthat the vestiges of the old religion would soon disappear. DavidBen-Gurion, Israel’s �rst prime minister, held that the 2,000years of diasporic Judaism were a deviation from the true ful�l-ment of the Jewish ethos. The Talmud (Judaism’s ancient bodyof law and lore) was too casuistic, he felt; the new state must harkback to the Bible. But he agreed to exempt a few hundred Talmudstudents from army service, con�dent they were a dying breed.

Before the Holocaust, Zionism, the movement for Jewishindependence in Palestine, had to struggle for Jewish popularsupport. Now it was vindicated, at least in its own eyes. But someJews, especially in America, were still not convinced. Israel, �ght-ing for its survival, �ooded by destitute immigrants, looked pre-carious to them. In America assimilation was the watchword. At-tenuated forms of religious practice that originated in 19th-century Germany were embraced by the upwardly mobilechildren and grandchildren of the immigrant generation.

American Jews’ stando�shness towards their Jewish na-tionhood shifted sharply after the six-day war in 1967. The collec-tive experience of fear, and then relief and jubilation, producedan outpouring of solidarity with the beleaguered Jewish state.Mixed in with these emotions was a sense of unease, even guilt,over the ine�ectiveness of American Jewish lobbying during the

Holocaust to get President Roosevelt to rescue Jews. Sociologists say that Israel�and fundraising and lobbying

on its behalf�became American Jewry’s �secular religion�. Avocal grassroots campaign to free emigration for Soviet Jewryalso attracted wide support, especially among younger Jews.

By the turn of the 21st century, moreover, post-modernismwas cocking an unexpected snook both at dogmatic Israeli God-lessness and at diaspora assimilationism. �Post-modernism hasbeen kind to all religions,� says Moshe Halbertal, a philosopherliving in Jerusalem. �Reason was dethroned; there’s no large nar-rative out there any more.� Hyphenated ethnicities and identi-ties encourage people to enjoy and display their diversities in-stead of keeping them out of sight.

Many diaspora Jews today still drift out of Judaism or outof Jewishness, or choose to leave. But many others are con-sciously deciding to stay in, choosing one of myriad new ways toexpress their commitment. Exactly what de�nes Jewishness re-mains a matter of much debate. This special report will concen-trate on those who formally identify with the faith (see table 1,next page, for the main denominations), but in Israel even thenon-religious are in�uenced by Jewish culture and mores.

Jewish Orthodoxy has come surging back. Early marriagesand high birth rates have produced a demographic explosionamong the ultra-Orthodox haredim (God-fearers). This haspumped up their numbers, compensating for the steady out�owfrom active Judaism caused by assimilation. The overall total ofJews worldwide is somewhat higher than it was 40 years ago(see chart above). By conservative estimates, one in ten Jews isnow haredi. The �modern-Orthodox� account for another 10%.

Many Israelis like to think of themselves as �traditional�.But even the avowedly secular live Jewish lives, and indeed reli-gious lives, in many subliminal ways; and Israel increasingly ra-diates its national, cultural and religious Jewishness into thediaspora communities.

Following the collapse of the peace process with the Pales-tinians in 2000 and the violent intifada (uprising) that followed,

Source: ”Jewish Demographic Policies”, by SergioDellaPergola, The Jewish People Policy Institute

*Jews registered with*Jewish communities

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

18

Israel(Palestine before 1948)

Western Europe

Eastern Europeand Balkans

Former USSR

Asia

North Africa

South Africa

North America

Latin America

Oceania

1900 1939 1948 1970 2010

UNITED STATES5,275,000

MEXICO39,400

CHILE20,500

BRAZIL95,600

ARGENTINA182,300

SOUTHAFRICA

70,800 AUSTRALIA107,500

RUSSIA205,000

ISRAEL5,703,700

BRITAIN292,000

FRANCE483,500

UKRAINE71,500

ITALY28,400

CANADA375,000

Jewishpopulation

By country or region, m

of whom live in Israeland the United States81%

World total13,580,000

NETHERLANDS30,000

BELGIUM30,300

GERMANY*119,000

HUNGARY48,600

By country, 2010

The Economist July 28th 2012 3

SPECIAL REPORT


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Israeli political attitudes have palpably hardened. In theory, allIsraeli mainstream parties are committed to a �two-state sol-ution�; in practice, the growing modern-Orthodox settler move-ment in the West Bank spearheads a government policy of occu-pation without end. To sustain and justify that policy, a stridentlynationalistic Zeitgeist is evolving. In the absence of progress to-wards peace, that may be inevitable. Perhaps it is inevitable, too,that it is winning the soul of diaspora Jewry.

Our kind of peace

Doubtless most members of a non-Orthodox synagogue insuburban Connecticut, like most Israelis and diaspora Jews,would tell pollsters that they support peace and two states. Theatmosphere there on a recent Sunday could hardly have beenmore civilised. Jews, Christians and Muslims munched hot dogsand coleslaw together before setting out to clean up the neigh-bourhood park. The rabbi spoke words of appropriate interfaithinspiration. In the library the synagogue sta� had spread carpetson the �oor for the Muslims to pray.

In the corridor outside this temporary mosque, two Mus-lim schoolboys read the Israeli declaration of independence:�We extend our hand of peace and unity to all the neighbouringstates and their peoples.� It was displayed alongside a map of theregion. �No Gaza,� one noted. �No West Bank either,� his brotheradded. A synagogue warden explained later that the map was�biblical, not political�.

The prevailing political sentiment in Jewry today is of ag-gressive defensiveness, a curious amalgam of victimhood andintolerance. Dissent about Israel is discouraged and often gaggedoutright. Among British Jewry, some 300,000 strong, �a positive-ly McCarthyite atmosphere has been created,� says JonathanFreedland, a political columnist. �People are frightened to saywhat they feel.� In America �honest discussion about Israel islargely shut down,� notes Arnold Eisen, a historian and chancel-lor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, a rabbinical school inNew York. �Some rabbis will speak their minds�but peopledon’t want to �ght and there is a disinclination to argue about Is-rael. The right says you’re giving aid and comfort to the enemy ifyou say anything critical about any Israeli policy.� Given Israel’spower and diaspora Jewry’s strength and in�uence, that seemsparadoxical.

