Two Scholars on Israel’s Discernible Shift toward Religiousity

Israeli society is becoming increasingly religious. When the state of Israel was formed, its nascent structure tried to limit Jewish religiosity as part of its effort to forge a new secular Jewish nation. Although the arrival of religious discourse in Israeli politics has long been noticed, its cultural development has rarely been addressed. Yaron Peleg's new book Directed by God: Jewishness in Contemporary Israeli Film and Television explores how the country’s popular media, principally film and television, reflect this transformation. In doing so, it examines the changing nature of Zionism and the place of Judaism within it.

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We asked author Yaron Peleg to discuss the religious undercurrents in today's Israeli media with fellow scholar Eran Kaplan. Peleg is the Kennedy-Leigh Lecturer in modern Hebrew studies at the University of Cambridge, where he teaches modern Hebrew literature and Israeli culture. He is the author of Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas: A Brief Romance and coeditor of Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion. Eran Kaplan is the Rhoda and Richard Goldman Chair in Israel Studies at San Francisco State University. He is the author of The Jewish Radical Right: Revisionist Zionism and its Ideological Legacy, The Origins Of Israel: A Documentary History with Derek Penslar (both published by the University of Wisconsin Press), and Beyond Post Zionism from SUNY University Press.

In this discussion, these scholars tie Israel's shift to religiosity to a global pendulum shift away from separating religion and institutions of power and how popular entertainment and mainstream media both reflects and feeds these cultural shifts.

Eran Kaplan: Earlier this month, Israel’s Channel 2—the country’s most watched channel and newscast—featured a link to a video on its news home page of one of its most popular hosts, Sivan Rahav-Me’ir, giving a Torah lesson on the reasons why Jerusalem was destroyed nearly two millennia ago. Does this signify to you the type of social and cultural developments that you have identified in your new book?

Yaron Peleg: You are asking an interesting question, because while the personal story of journalist Sivan Rahav-Meir is not unusual—she grew up in a secular home and became religious later on in life, as an adult—the fact that she was given a mainstream national platform for "preaching" is very unusual. What we have here, I think, is an example of an increasing blurring of boundaries in Israel between the personal—religious belief—and the public—national TV. Sivan Rahav-Meir is not only a popular journalist but also a popular religious public figure. Until now, however, she separated these worlds, conducting her journalistic work while also being active in her religious community. Her Torah lesson on a popular TV channel, which has never before scheduled a religious show, is significantly different. Her televised lesson has no news value nor was she invited as a guest to speak about herself. In many ways it can be labeled "televangelism", which even in the U.S., where the genre was invented, is broadcast on dedicated television channels.

EK: Where else in Israeli culture do you see this blurring of the line between the public and private sphere?

YP: I would say that this blurring occurs most alarmingly in the military, the IDF. There is currently a culture war between the higher echelons of the IDF, who were educated during a time when the political influence of the national religious was less prominent in Israel, and the lower ranks, many of whom hail from the national religious sector in Israel. These lower ranks, especially the elite fighting units, were once populated by Labor-identified or more left oriented Israelis. These lowers ranks are where most of the higher command of the Israeli army is groomed, and eventually they will rise through the ranks to become the army's generals. When this happens, in a decade or so, the character of the Israeli army will likely change to reflect that. We saw this already in the last operation in Gaza in 2014, which was defined in religious terms by some commanders and soldiers who took part in it. A lot of media attention focused on this phenomenon during the 2014 operation.

Education is another area where this blurring occurs, especially under the influence of religious parties, which control the Ministry of Education and introduce various initiatives and textbooks that promote so-called Jewish values. I say “so-called” because many of the values that are promoted as “Jewish” in Israel today are separationist and jingoistic and seem increasingly beholden to the ancient Israelite aggression as recorded in the Hebrew Bible rather than to the more compromising Judaism of the rabbis. It is not difficult to imagine the long-term effects of these phenomena on Israeli society, whose children will be first drilled in schools and then in the army along more tribal sensibilities rather than more universal ones.

Beyond the Forest Q&A with Loli Kantor

To mark the start of Hanukkah, we asked photographer Loli Kantor to answer some questions about her new book, Beyond the Forest: Jewish Presence in Eastern Europe, 2004–2012. Kantor is the daughter of Polish Jews who met and married in Munich after the war. Born in France and raised in Israel, she has spent the last thirty years living stateside in Fort Worth, Texas. In the early 2000s, she was compelled to set out in search of her roots. In the book's introduction, Anda Rottenberg sets up the devastating details that spurred Kantor's travels in Eastern Europe over an eight-year period:

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"The face of her mother, who died in childbirth, is something familiar only from photographs. Of her father, she knows his place of birth and his short, professional CV, most likely written for the U.S. State Department and thus omitting the details of his war experiences....she knew little of the historical landscape from which her parents emerged, the territory of Central-Eastern Europe—stretching from the western borders of prewar Poland to the line connecting Leningrad, Smolensk, and Kursk in the east, Tallinn in the north, and Crimea in the south—and aptly described by Timothy Snyder as the 'bloodlands.' From 1933 to 1945 this region witnessed the deaths of 14 million innocent people, including women, children, and the elderly. Up until 1948 it also experienced mass forced displacement of whole populations (Jews, Roma, Poles, Germans, and Rusyns), as well as the “voluntary” exile of those who hoped to save their lives or improve their fate."

Kantor's photo-essay is a very moving account of her personal journey to reconcile incredible loss with hope, faith, and community. Given recent events in the area, we took the opportunity to ask her about what Jewish communities now under Russian rule  in the Crimea region are coping.

We wish you and yours a Happy Hanukkah. Chag Chanukah sameach!


Q: The plates in the book progress from stark black-and-white images to colorful, people and food–filled scenes, almost winter to spring. How does that evoke what you experienced in your travels and time spent in these communities?

The transition from black-and-white to color, from stark to bright does reflect my disposition at the beginning of the project. I made my first trip in November 2005, purposefully to have this stark, cold, and snowy atmosphere in the works, using black-and-white film. This was partly intentional and was also my state of mind about the place of Jewish presence and absence in Eastern Europe.

Block 11 | Auschwitz, 2005 | Poland