Secularity and Its Discontents: Religiosity in Contemporary Israeli Culture

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)One of the most profound changes Israeli society has been undergoing in the last two decades has been a slow but increasingly discernible ?religification.? If we take the animosity of early Zionism and the young Israeli state toward religious practices and rabbinic control as a point of departure, ?religification? refers to changes in those attitudes over time. Though hard to define, the process refers to an increase in the public visibility, acceptance, and sanction of religious symbols and practices in Israel in comparison to the attitudes of earlier decades. This includes the greater role of religion in the country?s official culture and politics, from politicians wearing yarmulkas during official state ceremonies and the adoption of quasi-religious rhetoric in politics;1 to the introduction of religious rituals and prayers in official military ceremonies;2 to the inclusion of religious texts and content in popular culture media, such as weekly newspaper columns and television programs that deal with Scripture or the use of religious texts for lyrics of popular songs;3 to gender separation on public transportation.4 Such public expressions of religious devotion and practice are the phenomena of recent decades: they did not exist thirty or even twenty years ago in Israeli public life.5One reason for this trend has to do with the steady growth of Israel's religious populations: the ultra-Orthodox and the settler communities. These demographic changes have obvious cultural consequences as well as political corollaries that play into the country's well-established traditions, which were set long before religious voters were a political force to be reckoned with. Indeed, this is precisely what Guy Ben-Porat has found in a study that actually claims the opposite-that Israeli society is not religifying but rather becoming more secular. In his 2013 book about the divisions between secular and religious people in Israel, Ben-Porat shows how large sections of the secular Israeli public are becoming increasingly alienated from the state religion, which has grown more beholden to radical elements. When one considers the growing influence the Orthodox and the settlers have had on government policies in the last few decades, Ben-Porat's analysis makes a lot of sense.6The gravamen of Ben-Porat's argument is that while the official representatives of Judaism in Israel are growing stricter and more politically powerful, the secular public is becoming more radically secular, abandoning the few remaining traditions it held and defying them through the consumption of pork, having civil weddings, shopping on Shabbat, and so forth. This article looks at the dynamics of this process, primarily by following the attempt of secular Israeli society to understand and contain the rising profile of religion in public life.Indeed, the changing Israeli demographics have seen an increase in the visibility of religious expressions in cultural mediums such as theater, popular music, film, and television. 7 These mediums, which in the past were the purview of secular Zionist culture-and fervently developed to establish and promote it as an alternative to traditional-religious expression-seem increasingly more attentive to the place and role of Judaism in Israeli society today, both religious practice (mrom mm or return to the faith) as well as contemporary Haskala: enlightenment as epitomized by the calls to return to the Jewish bookcase ('ΤiΓΡΠ onaon inx).s In this essay, I would like to examine these trends through a historical survey of Israeli films and television programs that process these developments and paint a picture of an Israel that is changing before our eyes.Early Zionism was animated by a strong antireligious spirit that was influenced by civic nationalism in Europe as well as by the maskilic critique of traditional Judaism. …