Resurgent religious faith is deeply caught up in this. Nation-alism, xenophobia and Judaism blur and merge. Jews �nd them-selves out of step with most of world opinion, which heightens awidespread sense of apprehensiveness. Iran’s threats and nuc-lear pretensions provide a focus for these feelings. Diaspora Jew-ish leaders insist that Israel is misunderstood. They attribute crit-

icism to anti-Semitism, which is rising again.Arthur Green, a scholar of Jewish mysticism and a profes-

sor at a rabbinical school in Boston, blames Israel’s policy andAmerican Jewry’s blanket support for it �for the fact that lots andlots of thinking Jews are walking away. And then we say, well,they’re not committed Jews anyway, so who cares about them?�

The accusation that Israeli hawkishness turns young dias-pora Jews o� their Judaism and their Jewishness has been tren-chantly advanced by Peter Beinart, a journalist in Washington,DC. It has caused huge controversy among American Jewry. Butmany other experts deny the causal link. Jews, especially youn-ger ones, have been dropping out in large numbers for years, MrEisen points out. As their attachment to Judaism weakens, sodoes their commitment to Israel. Those who criticise Israel andincur the community’s wrath care at least as much as those whotry to silence them. �Love has a voice,� he insists. 7

1

Source: The Economist *First five books of the Old Testament †Religious precepts

Main Jewish denominationsArticles of faith

Source of Authority of religious the Torah* law (halacha) Ritual and practice Zionism and Israel Definition of Jewishness

Ultra-Orthodox Dictated by God All God-inspired Minutely regulated by halacha Originally opposed to Zionism Jewish mother, or converted by(haredi) to Moses and thus immutable and therefore unchanging, but most now accept Israel. ritual immersion, circumcision (males), though emphasis may shift Significant immigration to Israel accepting the mitzvot†

Modern- As above As above but As above, but some scholars See Zionism as a divine manifestation As above, but accepting the mitzvot Orthodox interpreted are pushing for change, and Israel as religiously significant. interpreted more flexibly more flexibly especially regarding women Substantial immigration

Conservative Inspired by God Binding but being Halacha significantly modernised; Support Zionism and Israel. As above, but mitzvot commitment but interpreted continuously developed women and gay rabbis; ritual Not much immigration interpreted much more flexibly by humans by rabbis non-discriminatory

Reform As Conservative No longer binding, Early radical changes but Originally opposed to Zionism. Jewish mother or father. For converts, except for its recent restoration of some Reversed position in mid-20th some rabbis require immersion and ethical aspects rituals and practices century. Not much immigration circumcision but not mitzvot acceptance



SPECIAL REPORT

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THE OLD DEMARCATION lines that have long de�ned Ju-daism are becoming obsolete. People rightly speak of today

as a �golden age� for Judaism in America, yet the two largest de-nominations, Conservative Judaism and Reform Judaism, bothrelatively liberal, are shrinking.

The Conservatives, who accounted for more than half ofall synagogue-a�liated Jews only a few decades ago, do notbother to deny it. An atmosphere of decline is palpable in someof their synagogues. The Reform, with some 1.1m fee-payingmembers and another million-odd who they say identify them-selves as such, do deny it. They have tried hard to fudge the �g-ures, changing the rules to accept those born of a Jewish fatherand a Gentile mother as full-�edged Jews and welcoming mixedJewish-Gentile couples into their congregations. But Steven Co-hen, a professor of sociology at the Reform’s own Hebrew Un-ion College, thinks that both the big liberal movements are los-ing more than 1% of their members each year.

Both had their roots in 19th-century Germany. In AmericaConservatism became the bridge on which millions of immi-

Judaism in the diaspora

A bu�et to suit alltastes

But please don’t leave the restaurant


SPECIAL REPORT


2

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grants and their children moved from the traditional Orthodoxyof eastern Europe to forms of worship more in tune with theirnew homeland. Men and women prayed together. Liturgy wasjudiciously revised. References to the biblical cult of animal sac-ri�ces were excised. In the 1950s, with the great Jewish exodus tothe suburbs, the Conservative rabbis ruled that it was permissi-ble to drive to synagogue on the Sabbath, though nowhere else.They insisted, and still insist, that Conservatism is governed byhalacha, the system of Jewish law based on the Talmud. But theyinsist, too, that halacha must change with the times.

The Conservatives are particularly vulnerable �becausethey’re middle-of-the-road,� says Samuel Heilman of City Uni-versity of New York, �so they’re hit by tra�c from both direc-tions.� Some Conservatives move to Reform or drop out alto-gether. Others move to Orthodoxy. Still others join �alternativeminyans� (prayer groups), una�liated congregations o�ering re-laxed and novel forms of worship and study. Mr Cohen speaksof �a most marvellous e�ervescence of Jewish innovative com-munities, led in large part by Conservative-trained rabbis�.

Reform was originally all for ditching halacha. Some of itscongregations even moved the Sabbath to Sunday to �t in withthe Christian world around them. It cut out references to Zionand to Jewish nationhood. Zion was everywhere��rst in Ger-many, and later in America. Yet Reform has gone a long way backon itself. After the Holocaust and the creation of Israel it em-braced Zionism, which implied that the Jews were a nation afterall. And in recent years traditional forms and practices havemade their way back into Reform synagogues (or temples).�There is now so much bobbing and bowing before the Ark,�one old-school Reform rabbi wrote sni�ly, �and hugging andkissing of the Scrolls of the Law to happy-clappy guitar accompa-niment, that a casual visitor might imagine that he had wan-dered by mistake into some transplanted Polish shtiebel [prayerroom] from 200 years ago.�

Despite Conservative and Reform e�orts to stop the slide,the largest religious denomination among American Jews todayis �none�, and it is getting larger. The sameis true among Christians, Mr Cohenpoints out. �The unchurched are growing;the religious surge has peaked. The windsof America are blowing in a more seculardirection, especially in the blue [Demo-crat] states, where Jews live. Blue states areJew states��

Marrying out

Sociologists link the rise in non-a�l-iation among Jews to the steep increase inJewish-Gentile intermarriage in recent de-cades. �Intermarriage has changed theface of US Jewry,� says Leonard Saxe, aprofessor of contemporary Jewish studiesat Brandeis University, near Boston. MrCohen has shown that intermarried cou-ples are statistically less likely to bring uptheir children as Jews. �In Reform congre-gations, half of families leave after theirlast child’s bar-mitzva,� he says. �Part ofthe reason is that a high proportion are in-termarried; their commitment to the syn-agogue is more tenuous.�

Rabbi Jonah Pesner, senior vice-pres-ident of America’s Union for Reform Ju-daism, says that some intermarried cou-ples are among a synagogue’s most active

members. But Mr Cohen insiststhat those are the exceptions.�He’s looking at the cream ofthe crop. In fact, only 15-20% ofintermarried families ever joina synagogue. And most ofthem are less actively Jewish.�

The �none� category in-cludes many who don’t care,but also some who do. In thenewly chic London suburb ofWillesden, for instance, a groupof una�liated young Jews re-cently spent Friday night andSaturday together in a �Cre-ative Te�la [prayer] Shabbat�.The venue was a �Moishe

House�, one of a network of such residential centres in Americaand Europe set up by an American philanthropist to encouragenonconformist Jewish activism. The food was kosher, vegan andentirely delectable. Worship was relaxed, participatory and orig-inal. At one point a young man lay on his back on the oor, lan-guidly kicking his legs in the air. He turned out to be both knowl-edgeable and committed, a trainee rabbi and professionaleducator.

The two young women organisers of the event had taken acreative prayer course at a Conservative kibbutz in Israel. Nextmorning, instead of the usual weekly Torah reading, they actedout sections of the text in an entertaining but thought-provokingway. �We’re living in an age of pick-and-choose,� says AmichaiLau-Lavie, a young Israeli teacher and actor who devised thisstorytelling technique. �The Orthodox say Judaism’s not a buf-fet. Well, guess what: Judaism is a bu�et. But most people are notinformed enough consumers to make choices. My job as a guideis to provide a really great bu�et. Then the next step is how tomove from ‘I want to’ to ‘I feel obliged to’.� Mr Lau-Lavie, who

2Be fruitful

Source: Jewish CommunityStudy of New York, 2011

Mean number of childrenper woman aged 35-44Jews in New York, 2011

0 2 4 6

By denomination, %

All Jewishhouseholds 100

Non-Orthodox 68

Modern-Orthodox 10

Ultra-Orthodox 22

At home in New York



SPECIAL REPORT

2 lives in New York, is preparing to return to his homeland�as Isra-el’s �rst openly gay rabbi.

A huge and hugely successful pick-and-choose bu�et thathas evolved in recent years is Limmud (literally: learning)�studyseminars lasting a day, a weekend or a week for Jews of all de-nominations or none. The idea was conceived by young BritishJews 30 years ago. Today, more than 3,000 people pay to attendBritish Limmud’s annual winter seminar on a university campusin the Midlands. Dozens of lecturers �y in from Israel and Ameri-ca to bolster the local talent. Subjects range from traditional tex-tual study to art, theatre, Yiddish literature, Israeli politics, an-cient Jewish music and Torah chanting. Britain’s ChiefRabbinate, a sternly Orthodox body, frowns on Limmud becauseit hosts non-Orthodox rabbis. But Limmud has become BritishJewry’s proudly celebrated contribution to modern post-de-nominational Judaism, emulated in Jewish communitiesaround the world.

Another growth area of Jewish learning is the spread ofJewish studies programmes in universities, particularly in Amer-ica. Formerly con�ned to a handful of divinity schools, Jewishstudies are now part of almost every American university’s cur-riculum. Of some 350,000 Jewish students on American cam-puses, says Mr Saxe, a quarter or more take Jewish studiescourses at some point in their college careers. But these hardlymake for a learned or even literate laity. There is huge incongru-ity between the sophistication of so many American Jews in so

many disciplines and their ignorance of Judaism. For the vastmajority Jewish education is con�ned to a few hours a week andends at age 13, after bar-(or bat-, for girls) mitzva.

Orthodox (and certainly ultra-Orthodox) children almostall attend Jewish day schools, at least at the elementary level.These are expensive, but Orthodox families scrimp and sacri�ce,and their communities provide bursaries for children whosefamilies cannot a�ord the full fees. Many liberal Jews still see sec-tarian day schools as somehow un-American, and the relativelyfew Conservative and non-denominational day schools haveseen a drop in enrolment since the 2008 �nancial crisis. But thebest ones are �ourishing.

If intermarriage is the yardstick for measuring Jewish com-mitment�and for most sociologists it is�the impact of Jewishday schools is undeniable. The National Jewish Population Sur-vey 2000-01, commissioned by the Jewish Federations of NorthAmerica, the main umbrella organisation for the community,found that 43% of Jews who had no Jewish education intermar-ried. Among those who went to Sunday school, the proportiondropped to 29%, and among those who attended Jewish dayschool to 7%�although part of the reason may be that the Ortho-dox, who almost all go to day schools, are the least likely to inter-marry anyway because they still see marrying out as a sin. Still,in Australia and South Africa, where day schools are the norm inJewish communities, intermarriage rates are signi�cantly lowerthan in America. 7

ON THE 19TH of Kislev in 1798, RabbiShneur Zalman of Liadi, a Hasidic leader,was released from prison in St Petersburg.He had been arrested on charges of trea-son, laid by Jews who opposed the nascentmovement of Hasidism (a mystical varietyof Orthodox Judaism) as a heresy. InPhnom Penh on the 19th of Kislev last year,a dozen Jews celebrated the 214th �Festi-val of Redemption� at the home of Bent-zion and Mashie Butman, the shluchim

(emissaries) of Chabad in Cambodia. Chabad is a Hebrew acronym for

wisdom, understanding and knowledge,attributes of the Divine upon which RabbiShneur Zalman constructed his Hasidicsystem of contemplation. His son andsuccessor moved his �court� to the villageof Lubavitch. The seventh and last Luba-vitcher rebbe (spiritual leader), MenachemMendel Schneerson, died childless in NewYork in 1994. Many of his followers thoughthe was the Messiah. The Butmans still do.

The Butmans’ colonial-style homedoubles as the Phnom Penh �Chabadhouse��a synagogue, a restaurant, alibrary, a place where Jews can come andsocialise. There are Chabad houses wherev-er Jews live and, as in Phnom Penh, inplaces where they don’t live but mightvisit. In Katmandu in Nepal, Chabad annu-

ally hosts �the biggest seder on Earth� for2,000 young Jewish backpackers.

In America almost every city anduniversity campus has a Chabad house. Themovement has become a powerful force inJewish life. Many people, Jews or Gentiles,who know little or nothing about Judaismhave bumped into a Chabad emissary some-where. They look haredi in their beards andblack hats, and they claim to be haredi intheir observance and beliefs. But Chabad istolerant, whereas the hallmark of haredism

is intolerance towards non-observant Jews.Chabad preaches love for all, and practiseswhat it preaches.

The shluchim urge people to follow thereligious precepts but, crucially, they don’tstop loving them if they don’t. �Thesepeople have given my son a life,� a (non-observant) Wall Street banker said of aChabad couple in his home town in Connect-icut who run a friendship circle for childrenwith special needs. �He’s got friends. He’sgoing to have a bar-mitzva.�

Steven Cohen, the Reform-a�liatedsociologist, notes wryly that with its 3,200shluchim in America alone, and another2,000 around the world, Chabad packs amore powerful evangelical punch �than allthe members of all the non-Orthodoxrabbinical associations combined�.

