From State to Community: Re-envisioning Jewishness in Contemporary Religious Zionist Society

• In Event: Orthodoxy and Zionism in Israel and America

Abstract

Over the last few years, there has been a “buzz” in religious Zionist society in Israel; an unrest. It is a result of a growing discontent with the functioning, or dis-functioning, of Israel’s Chief Rabbinate in matters of Jewish conversion, marriage and divorce, and KASHRUT. Increasing numbers of religious Zionists, particularly among circles that are perceived as liberal, reject the services of the state’s Rabbinate and come up with alternatives of their own. Over the past decade, liberal religious Zionist rabbis, activists, and public figures have been talking and writing about creating new Orthodox-oriented religious services that bypass the Rabbinate’s procedures, and have acted toward realizing these ideas.
This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Israel among liberal religious Zionist nongovernmental organizations and communities that propose egalitarian and pluralist alternatives to ultra-Orthodox religiosity that has shaped Israel’s religious institutions over the past several decades. I will draw on notes and interviews from my fieldwork, as well as on texts published in religious Zionist journals, to demonstrate that in their actions toward religious and social change, liberal religious Zionists engage in re-envisioning Judaism’s relation to the state. Their pro-change initiatives reflect a departure from Zionism’s dominant paradigm about the state as the locus of public Judaism, and their shifting toward promoting and practicing individualized and community-based Judaism that is inspired by what they view as American models of religiosity.
By unpacking ways in which oppositional relations within Israel’s Orthodox society and between Israeli and American Jewish Orthodox worlds formulate on the ground, this paper will outline the most recent development in the decades-long contestation over determining the Jewishness of Israel. Ultimately, however, it will illuminate ways that organized political activity informs, and is informed by, activists’ constitutions of their identities as Jews and as Israeli citizens.

Author

• Ofira Fuchs, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign