What do you think?
Rate this book
יהדות ישראלית - דיוקן של מהפכה תרבותית
היהודים של ישראל כבר בנו מדינה. סללו כבישים, הקימו בתים, פיתחו טכנולוגיה, גייסו צבא.
היהודים של ישראל עדיין עוסקים בעיצוב של תרבות חדשה. תרבות מיוחדת ומהפכנית: יהודית־ישראלית.
שמואל רוזנר, עמית בכיר במכון למדיניות העם היהודי, וקמיל פוקס, פרופ׳ לסטטיסטיקה וסוקר, יצאו לפצח את הקוד המיוחד של התרבות הזאת.
הם יצאו לאתר את מרכיביה. הם יצאו לברר מי שותף ליצירתה ומי מסתייג ממנה. הם יצאו לבדוק במה היא שונה ממה שהיה קודם, ובמה היא עוד צפויה להשתנות. הם חזרו עם ממצאים. עם עובדות, מספרים, תובנות וסיפורים. הם חזרו עם מסקנות לא על מה שצריך להיות (זה כל אחד יחליט בעצמו) אלא על מה שיש.
ישראלים של יום כיפור ויהודים של יום העצמאות.
יהודים של לגור בארץ וישראלים של מצה ומרור.
ישראלים של קידוש בשישי ויהודים של שופינג בשבת.
יהודים ישראלים מאוד וישראלים יהודים מאוד.
מי שאתם. מי שאנחנו.
שמואל רוזנר הוא עמית בכיר במכון למדיניות העם היהודי, עורך ספרי העיון בכנרת־זמורה־דביר, בעל טור בעיתונים ניו יורק טיימס, ג׳ואיש ג׳ורנל ומעריב. זהו ספרו השלישי בעברית.
קמיל פוקס הוא פרופסור אמריטוס בחוג לסטטיסטיקה באוניברסיטת
תל אביב. הוא יועץ במכון הסקרים ״דיאלוג״, ועורך סקרים עבור ערוץ 10, וגופים רבים אחרים.
לפני שמתחילים:
באיזו מידה חשוב לך שאתה יהודי/ה?
(64% אומרים ״חשוב מאוד״)
באיזו מידה חשוב לך שילדיך יהיו יהודים?
(67% אומרים ״חשוב מאוד״)
כמה את/ה מרגיש/ה יהודי/ה?
(53% אומרים ״בלי שום ספק״)
האם את/ה בטוח/ה שילדיך יהיו יהודים?
(61% אומרים ״בלי שום ספק״)
האם את/ה חושב/ת שנכדיך יהיו יהודים?
(51% אומרים ״בלי שום ספק״)
ומה אתכם?
היהודים של ישראל עדיין עוסקים בעיצוב של תרבות חדשה. תרבות מיוחדת ומהפכנית: יהודית־ישראלית.
שמואל רוזנר, עמית בכיר במכון למדיניות העם היהודי, וקמיל פוקס, פרופ׳ לסטטיסטיקה וסוקר, יצאו לפצח את הקוד המיוחד של התרבות הזאת.
הם יצאו לאתר את מרכיביה. הם יצאו לברר מי שותף ליצירתה ומי מסתייג ממנה. הם יצאו לבדוק במה היא שונה ממה שהיה קודם, ובמה היא עוד צפויה להשתנות. הם חזרו עם ממצאים. עם עובדות, מספרים, תובנות וסיפורים. הם חזרו עם מסקנות לא על מה שצריך להיות (זה כל אחד יחליט בעצמו) אלא על מה שיש.
ישראלים של יום כיפור ויהודים של יום העצמאות.
יהודים של לגור בארץ וישראלים של מצה ומרור.
ישראלים של קידוש בשישי ויהודים של שופינג בשבת.
יהודים ישראלים מאוד וישראלים יהודים מאוד.
מי שאתם. מי שאנחנו.