An open invitation

Chabad houses make Jews welcome wherever they go


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TO SEE JUST how well Judaism is doing in Israel, you couldhave strolled around the galleries of the Tel Aviv Museum

of Art on May 26th this year, the festival of Shavuot (which com-memorates God’s gift of the Torah to the Jewish people). Be-tween midnight and dawn hundreds of people, almost all ofthem secular, milled about, programme in hand, choosing be-tween lectures on ecology, mythology, modern Israeli literature,art and photography. There were also a few talks on Talmud andone on God. The night ended with a piano recital.

It was a far cry from the traditional Shavuot night service,called tikkun, which is hundreds of years old. That involved recit-ing holy texts and studying Talmud all night, then praying at sun-rise on Shavuot to celebrate the handing down of the ten com-mandments on Mount Sinai.

A couple of miles down the road, in the all-haredi town ofBnei Brak, ultra-Orthodox Israelis�men only�were doing the

tikkun in the old way. All around the country, groups�mostly va-rious shades of Orthodox but some secular too�gathered for thenocturnal study session. In Jerusalem thousands streamed tothe western wall at dawn. In Tel Aviv there were prayers on thebeach. A few years ago no one apart from the ultra-Orthodoxhad even heard of tikkun. Shavuot for most Israelis was the festi-val when people eat cheesecake.

�Today there’s Jewishness on the television, on the radio, inmusic, dance and theatre. There never used to be. That’s the mea-sure of our success,� says Ruth Calderon, founder of Alma, thegroup that organises the learn-in at the museum and serves as acentre of Jewish studies in Tel Aviv all year round. Ms Calderonfocuses on writers, artists and musicians. �I believe in elites,� shesays. �Through them we’re reaching the mainstream.� A PhD inTalmud, she is determinedly secular. �Israeli youngsters knowtheir Bible,� she says. �But Ben-Gurion robbed us of the Talmud’swisdom. Growing up here I didn’t know my own culture. Nowpeople are more open, curious, ready to listen.�

In a survey of religious beliefs and practices among JewishIsraelis conducted in 2009, 46% de�ned themselves as secular,but only 16% said they did not observe tradition at all. Even that�gure was probably too high, the researchers found. Only 6%said that circumcision was not important to them, and only 10%had no time for the Passover seder. Around 70% of the respon-dents said they eat only kosher food. Most observe the Sabbath,though only a third of the total �meticulously�, and most do notfavour imposing those restrictions on others. An amazing 20%said they attended all-night study sessions on Shavuot.

All this could mean either that Israel is getting more reli-gious, beyond the demographic increase in the Orthodox and ul-tra-Orthodox; or that the old dichotomy between the secularand the religious is eroding as people pick and choose to develop

a modern, pluralistic Israeli Judaism. Earlier this year a party of faculty and students from the He-

brew University of Jerusalem’s ancient-history departmenttoured the Peloponnese. �Out of 35 people, only one person, awoman, was observant,� reports Alex Yakobson, a senior lectur-er. �Yet the entire group agreed without any argument to leaveancient Olympia, the most important place we visited, and getback to the hotel before sundown on Friday. And then this over-whelmingly secular group decided that we wanted to have a ka-balat Shabbat [welcoming the Sabbath] service. At home wedon’t do it, but abroad it seemed right somehow. The observantwoman couldn’t lead the prayers, of course, in our chauvinisticreligion. So we chose a male student to be our ‘rabbi’. He put on ahat and started reading the texts from his laptop�Someone hadgot wine, and there were sort of challot [plaited loaves] andeveryone sang�Of course it wasn’t strictly traditional. But whatwe were doing was part of our Israeli culture. Modern Hebrewculture and the Hebrew language itself are all Judaism, all Jew-ishness. Religion and tradition are obviously a major part of theculture. A culture can’t retroactively change its sources. Andmost Israelis don’t want it to.�

Dr Yakobson’s insights are doubly signi�cant because he isa prominent intellectual voice from within the Russian-Israelicommunity. �My parents were the product of their parents’ as-similation,� he says. �My grandmother claimed she’d forgottenher Yiddish. But she never for a moment denied her Jewishness.�

Most of the Russian-Israeli commu-nity, now more than a million strong, ar-rived in the 1990s, after the collapse ofcommunism. �From 1991to 1999 there wasa certain decline in attachment to Jewishtradition and religion, apparently underthe impact of the mass immigration from

the former Soviet Union,� the 2009 survey notes. �From 1999 to2009 there was an increase in this attachment.�

The Russian immigrants are purposefully assimilating intoIsraeli society, says Dr Yakobson, and tradition-based behaviouris part of that assimilation. That also applies, he maintains, tosome 300,000 of them who are not recognised as Jewish underIsraeli law. The law is based on the Orthodox de�nition of a Jewas someone born of a Jewish mother or converted to Judaism.However, it enabled these people to immigrate and to acquireimmediate Israeli citizenship if they were the children, grand-children or spouses of full-�edged Jews. Some of the youngerones go through conversion during their army service. But mostadults cannot convert, and do not want to, because the civilianChief Rabbinate, a statutory body, insists that converts must

Judaism in Israel

Talmud and cheesecake

Israel is moving towards a more pluralistic Judaism

In a survey of religious beliefs and practices amongJewish Israelis, 46% de�ned themselves as secular, butonly 16% said they did not observe tradition at all

3Faith in numbers Israeli Jews’ self-defined religiosityand observance of tradition

Source: The Guttman Centre for Surveys

How would you define yourself froma religious perspective? %

To what extent do you observetradition? %

Data gallery: More from the Guttman report Economist.com/guttmancharts

0 10 20 30 40 50

Ultra-Orthodox

Orthodox

Traditional

Secular, notanti-religiousSecular,anti-religious

0 10 20 30 40 50

Meticulously

To a greatextent

To someextent

Not at all(totally secular)

1991 1999 2009


AN ICONIC MOMENT in Israeli politics, captured by theTV cameras in October 1997, showed Binyamin Netanyahu,

then in his �rst term as prime minister, leaning towards YitzhakKeddouri, a venerable kabbalistic sage (both pictured below)and speaking into his ear. The microphones could not quitemake out his words, but an alert reporter lip-read them: �The left-ists have forgotten what it means to be Jewish.� The aged rabbiseemed to smile in assent.

Rabbi Keddouri has since died and Mr Netanyahu is back asprime minister, much chastened and matured. He now avoidsgiving gratuitous o�ence and shields his mouth when whisper-ing in people’s ears. But his political pro�le remains the same: hepresides over a rightist-religious coalition.

Following in the footsteps of Menachem Begin, the �rst Li-kud party prime minister (1977-83), Mr Netanyahu has welded analliance of three distinct ideological groups: his own Revisionist-Zionist party, together with the rightist Russian immigrant party,Yisrael Beitenu; the Orthodox-Zionists, who have spawned thesettler movement on the West Bank; and the haredim, or ultra-Orthodox, the fastest-growing sector in Israeli society.

Mr Netanyahu calls his tripartite alliance the �nationalcamp� and implies that it is not only more patriotic than the

Israeli politics

More Jewish than thou

The political and the religious right are making

common cause

A word in your ear


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henceforth adopt an Orthodox lifestyle.�But they, too, want to be successfully absorbed in Israeli

society,� says Dr Yakobson. �They are prevented from marryingfull-�edged Jews in Israel, because the rabbinate has a monopolyover marriages. So what do they do? They hop over to Cyprus fora civil marriage, and that’s legally acceptable. And they hate therabbis. But hating the rabbis is an integral part of Israeli Jewishculture. Lots of young Israelis, full-�edged Jews, hate the rabbistoo, and get married in Cyprus too. Hating the rabbinate is part ofthese people’s assimilation into Israeli society and culture.�

The biggest reason by far for hating rabbis, though, is thedraft. The 400 Talmud students whom Ben-Gurion exemptedfrom army service have grown to 110,000 able-bodied haredimen who have served neither in the regular army nor in the re-serves. Each year another 6,000-odd haredi yeshiva (Talmudicseminary) students reach the age of 18 and join the ranks of thedraft-dodgers. That �gure already represents 13% of the Jewishmale age group (Arab-Israelis are also exempt from the draft) andis set to grow fast: among Jewish schoolchildren, 26% of �rst-graders are haredi. Their schools focus on religious learning: evenbasic subjects such as maths and English get short shrift.

Under the present law, draft-dodging becomes a way of lifebecause the dodger must remain full-time in his yeshiva and isnot allowed to work. Unemployment among haredi men ex-ceeds 60%. The rest of the population shoulders the tax burdenof supporting the increasingly impoverished haredi community.

But perhaps not for much longer. The High Court of Justicehas ruled that the draft discrimination is unconstitutional andhas given the government until the end of this month to bring innew, more equitable legislation. A parliamentary committee,boycotted by the haredi parties, has drawn up proposals for newlegislation under which only the best Talmud students�to be se-lected by the yeshiva deans�would continue to receive generousstate support and remain exempt.

Goodbye to the life of contemplation

For Mr Netanyahu, anxious not to forfeit his long-time alli-ance with the haredim, that plan is too radical. He wants a gen-tler, more gradual process of haredi enlistment, spread over a de-cade. Last week that lost him the support of Kadima, the largestopposition party, which had joined his government only in Mayand stormed out again on July 17th, accusing him of kowtowingto the haredim.

Whatever the precise timing, some form of haredi draft ison its way. The army already runs special haredi-friendly unitsfor the small but growing number who choose to leave the yeshi-vas and enlist. Ultra-kosher food is served and no women sol-diers are in sight. An all-haredi computer unit in the air force en-ables Talmudic whizz-kids to show high-tech potential.

For the yeshivas, some of which are lucrative family busi-nesses, the reform would eventually mean drastic downsizing.But behind the haredi outrage there is grudging recognition thatthe �society of learners� cannot continue to grow inde�nitely. Acommunity of 850,000-900,000 people must pull its own eco-nomic weight.

A credible reform of the haredi draft would be a big step to-wards breaking down the secular-religious division in Israelisociety. Even today, both camps are slowly moving towardsgreater mutual tolerance. Until recently the day of rest was oftena day of battle as haredim sought to impose their rigid form ofSabbath-observance on the rest of the population, closing roadsand stoning cinemas. Now they have all-haredi towns of theirown and large, homogenous suburbs, so they have less reason tointerfere with other people’s way of life. Conversely, there arenow so many haredim that the rest can no longer ignore them. 7


�peace camp� (meaning mainly those in opposition) but alsosomehow more Jewish. He has deftly subsumed into his politi-cal message not just Jewish nationalism but Judaism itself. Hissettler allies, moreover, have developed a messianic theologybased on a fundamentalist reading of the Bible which sets theconquest and settlement of the land above all else and promisesdirect divine succour to achieve them. These teachings havesubtly penetrated and in�uenced much broader swathes of Isra-el’s politics and culture.

The con�ation of hawkishness and Jewishness is in evi-dence in the diaspora, too, where it blurs criticism of Israel’s oc-cupation policy with anti-Semitism. If �anti-Israel� equals anti-Semitic (ie, anti-Jewish), then Israel, and speci�cally the occupa-tion policy being criticised, equals Jewish. QED.

The strong point of this argument is that anti-Semitism, vi-cious and irrational, is rising once more, especially in Europe (seechart 4). In Hungary it has become particularly virulent; Jewsthere fear for their physical safety. Anti-Semitism comes in neo-Nazi and hard-left varieties, and of late it has been embraced byMuslim groups too. Anti-Semites are usually anti-Israel; manyoppose Israel’s very existence.

Moreover, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, isboth anti-Israel and anti-Semitic, and a Holocaust denier to boot.His government is working hard to obtain the means to imple-ment his threats to annihilate the Jewish state.

For the Israeli right, and for many Jewish communal lead-ers in the diaspora, an undi�erentiated axis of evil extends fromthe Iranians to the Palestinians and on to anti-Semitic thugs onEuropean streets. Rising anti-Semitism is lumped together withgrowing criticism of Israeli policy and hyped by Mr Netanyahu’sgovernment into what it calls a campaign for the �delegitima-tion� of Israel.

The advantage of this tactic is that any critic, whether Jewor Gentile, can be dismissed as a delegitimiser and hence an anti-Semite. The much deeper disadvantage is that it fosters paranoiatowards the Palestinians, with whom Isra-el needs to come to terms if it is to surviveas a Jewish and democratic state. In right-ist-religious circles, even to point out thisdrawback is beginning to be dubbed anti-Jewish and anti-God.

One Jewish voice that has beenheard questioning the dominant Zeitgeist is that of Mick Davis,the long-time chief executive of Xstrata, an international mininggiant. Born in South Africa, he serves as chairman of the JewishLeadership Council, a British-Jewish umbrella organisation, andcontroversially gave warning in late 2010 that Israel risked be-coming an apartheid state unless it negotiated peace with thePalestinians. He has since bowed to pressure to pipe down inpublic (though he denies having done so), con�ning himself toencouraging peacenik Jewish dissidents not to turn their backson the mainstream community.

�If the prime minister of Israel wants to speak for the Jew-ish people,� he says, �then he must articulate the values of theJewish people, and he doesn’t do that. Settlements can’t possiblybe the values of the Jewish people. The Jewish people place greatemphasis on life, on how they interact with their fellow men.How can building settlements willy-nilly be Jewish values sim-ply because you say there’s a mitzva [religious precept] to occupythe land?�

But are his Jewish values not diasporic values? �Then Israelis just a state for Israelis,� he retorts. �Israel is as much our projectas it’s the project of Israelis. The whole history of the Jews hasbeen a constant struggle to meet the values that we think are im-mutable�When Israel doesn’t struggle to meet them, then that

impacts my identity as a Jewand I am diminished by that.�

For Menachem Lorber-baum, chair of the GraduateSchool of Philosophy at TelAviv University, Israel’s victim-hood politics is �the very an-tithesis of Zionism� and alsoprofoundly un-Jewish. �Nei-ther Bibi [Mr Netanyahu] norBarak [Ehud Barak, the defenceminister] know anythingabout Judaism, and I don’t seethem as spokespeople for whatJudaism is or ought to be�Thestate of Israel doesn’t own Ju-daism�Israel is the greatestopportunity to exercise sover-eignty for the purpose of creat-ing a viable and sustainable

Jewish society. But it’s also the greatest seduction�the seductionto de�ne Jewish as a political category�Of course being the vic-tim gives you lots of points. ‘They’re out to destroy us’ is a knock-down argument. But what it does is to legitimise unbridled useof power.�

Tal Becker, an Israeli diplomat and scholar, worries that Is-raeli policies�both peace policy and domestic policy which re-jects non-Orthodox Judaism�are leading to schism within Jew-ry. �Among Jews whose Jewishness is important to them, thefault line is between those for whom being Jewish is about thesurvival of Israel and for whom Orthodoxy is the authentic formof Judaism, and those who have a very diverse, pluralistic ex-pression of their Judaism. The preoccupation of so many IsraeliJews with survival, and not with the reasons why survival is im-portant, has alienated them from Jews who feel our survival is

not at risk, who feel disenchanted with Israel�For many Jewsthe tension between supporting Israel and having liberal valuesis becoming less sustainable.�

This fusion of Orthodoxy with what Mr Becker calls�death-narrative nationalism� is the underpinning of Mr Netan-yahu’s political success. Mr Becker voices the conventional liber-al wisdom when he accepts that they constitute a package dealinstead of prising them apart. Arguably, this refusal of the liberalleft to distinguish between the two very di�erent strains withinOrthodoxy is tragically short-sighted.

The fear of God

As long as haredism was small and weak, in Israel and inthe diaspora, it could be dismissed as irrelevant. Reluctant to co-operate with pollsters for fear of the �evil eye�, haredim havebeen undercounted for decades. But last month a new reportcommissioned by the UJA-Federation of New York, the leadingcommunal philanthropic organisation, showed that of the esti-mated 1.5m Jews in greater New York, including Nassau, Su�olkand Westchester, 22% are haredi and 10% modern-Orthodox. Giv-en the haredi birth rate��at least three times that associated withnon-Orthodox New Yorkers��the haredi proportion is growingrapidly. The report suggests that perhaps not enough poor hare-

Scary

Source: Anti-Defamation League *2011

% of those surveyed agreeingwith anti-Semitic stereotypes

4

0 20 40 60 80

Hungary

Spain

Poland

Austria

France

Germany

Britain

United States

20122009

*

For the Israeli right, an undi� erentiated axis of evilextends from the Iranians to the Palestinians and on toanti-Semitic thugs on European streets

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dim take advantage of the services the UJA-Federation o�ers. Ha-redi activists have long claimed that their community does notget its fair share of welfare services. Most New York haredim, un-like most Israeli ones, work for their living, but only 11% of themcontribute to the UJA-Federation.

A century ago the haredi rabbis of Poland and Russia took agenerally jaundiced view of Zionism, which was then just start-ing up. They thought God would restore his people to the HolyLand in his own good time. But as the Zionist enterprise in Pales-tine began to grow, so did a pragmatic streak within haredismthat wanted to join in. A haredi minister served in Ben-Gurion’s�rst government. Hard-core recalcitrants continue to see Israel assinfully presumptuous, but the majority have come to termswith it. Unlike the modern-Orthodox, though, the haredim havenot become messianic. They still have theological misgivingsabout Zionism, and certainly about Zionist expansionism.

Hence, they pointedly do not settle deep in the Palestinianterritories. Two large haredi settlements, Betar Ilit and Modi’inIlit, are situated, by order of the rabbis, just over the 1967 border,on land that would probably be annexed to Israel in a negotiatedpeace with the Palestinians. They ought to be part of the �peacecamp�, alongside the Israeli doves and the diaspora Jewish liber-als. They are not there, mainly, because the liberals’ pluralismstops when it comes to the haredim. They are seen as fundamen-talist, fanatical, misogynist and determined to impose their cul-ture and values upon the majority.

The haredim do their bit to fan these prejudices. They preferto live apart, and for the most part they show contempt for theless Orthodox and loathing for the avowedly non-Orthodox. It isthe anti-haredi prejudices on the left that help sustain Mr Netan-yahu’s coalition of all the Orthodox with the hardline right. Twocenturies after the breakdown of traditional religious authority,Jews are still �ercely �ghting for each other’s hearts and minds.Only now the prize is not a rabbinical appointment in someshtetl but the political direction of a powerful sovereign state.Thanks to liberal arrogance and haredi disdain, the settlers’ mes-sianic nationalism is increasingly setting the tone. 7

�ON THE SECOND day of the month of Nissan in the year5772 according to the manner in which we count here in the

Community of Berlin, the bridegroom, Naftali son of Aaron, saidto Naomi daughter of Our Patriarch Abraham, ‘Be my wife ac-cording to the law of Moses and Israel, and I will work, honour,feed and support thee in the custom of Jewish men who work,honour, feed and support their wives faithfully’��

The ancient Aramaic formula of the Jewish wedding con-tract (ketuba) rang out across the �agstones of the old east Berlincourtyard on a Sunday afternoon in March. The little congrega-tion, the men in hats or skullcaps, the women in modest head-covers, looked on lovingly. Two of their own were tying the knot:Naftali a student at the Rabbinerseminar zu Berlin, Naomi a stu-dent at the Women’s Midrasha, both of them members of thelearning community of Yeshivat Beit Zion.

Among the wedding party were several other sons and

daughters �of Our Patriarch Abraham�,the term traditionally used to describeconverts to Judaism. Naomi’s mother diedwhen the family was still in Russia, andher Jewish ancestry was unclear. The ye-shiva rabbis required the bride to undergoa conversion ceremony, which involvesimmersion in a ritual bath and a solemncommitment �to accept the yoke of mitz-vot [religious precepts]�.

Almost everybody in the Beit Zioncommunity is Russian, as are most of the200,000-odd Jews in Germany today.After further study, Naftali will become arabbi in a German provincial town. �Heand his wife will be the only observantJews in the town,� says Rabbi Joshua Spin-ner, Beit Zion’s director.

The original Rabbinerseminar zuBerlin was founded by Rabbi Esriel Hil-desheimer in 1873. It was intended as be-leaguered German Orthodoxy’s answerto the Jüdisch-Theologische Seminar inBreslau (now Wroclaw, in Poland), the cru-cible of Conservative Judaism, and the Hochschule für die Wis-senschaft des Judentums, the Reform rabbinical seminary, alsoin Berlin. Rabbi Hildesheimer’s seminary ordained modern-Or-thodox rabbis who served communities throughout Europe. Itsbasic outlook was that although Jewish law, the halacha, was im-mutable, it had to be couched in contemporary language.

Today the reconstituted Rabbinerseminar walks the samedelicate path between haredism and modernity. The fundingcomes mainly from the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, which hashelped to bring about a modest renaissance of Jewish life in Ger-many and central and eastern Europe. An early practitioner ofpost-denominational Judaism, the foundation supports everykind of Jewish education.

For their part, the newcomers have breathed new life intoonce-great Jewish communities. �We are not Orthodox,� saysBeatrisa Kirschner, a young Jewish immigrant from Moldovawho lives with her extended family in Mainz. �But we are tradi-tional. The religion was repressed in the Soviet Union. Now theold people like my grandad want to have it again.� MsKirschner’s 98-year-old grandfather likes to spend his days in thestriking new synagogue in Mainz, which replaced one built acentury ago and destroyed by the Nazis. The prayer books are inHebrew with Russian translation. Ms Kirschner’s mother, anurse, is on the synagogue council, and her young son will at-tend the religion classes. The synagogue’s president, Stella Schin-dler-Sigereich, grew up in nearby Worms. �Who would havethought I’d be a synagogue president?�

Speyer, Worms and Mainz, the �Shum� communities in theHebrew acronym, were an important centre of medieval Jewishscholarship. In Speyer visitors can see a perfectly preserved 12th-century Jewish ritual bath in the grounds of the restored Jewishquarter, in the shadow of the huge Romanesque cathedral. In thecentre of Worms, unaccountably intact, lies a large Jewish cem-etery. The Hebrew gravestones, clearly legible, go back to the 11thcentury. The state of Rhineland-Palatinate is applying to UNES-

CO to have the three ancient Jewish communities recognised asa World Heritage Site.

The revival of Jewish life among some of the Russian Jewsin Germany has been an important corrective for thinking Israe-lis. In the 1980s and 1990s, when Jews streamed out of the SovietUnion, their exit visas all citing Israel as their destination, Israel

Ideological divisions

Who is a Jew?

It’s less obvious than you might think

fought foreign governments and diaspora Jewish organisationsto stop them dropping o� on the way. They were not refugees,the Israeli government and the World Zionist Organisation con-tended. They had a homeland: Israel. Outside Israel their Jewishidentity would die.

This has not happened in Germany, nor in America, wherethe mixture of assimilation, religiosity and ethnic identityamong the hundreds of thousands of ex-Soviet Jews who livethere is similar to that of the broader Jewish community. All thissuggests that diasporas are more resilient than dogmas of Zionistprimacy admit.

Most German Jewish communities restrict their member-ship to halachic Jews only; that is, those born of a Jewish motheror converted to Judaism in accordance with the halacha. Many ofthe Russian immigrants do not qualify for membership. Some ofthem undergo conversion; most do not, leaving them in a sort ofJewish limbo.

In this respect, German Jewry resembles Israel’s. There, thisquestion of �who is a Jew� presents the Jewish state and its statereligion, Orthodox Judaism, with a challenge. Halachic prece-dents over the centuries provide ample basis for a lenient ap-proach to �accepting the yoke of mitzvot� in the conversion pro-cess. But the increasingly powerful haredi rabbis insist thatconverts pledge to become Orthodox.

Flashpoint conversion

Conversion is the point where religious rigidity, Israeli poli-tics and diaspora denominationalism clash. The Conservativeand Reform movements in America have long fought Ortho-doxy’s monopoly on Judaism in Israel. Earlier this year, facing aHigh Court action brought by an Israeli Reform rabbi, the Israeligovernment announced that it will fund a small number of non-Orthodox rabbis around the country. But they will still have nopower to conduct marriages or conversions. The non-Orthodoxmovements nevertheless hailed the decision as a breakthrough.They claim that it is o�cial discrimination that has kept themmarginal in Israeli society. As Americans, they are uncomfort-able with the notion of a state religion. As Jews, they reject theidea that Israel’s state religion is Orthodox Judaism, rather thanjust Judaism.

Israel, then, is the transferred battle�eld for American Jew-

ry’s interdenominational warfare. Non-Orthodox leaders in America are apt towarn Israeli prime ministers that pander-ing to the Orthodox will dismay millionsof American Jews. Mr Netanyahu, whospent his formative years in America, issensitive to such admonitions.

There are two big complications.The �rst is a yawning divide between theConservative and the Reform movementson the question of �who is a Jew�. ReformJudaism, in 1983, recognised patrilinealJews�those born of a Jewish father but aGentile mother�as full Jews, providedthey chose to live Jewish lives. Conserva-tive Judaism has stuck with the tradition-al, matrilineal criterion. Hundreds ofthousands of Americans who are accept-ed as Jews by Reform synagogues are notconsidered Jewish by Conservative rab-bis. Reform’s position also contradicts Is-raeli law, which takes matrilinealism asthe criterion for Jewish descent. And mostConservative rabbis would not recognise

most Reform rabbis’ conversions on halachic grounds, says Rab-bi Joel Roth, a professor at the Conservatives’ Jewish TheologicalSeminary and a small-c conservative.

The second, more troublesome complication is that the turfwar waged by the two non-Orthodox movements against IsraeliOrthodoxy has prejudiced the prospects of Russian-Israelis qui-etly being converted. Earlier this year Avigdor Lieberman’s Rus-sian immigrant party, Yisrael Beitenu, reached a deal with the ha-redi parties that would have enabled more moderate,modern-Orthodox rabbis to sit on conversion courts. As a quidpro quo, the new law would have cemented the Orthodox mo-nopoly over conversion. But the Conservative and Reform lead-erships in America persuaded Mr Netanyahu to undo the deal.

Rabbi David Ellenson, president of the (Reform) HebrewUnion College, staunchly defends the non-Orthodox case.�There have to be other ways,� he says. �Why should I be askedto commit suicide?� He grew up Orthodox in a close-knit com-munity in Newport News, Virginia, and recalls his class at dayschool reciting each morning: �First of all we must know that theentire Torah, both the Written Law and the Oral Law, was givenby the Holy One himself, Blessed Be He, to Moses our Teacher, ofblessed memory, at Mount Sinai. It is impossible to change eventhe tiniest jot or tittle�� But he stopped believing in that, andnotes that �most modern Jews don’t�, either. �I see all the de-nominations as attempting to provide a response to the samequestion. We are all on a continuum.� For him, Reform is themost authentic.

Remarkably, Rabbi Ellenson has devoted his career as a his-torian to the study of Orthodox responses to modernity. His 1990biography of Rabbi Hildesheimer, the founder of the Berlin Rab-binerseminar, was a classic. Most recently, he co-authored an im-portant study of 19th- and 20th-century Orthodox rabbinicalviews on conversion. He claims he can be at once the dispassion-ate analyst in his books and the passionate polemicist in his rab-binical role, and he pretty much pulls it o�. But on a deeper level,this highly regarded denominational leader seems to embodythe post-denominational future of Judaism. Many of today’sJews, and probably many more of tomorrow’s, are on the contin-uum he describes, consciously or not. They are reaching out be-yond the old divides of Israeli religiousness and secularism,diasporic Orthodoxy, Conservatism and Reform. 7

Many oftoday’sJews, andprobablymany moreoftomorrow’s,arereachingout beyondthe olddivides


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Is Israel’s left justi�ed insuspecting that the diasporaleaders’ e�orts to strengthenJewish identity are coloured bythe country’s rightist-religiousZeitgeist? If so, they will alwaysexclude Jewish liberals. Worse,they will shore up an aggressivepro-Israel loyalism that deniesthe only feasible future for aJewish, democratic Israel: shar-ing the land with a Palestinianstate. Israel needs to recover itspragmatic Zionism. It cannot af-ford a governing ethos infusedby a religious fundamentalismconcerned chie�y with settle-ment, conquest and con�ict.

Judaism itself, which theIsraeli governing camp has triedto harness to its policies, needsto quell this dangerous strand ofzealotry within it. During 2,000years of exile without a state,the Jews developed a sophisti-cated, sublimated reading of theBible that is still embraced bythe haredim. It would serve thefaith better than the fundamen-talism of settler rabbis.

Open wide

The haredim, perhaps incongruously, could o�er hope for amore temperate, less obdurate ethos of Jewish nationhood.They have enjoyed a remarkable renaissance. Demographicallythey are racing ahead. Politically they are still �exing their mus-cles. Diaspora communities seem to view them with distasteand trepidation. When haredim come up in conversation, dias-pora leaders automatically shift from the �rst person plural tothe third. That needs to change.

Israeli leaders, too, especially moderate ones, would bewise to draw the haredim into the mainstream of national life.Haredism, for all its religious extremism, is the natural enemy ofnationalist extremism. Impending changes to the army draft forharedim o�er hope for more integration in the future.

The plethora of religious innova-tion, both in Israel and in the diaspora, ishopeful, too, re�ecting Judaism’s diversee�orts to reconcile modernity and faith.Granted, the haredim are not currentlypart of that ferment, but nor are they obli-vious to it. The issues�the soul of the Jew-

ish state, the spirit of its supporters abroad, the Jewishness of itsimmigrant citizens�are too important to be left to rabbis and pol-iticians still �ghting old factional wars.

For now, haredi Orthodoxy is in the ascendant. But that as-cendancy might be its own salvation, because with it comes re-sponsibility. The last word should go to Moshe Halbertal, thephilosopher, in conversation with an unnamed haredi on an ElAl (Israel’s national airline) �ight. �Why�, the professor asked,�are you blithely defying the pilot’s instruction to buckle yourseat belt?� The haredi explained a�ably that for him the pilot wasthe poritz, Yiddish for the autocratic Polish squire who lorded itover the Jewish shtetl. �One day soon�, Mr Halbertal replied,�you’ll understand that you’re the poritz now.� 7

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APATHY, ALIENATION, ASSIMILATION�all these traits ofan open society naturally weaken Jewish solidarity in the

diaspora and threaten what community leaders call �Jewishcontinuity�. Those leaders think they have found at least a par-tial answer. Every Jewish young person in America, and in otherdiaspora countries too, is o�ered a ten-day trip to Israel, free ofcharge. Last year some 35,000 went from North America alone,and the numbers are rising.

The project is called Birthright Israel. It was originally con-ceived by Yossi Beilin, a left-wing Israeli politician, and is largelypaid for by philanthropists such as Sheldon Adelson, an Ameri-can billionaire casino owner and prominent Republican Partysupporter. It seems to be working�at least judged by that crudebut cogent criterion, intermarriage. According to Leonard Saxe,who has tracked Birthright alumni over 12 years, �they are 50%more likely to in-marry than comparable youngsters who didnot go on Birthright. That is a very big deal.�

The Israeli government, as well as diaspora philanthropies,also provide longer study courses in Israel for diaspora young-sters, along with gap-year programmes and semesters for high-

school students. These at-tract thousands every year,and thousands more studyat Israeli yeshivas. �It has ex-ploded in the past decade,�says Ted Sasson, a sociologistat Brandeis University.�More than half of youngAmerican Jews will havehad an Israel experience be-fore the age of 30.�

How exactly Israelworks on them is hard to ex-plain. �Just to be on a bus,and everyone’s Jewish�

that’s very comforting,� says Rose, a sophomore at Tufts Univer-sity just back from a trip. �I had zero desire or need to come to Hil-lel [the Jewish student club] before,� says Lia, another studentfrom the same university. �Now I’m connected to the Jewishcommunity at Tufts. I can come alone and sit at a Friday nightdinner and feel welcome.�

One reason for Birthright’s success it that it transcends de-nominational divides among visitors and hosts alike. And it triesto keep away from politics. The programme leaves out the Pales-tinians on the West Bank and generally soft-pedals the con�ict,which draws �re from the Israeli left. Still, the students at Tufts in-sisted they were not brainwashed. They know perfectly wellthat there is an occupation.

Looking ahead

A Jewish spring?

There are reasons to hope for a more temperate kind

of Jewish nationhood

Every Jewish young person in America, and in otherdiaspora countries too, is o� ered a ten-day trip toIsrael, free of charge

july 28th 2012 - the economist · july 28th 2012 special report ... population of the new state of...

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