The big bang of 2010 (Haaretz - Israel News)
The new idea is an old one - it's the Zionist idea. At a time when the legitimacy of the Jewish state is coming under unbridled global attack, there is an urgent need to revitalize the Zionist idea. When the Israeli elites turn their backs on the national ethos, there is an immediate need to revitalize the Zionist idea. When most of the children in the first through fifth grades are ultra-Orthodox or Arab, it's a matter of survival to revitalize the Zionist idea. When the State of Israel is becoming the state of Tel Aviv, there's a strategic need to revitalize the Zionist idea. The challenge is one that Israel has not faced since its establishment: that of redefining the Israeli republic.
The silent Israeli majority feels that Zionism is under siege. The threat is posed not only by Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. The threat lies within ourselves: our moral eclipse, our obtuseness, our lack of feeling, our stupidity. Our loss of faith in our rightness.
So all Zionist parties must come to their senses, come together and take action. If Netanyahu proves he can lead the Zionist coalition and unite the Israeli majority, his leadership will have meaning. But to do so he must make sure that the big bang of 2010 is a Zionist one, not a cynical one.
At the edge of the abyss (Haaretz - Israel News)
- Since the Haredi community will not change voluntarily, there is no option but to make some tough decisions: The introduction of English, math and science studies must become a condition for receiving state school funding, and quotas must be set for the number of yeshiva students exempted from the draft. The cut in child allowances and other government support a few years ago increased Haredi participation in the workforce, but not sufficiently. For that to happen, assistance to large families must be made conditional on joining the labor market.
These decisions must be made immediately, for two reasons. First, because if they are delayed for a decade it could be too late to prevent the plunge into the abyss. Second, because the political power of the Haredim is increasing, and any delay will make it harder to legislate these decisions, which are critical for the state and the Haredim themselves.
Learning Curve (HADASSAH MAGAZINE)
Here’s a more contemporary error about haredi society: I once attended a meeting at my daughter’s high school in preparation for the standard 12th-grade tour of Poland. The headmistress told me that the students wouldn’t just learn about death camps. Before their trip, she said, they’d visit Meah She’arim, to see what Jewish life was like in Poland before the Holocaust.
Her nostalgic view of Meah She’arim is a common one, but mistaken. It’s not just that prewar Jewish Warsaw, with its Yiddish secularists, Zionists and assimilationists didn’t match Jerusalem’s haredi belt. Even Eastern European ultra-Orthodoxy did not look the same as today’s.
Despite ultra-Orthodoxy’s opposition to Zionism, Israel’s version of haredi Judaism is a creation of the Jewish state. Both the common view at the time of Israel’s establishment that religious Judaism was fading away and nostalgia for Eastern Europe helped promote this new form of Judaism. So did some successful steps taken by haredi leaders to revive a community that was first shrunken by modernity, then devastated by the Holocaust.
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