שמואל רוזנר הוא עמית בכיר במכון למדיניות העם היהודי, עורך ספרי העיון בכנרת־זמורה־דביר, בעל טור בעיתונים ניו יורק טיימס, ג׳ואיש ג׳ורנל ומעריב. זהו ספרו השלישי בעברית.
קמיל פוקס הוא פרופסור אמריטוס בחוג לסטטיסטיקה באוניברסיטת
תל אביב. הוא יועץ במכון הסקרים ״דיאלוג״, ועורך סקרים עבור ערוץ 10, וגופים רבים אחרים.
לפני שמתחילים:
באיזו מידה חשוב לך שאתה יהודי/ה?
(64% אומרים ״חשוב מאוד״)
באיזו מידה חשוב לך שילדיך יהיו יהודים?
(67% אומרים ״חשוב מאוד״)
כמה את/ה מרגיש/ה יהודי/ה?
(53% אומרים ״בלי שום ספק״)
האם את/ה בטוח/ה שילדיך יהיו יהודים?
(61% אומרים ״בלי שום ספק״)
האם את/ה חושב/ת שנכדיך יהיו יהודים?
(51% אומרים ״בלי שום ספק״)
ומה אתכם?
288 pages, Unknown Binding
Published January 1, 2018
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
September 22, 2019
One of the, if not the, best book to understand how Judaism has evolved since the creation of the state of Israel. Apart from that, it illustrates the cohesion of the different Jewish groups that exist in Israeli society (Haredim, National-Religious, Secular). It’s really good because it relies on data and polls all the time, but it also makes an acute and serious analysis that you won’t likely find anywhere else. The new “must-read” about Israeli Judaism.
July 24, 2023
A summary of some extensive polling of Israeli Jews about their feelings about Judaism and nationalism in Israel. I have several issues with it and will start with the smallest but most annoying: the gratuitous hashtag in the title. Seriously, why?
On to the methodology. The data comes from an internet survey of 3000 people, resampled to match the religious breakdown of the population based on government statistics. While the authors admit that internet polling introduces sampling bias, they claim that this bias is still less than that of phone polling (even for Haredim?!), and that doing a survey of this scale in person would be prohibitively expensive. Another interesting point (like the first, buried in an appendix) is that the authors used some more complex statistical modelling to cluster their responses (factor analysis, latent variable modelling) but kept getting only two clusters, which in their opinion didn't accurately reflect reality, so they rejected these and used four groups (Jews, Israelis, Universalists, Jewsraelis) instead.
I actually have no problem with rejecting the results of a complex statistical model based on an intuition about the data (avoiding what Andrew Gelman calls taking your model too seriously). But I do think that this requires you to admit more about how your starting assumptions affect your analysis, rather than presenting your findings as completely emerging from your polling.
At every stage of this kind of project the researchers' preconceptions affect the work: which questions are asked, how those questions are worded, how to interpret the outcomes. In some cases their interpretation even seems not to fit their own data: chapter 3 claims that there is about equal concern in Israel about religious and secular coercion (hadata and hilun), yet the polling printed at the end of the chapter leans much more heavily in the direction of religious coercion. (In this and other places, even a small amount of visualisation - even the much-hated pie chart! - would have gone a long way. Instead the reader must read through tables of percentages. Maybe there was no budget for it?)*
My contention is not that Rosner and Fuchs' work falls short of the state of the art in their field; it is that the state of the art is inadequate for dealing with issues of this complexity. It regularly falls short when faced with the Popperian requirement of making a falsifiable prediction, about the much simpler question of who will get the most votes in a close election, never mind why people vote the way they do and how they will vote in the future.
I have belaboured this point a bit because of the book's constant refrain that the authors are not sharing their own opinions but merely what the data reflects, a claim I think is not credible. Having set up why I think this is a matter of values and opinions - not Weber's ideal of a "value-free" (wertfrei) empirical science - I want to say a bit about why I disagree with their conclusions.
In 2015 Israel's then-President Rivlin gave a famous talk about the "four tribes" into which he warned the country was separating. The authors basically disagree with Rivlin, at least in regard to Israeli Jews, arguing that the secular, haredi and traditional are somewhat converging into a new flavour of Israeli Judaism which encompasses a broad middle ground, and that the age-old arguments about religion and state, are not worsening and are in some ways moving toward consensus. This goes against the conventional wisdom which says that as the demographic share and political strength of religious communities grow, they are shifting the state to become more pious and less tolerant of non-observance. Events that have happened since the book's publication seem only to lend weight to this, such as the collapse of the previous government over its capitulating to a court ruling allowing non-Jews and non-observant Jews to bring hametz into hospitals on Passover. Seeking to show that both the religious-coercion crowd and the secular-coercion crowd have their victories at times, they cite parallel examples: the one of secular coercion is from 1940.
The authors' Pollyannaish approach leads them always to same general point: no one side will win the demographic battle, the secular are becoming more traditional and the religious more moderate, and the place of religion in the state will remain in flux. It is true that no dramatic resolution is in the offing. But what happens instead is a steady, monodirectional drip of change. The left has not won an election in this millennium, and this is reflected in policy. New issues that come into play (drafting haredim, funding of schools that don't teach secular education, the Western Wall compromise, enforcement of kosher laws on army bases…) are invariably settled in favour of the religious side. With the planned judicial reform preventing court review of future legislation, it seems likely that this process can only accelerate. And whatever its outcome, it has catalysed the unraveling of whatever previously bound the two sides.
My other problem with the book is more idiosyncratic. As is pretty standard in academic writing about Judaism, the authors take a descriptive approach: Judaism is simply what Jews do. As I wrote previously in my review of Capitalism and the Jews, I have a more limited and prescriptive definition, centred around traditional Jewish texts and their application. Jewish cultural practices (Chinese food on Christmas, bagels and lox, even hamantashen or sfenj or apples in honey on Rosh Hashana) don't count; nor do political or social practices (waving an Israeli flag or standing during the siren on Holocaust Day). So the chimera of Israeli Judaism (sorry, #IsraeliJudaism), if it does exist, is less a new chapter in Judaism the religion, than simply the latest version of how non-observant Jews feel about their faith and what subset of it they practice.
* Another, more pedantic, complaint, is the overpresence of percentages in the book itself. A lot of sentences are studded with parentheticals, e.g. "more Jewsraelis say they read books on shabbat (27%) or go to the beach (18%) rather than go to synagogue (9%)" (a made-up but representative example). These numbers are unnecessary (the sceptical reader can go look them up in the full report, and often in the table that ends each chapter) and distracting. And worse, they give a false sense of numerical exactitude, papering over the large amount of uncertainty in the survey results and analysis. If they had to be there at all I would have preferred that they contain confidence intervals.
On to the methodology. The data comes from an internet survey of 3000 people, resampled to match the religious breakdown of the population based on government statistics. While the authors admit that internet polling introduces sampling bias, they claim that this bias is still less than that of phone polling (even for Haredim?!), and that doing a survey of this scale in person would be prohibitively expensive. Another interesting point (like the first, buried in an appendix) is that the authors used some more complex statistical modelling to cluster their responses (factor analysis, latent variable modelling) but kept getting only two clusters, which in their opinion didn't accurately reflect reality, so they rejected these and used four groups (Jews, Israelis, Universalists, Jewsraelis) instead.
I actually have no problem with rejecting the results of a complex statistical model based on an intuition about the data (avoiding what Andrew Gelman calls taking your model too seriously). But I do think that this requires you to admit more about how your starting assumptions affect your analysis, rather than presenting your findings as completely emerging from your polling.
At every stage of this kind of project the researchers' preconceptions affect the work: which questions are asked, how those questions are worded, how to interpret the outcomes. In some cases their interpretation even seems not to fit their own data: chapter 3 claims that there is about equal concern in Israel about religious and secular coercion (hadata and hilun), yet the polling printed at the end of the chapter leans much more heavily in the direction of religious coercion. (In this and other places, even a small amount of visualisation - even the much-hated pie chart! - would have gone a long way. Instead the reader must read through tables of percentages. Maybe there was no budget for it?)*
My contention is not that Rosner and Fuchs' work falls short of the state of the art in their field; it is that the state of the art is inadequate for dealing with issues of this complexity. It regularly falls short when faced with the Popperian requirement of making a falsifiable prediction, about the much simpler question of who will get the most votes in a close election, never mind why people vote the way they do and how they will vote in the future.
I have belaboured this point a bit because of the book's constant refrain that the authors are not sharing their own opinions but merely what the data reflects, a claim I think is not credible. Having set up why I think this is a matter of values and opinions - not Weber's ideal of a "value-free" (wertfrei) empirical science - I want to say a bit about why I disagree with their conclusions.
In 2015 Israel's then-President Rivlin gave a famous talk about the "four tribes" into which he warned the country was separating. The authors basically disagree with Rivlin, at least in regard to Israeli Jews, arguing that the secular, haredi and traditional are somewhat converging into a new flavour of Israeli Judaism which encompasses a broad middle ground, and that the age-old arguments about religion and state, are not worsening and are in some ways moving toward consensus. This goes against the conventional wisdom which says that as the demographic share and political strength of religious communities grow, they are shifting the state to become more pious and less tolerant of non-observance. Events that have happened since the book's publication seem only to lend weight to this, such as the collapse of the previous government over its capitulating to a court ruling allowing non-Jews and non-observant Jews to bring hametz into hospitals on Passover. Seeking to show that both the religious-coercion crowd and the secular-coercion crowd have their victories at times, they cite parallel examples: the one of secular coercion is from 1940.
The authors' Pollyannaish approach leads them always to same general point: no one side will win the demographic battle, the secular are becoming more traditional and the religious more moderate, and the place of religion in the state will remain in flux. It is true that no dramatic resolution is in the offing. But what happens instead is a steady, monodirectional drip of change. The left has not won an election in this millennium, and this is reflected in policy. New issues that come into play (drafting haredim, funding of schools that don't teach secular education, the Western Wall compromise, enforcement of kosher laws on army bases…) are invariably settled in favour of the religious side. With the planned judicial reform preventing court review of future legislation, it seems likely that this process can only accelerate. And whatever its outcome, it has catalysed the unraveling of whatever previously bound the two sides.
My other problem with the book is more idiosyncratic. As is pretty standard in academic writing about Judaism, the authors take a descriptive approach: Judaism is simply what Jews do. As I wrote previously in my review of Capitalism and the Jews, I have a more limited and prescriptive definition, centred around traditional Jewish texts and their application. Jewish cultural practices (Chinese food on Christmas, bagels and lox, even hamantashen or sfenj or apples in honey on Rosh Hashana) don't count; nor do political or social practices (waving an Israeli flag or standing during the siren on Holocaust Day). So the chimera of Israeli Judaism (sorry, #IsraeliJudaism), if it does exist, is less a new chapter in Judaism the religion, than simply the latest version of how non-observant Jews feel about their faith and what subset of it they practice.
* Another, more pedantic, complaint, is the overpresence of percentages in the book itself. A lot of sentences are studded with parentheticals, e.g. "more Jewsraelis say they read books on shabbat (27%) or go to the beach (18%) rather than go to synagogue (9%)" (a made-up but representative example). These numbers are unnecessary (the sceptical reader can go look them up in the full report, and often in the table that ends each chapter) and distracting. And worse, they give a false sense of numerical exactitude, papering over the large amount of uncertainty in the survey results and analysis. If they had to be there at all I would have preferred that they contain confidence intervals.
December 17, 2019
Like many American Jews, observant or not, I have questions and concerns about Judaism and the State of Israel. Is Judaism a birthright, a religion, a nationality, or all three? Is Israel the state of my national origin, even though I was born before its founding? Can an atheist be Jewish? There are many additional questions, but that is enough to introduce the issue – What does it mean to be Jewish?
After reading this book (a gift from an Israeli friend), I still have the same questions and concerns. However, I have many new tools with which to address the subject. The book is full of demographic data and explanations of what the data means. So, what did I learn?
Israeli Judaism is different from American Judaism; and it continues to evolve. I do not have sufficient experience to evaluate Israeli society. Nor do I have sufficient experience to evaluate Israeli politics. Projecting my own values (American liberal) on those of Israeli society doesn’t make sense.
If you care about Israel, and all American Jews should care, this book is a must read.
After reading this book (a gift from an Israeli friend), I still have the same questions and concerns. However, I have many new tools with which to address the subject. The book is full of demographic data and explanations of what the data means. So, what did I learn?
Israeli Judaism is different from American Judaism; and it continues to evolve. I do not have sufficient experience to evaluate Israeli society. Nor do I have sufficient experience to evaluate Israeli politics. Projecting my own values (American liberal) on those of Israeli society doesn’t make sense.
If you care about Israel, and all American Jews should care, this book is a must read.
January 13, 2020
There have been many books that have looked into the divide between Israel and the diaspora. "We Stand Divided" by Daniel Gordis presented the historical differences that have created a chasm between Jews in the US and Israel. Arthur Herzberg in his seminal work, "The Zionist Idea" builds on the ideas of Achad Ha'am that predicted the divergence between Israel and the diaspora. Hillel Halkin in his imagined dialogue with an American colleague highlighted the divergence and came to the conclusion that for the perpetuation of Judaism, one should move to Israel.
Along come Shmuel Rosner and Camil Fuchs who now are exploring the direction of the Jewsraelis; Jews in Israel who lean towards tradition and nationalism. According to the authors, 55% of Israelis can be classified as Jewsraelis. Shmuel Rosner is a Senior Fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and a recognized author and editor. Camil Fuchs is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Statistics at Tel Aviv University. Together they have conducted polls, interviews, and research in an attempt to ascertain if there is a unique brand of Israeli Judaism.
My initial reaction to the book has nothing to do with the book, but of my first-hand experience living in Israel. The authors document the fact that more people are leaving the ranks of the religious and joining the ranks of the secular. Living in Jerusalem, surrounded by what is likely the highest concentration of observant Jews in the world, I do not see this phenomenon. In addition, my associations with surrounding Jewish Israelis in places such as Efrat, Neve Daniel, Nof Ayalon, and Beit Meir, all religious enclaves, probably reinforces my skewed perspective.
Once I got beyond my knee-jerk reaction, I found the research extremely enlightening. Too often we tend to simplify our perspective by putting people into myopic categories. This work destroys such prejudice. There is no one prototype person in any category; whether you break it down by religious, Zionistic, Political or any other category of belief. The majority of Israelis make Kiddush on Friday night. This includes people who classify themselves as secular.
And this is what leads to the creation of the Jewsraeli. People who are born in a Jewish State, who are not faced with issues of perpetuating Judaism, who speak and read Hebrew so they can explore the original texts first hand, who can view the Torah not only as a religious gift from Hashem but a historical work in the land where they reside and who visit sites from the Torah in their class trips will inevitably have a different perspective than Jews in the US who simply do not benefit from any of these advantages! It is inevitable the direction that Jews will take will diverge.
And yet, it is not only that; Israel is creating new Jewish traditions. Because nobody drives on Yom Kippur, people, especially children, especially those not religious, see the day as one where they can ride their bicycles in the middle of the street without worry. And as their research shows, it is not only secular Israelis riding bicycles, a number of traditional, and a smaller number of religious Jews have begun adopting this practice. Then there are the unique celebrations in Israel such as Yom HaShoah, Yom HaZikaron, Yom Yerusalem, and Yom HaAtzmaut. Sirens sound, Jews stand and reflect, religious say recite prayers such as Yizkor for the dead and Hallel to praise Hashem.
The most important statistic, and one that I personally found as a motivating factor for my personal Aliyah, was the perpetuation of Judaism. The majority of Jews in Israel believe that their children and grandchildren will be Jewish. This was not explored as a religious statement, rather as a social statement. However, if we compare this to the fact that in 2013 Pew Research poll documented that 71% of non-Orthodox and 58% of all Jews participated in interfaith marriages in North America, to me, the future of Judaism is clear. It is in Israel. From an estimated Jewish Israeli population of 630,000 in 1948, the Jewish population of Israel approaches 7 million in 2020 and 70% of them were born in Israel.
And Hillel Halkin makes this exact point in "Letters to an American Jewish Friend." As the population in the diaspora erodes while it grows in Israel, the center of Jewish culture will inevitably shift to Israel. Rosner and Fuchs 40+ years later is documenting that very fact. They do not define what Judaism or Zionism is in Israel in 2018 is not a myopic stagnant set of beliefs or practices, but as Judaism has always been and Israeli identity continues to be, it is complex ever-evolving dynamic. And although this work creates more questions than answers, they are important questions that must be asked and followed up upon in the future!
Along come Shmuel Rosner and Camil Fuchs who now are exploring the direction of the Jewsraelis; Jews in Israel who lean towards tradition and nationalism. According to the authors, 55% of Israelis can be classified as Jewsraelis. Shmuel Rosner is a Senior Fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and a recognized author and editor. Camil Fuchs is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Statistics at Tel Aviv University. Together they have conducted polls, interviews, and research in an attempt to ascertain if there is a unique brand of Israeli Judaism.
My initial reaction to the book has nothing to do with the book, but of my first-hand experience living in Israel. The authors document the fact that more people are leaving the ranks of the religious and joining the ranks of the secular. Living in Jerusalem, surrounded by what is likely the highest concentration of observant Jews in the world, I do not see this phenomenon. In addition, my associations with surrounding Jewish Israelis in places such as Efrat, Neve Daniel, Nof Ayalon, and Beit Meir, all religious enclaves, probably reinforces my skewed perspective.
Once I got beyond my knee-jerk reaction, I found the research extremely enlightening. Too often we tend to simplify our perspective by putting people into myopic categories. This work destroys such prejudice. There is no one prototype person in any category; whether you break it down by religious, Zionistic, Political or any other category of belief. The majority of Israelis make Kiddush on Friday night. This includes people who classify themselves as secular.
And this is what leads to the creation of the Jewsraeli. People who are born in a Jewish State, who are not faced with issues of perpetuating Judaism, who speak and read Hebrew so they can explore the original texts first hand, who can view the Torah not only as a religious gift from Hashem but a historical work in the land where they reside and who visit sites from the Torah in their class trips will inevitably have a different perspective than Jews in the US who simply do not benefit from any of these advantages! It is inevitable the direction that Jews will take will diverge.
And yet, it is not only that; Israel is creating new Jewish traditions. Because nobody drives on Yom Kippur, people, especially children, especially those not religious, see the day as one where they can ride their bicycles in the middle of the street without worry. And as their research shows, it is not only secular Israelis riding bicycles, a number of traditional, and a smaller number of religious Jews have begun adopting this practice. Then there are the unique celebrations in Israel such as Yom HaShoah, Yom HaZikaron, Yom Yerusalem, and Yom HaAtzmaut. Sirens sound, Jews stand and reflect, religious say recite prayers such as Yizkor for the dead and Hallel to praise Hashem.
