Religion and Society (2019)

Dear All,

I’m greatly looking forward to seeing you in a few weeks. In our meeting we’ll be talking about “religion and society,” a cast topic in any situation and certainly here. But we’ve got to start somewhere.

These readings are meant to give you a sense of the broad narrative arc I’ll be tracing – how Zionism was one of many ideologies that arose in response, not only to modern anti-Semitism, but to the modern collapse of traditional Jewish community, society and culture.  Zionism’s relationship to religion, and vice versa, took many different forms and evolved over time.  Labor Zionism, which was the central driver building the state, offered its own secularized version of Judaism, and here as elsewhere, Labor’s decline since the 1970s is one of the most consequential facts of Israeli life, with reverberations to the present. We will mainly be discussing Jews and Judaism, though of course, Israel’s non-Jewish religious traditions and communities are part of the story.

Turning to these readings, I suggest starting with Fuchs and Rosner, the abstract of a book published just a few months ago, offering a helpful snapshot of Israeli Judaism today. Then, read the classic 1897 essay by Ahad Ha-Am, a major Zionist thinker, in which he lays out just what were the crises that Zionism sought to solve, and why the era’s political crises could not be dealt with in isolation from modernity’s crisis of religion and culture. This essay of his laid the groundwork for the cultural-spiritual Zionism that accompanies political Zionism to this day. From there, I suggest looking at my piece on “From Morality to Ideology and Back,” from 2010 yet the basic analysis still, I think, holds. Then, the readings on The Religious Significance of the State, which gives a sense of some of the basic ideological positions, the opening sections of Barak-Erez (and the rest if you have time) and then my essays on Ovadya Yosef, the most important figure for Sephardic Jewry, and on Michael Walzer’s attempts to explain how and why secular revolutions end up laying the groundwork for religious resurgence. The article by Liebman and Don-Yehiya should be useful, if you have the time.

I’m sorry for including so many things by me, but hope their brevity is some consolation there. 

Yours,
Yehudah

 

Shmuel Rosner, Camille Fuchs, Noah Slepkov, #IsraeliJudaism: A Portrait of a Cultural Revolution: English Summary, Jewish People Policy Institute, Dec. 31, 2018

 

Ahad Ha-Am (aka Asher Ginzberg), “The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem” (1897), in Arthur Hertzberg, ed., The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997) [1959], pp. 249-251, 262-269 [Note – I have also included the Table of Contents of Hertzberg’s now-classic and still terrific anthology]