After Seventy Years, Israeli Judaism Is Settling In and Getting Comfortable

What has Zionism achieved? Like all revolutionaries, the early Zionists understood that in the new world they intended to create, a new kind of person would be required—in their case, a new kind of Jew, one not only speaking a new-old language in a new-old land but forging, or re-forging, a new-old identity.

This hugely ambitious goal is exactly what Zionism has achieved. That, at least, is the claim of a new Hebrew book entitled #IsraeliJudaism (Dvir Press 2018), which backs up that argument with a comprehensive study of contemporary Israeli Jewish society. Of the book’s two co-authors, Camil Fuchs and Shmuel Rosner, the former is an emeritus professor of statistics at Tel Aviv University and the latter a journalist and senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI). In #IsraeliJudaism, their individual talents are well matched, resulting in a portrait that is in equal parts a demographic study, a cultural introduction, and a work of social analysis. (An English-language edition is said to be in the works; in the meantime, an extensive English summary can be found here.)

Emerging from a survey conducted through JPPI, the book draws on 3,000 responses to an extensive questionnaire asking Israeli Jews how they think about their national identity as Israelis, about their religious identity as Jews, and about the relation between those two identities. Throughout, the authors remain committed to a descriptive tone, eschewing polemics in favor of an intimate, informal pose and concentrating more on how their subjects behave (“What do you do on the holidays, how do you keep Shabbat?”) than on what they believe.