The most important statistic, and one that I personally found as a motivating factor for my personal Aliyah, was the perpetuation of Judaism. The majority of Jews in Israel believe that their children and grandchildren will be Jewish. This was not explored as a religious statement, rather as a social statement. However, if we compare this to the fact that in 2013 Pew Research poll documented that 71% of non-Orthodox and 58% of all Jews participated in interfaith marriages in North America, to me, the future of Judaism is clear. It is in Israel. From an estimated Jewish Israeli population of 630,000 in 1948, the Jewish population of Israel approaches 7 million in 2020 and 70% of them were born in Israel.
And Hillel Halkin makes this exact point in "Letters to an American Jewish Friend." As the population in the diaspora erodes while it grows in Israel, the center of Jewish culture will inevitably shift to Israel. Rosner and Fuchs 40+ years later is documenting that very fact. They do not define what Judaism or Zionism is in Israel in 2018 is not a myopic stagnant set of beliefs or practices, but as Judaism has always been and Israeli identity continues to be, it is complex ever-evolving dynamic. And although this work creates more questions than answers, they are important questions that must be asked and followed up upon in the future!
June 19, 2020
This is an excellent work that steers very clear from engagement on issues of Zionism & post-Zionism. It remains hyper-focused on its data-driven studies conducted by the authors, Camil Fuchs and Shmuel Rosner.
In my view, this is the most important sociological book on modern Israel since Sabra by Oz Almog. By integrating targeted data, primarily via polling, Rosner and Fuchs actually manage to fossilize modern Israeli religious practice(s) and sentiments, then analyze each aspect of the socio-religious challenges as they appear in modern Israel society. It’s a balancing act, and they strike it.
The truth is that Israeli Judaism is evolving. Every day. Most of the Diaspora won’t acknowledge it, nor understand it, but it is happening. As Rosner himself writes, Israeli Judaism is “a new and natural fusion.”
I highly recommend this publication.
In my view, this is the most important sociological book on modern Israel since Sabra by Oz Almog. By integrating targeted data, primarily via polling, Rosner and Fuchs actually manage to fossilize modern Israeli religious practice(s) and sentiments, then analyze each aspect of the socio-religious challenges as they appear in modern Israel society. It’s a balancing act, and they strike it.
The truth is that Israeli Judaism is evolving. Every day. Most of the Diaspora won’t acknowledge it, nor understand it, but it is happening. As Rosner himself writes, Israeli Judaism is “a new and natural fusion.”
I highly recommend this publication.
April 26, 2020
So much debate around the current and future state of Israeli society is based around instinct and anecdote. Rosner and Fuchs have delivered here a readable analysis of the current makeup of Israeli society looking at the competing identities of Israeli and Jewish, and especially where they overlap.
The surprising part is just how much they do overlap, and just to see this in the numbers makes it a worthwhile read.
Add to that interesting insights into Haredim and their Israeli identity alongside their powerful Haredi identity, and a comparison between Jewish behaviours of Israeli Jews vs American Jews and you have in a very concise read many reasons to buy.
The surprising part is just how much they do overlap, and just to see this in the numbers makes it a worthwhile read.
Add to that interesting insights into Haredim and their Israeli identity alongside their powerful Haredi identity, and a comparison between Jewish behaviours of Israeli Jews vs American Jews and you have in a very concise read many reasons to buy.
March 24, 2020
I’ve read no better introduction to Israel’s complicated Jewish society. A ground breaking study conveyed in style and paste that makes it readable and accessible. If you’re Jewish - it’s a must read.
June 4, 2022
Fascinating take on Israeli Judaism
September 18, 2023
All the statistics lead me to the conclusion that the majority of Israelis areReconstructionists. . They have just never heard of Reconstructionism.
November 14, 2019
If you are interested in the national/religious observance of Israelis or even of the culture in general- this book is for you. It is very data driven, but accessible with charts and descriptions. It's well written and if you are interested in Israel or even American Judaism, well worth the read! It's a much shorter read than you might think, much of the book is appendices etc.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews