Professor Camil Fuchs and Shmuel Rosner | Photo: Yehoshua Yosef
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Emily Amrousi – Who is the Israeli Jew?
Original at IsraelHaYom
Veteran pollster Professor Camil Fuchs and researcher Shmuel Rosner examine being Jewish vs. being Israeli • Their study finds a steady decline in observance levels among religious Israelis but also an affinity for religious rituals among secular Israelis.
Professor Camil Fuchs brought the statistical analysis. Researcher Shmuel Rosner brought the theory. Their study – an attempt to identify the components of a new, revolutionary culture – is like cracking a code. “Israeli Judaism” is the code name. It may sound familiar, cliché even, but no one has cracked it before them.
In their new book “#IsraeliJudaism: A Portrait of a Cultural Revolution,” they argue that 55% of Jewish Israelis share this code. They interviewed 3,005 Israelis, ensuring that the gender, age and religious observance demographics accurately represented the general population (in accordance with the Central Bureau of Statistics data). Interviewees answered 300 questions in the first round and 100 additional questions in the second round. The research is still ongoing and thousands continue to participate.
The numbers don’t lie: The Israeli tribes are drawing ever closer. Observant Israeli Judaism is eroding. Traditional Israeli Judaism is eroding. Secular Israeli Judaism is also eroding. All this erosion has created a vacuum, generating demand for a new type of Judaism.
Fuchs and Rosner asked questions on the national spectrum (about topics like mandatory military service and observing a moment of silence on the memorial day for fallen soldiers) and on the religious spectrum (about topics like types of burial and observing Sukkot). They divided the interviewees – a very representative sample of Israeli Jews – into four groups: Israelis, Jews, Jewish Israelis and universals.
The Israelis place an emphasis on national topics but set aside tradition. The Israelis comprise 15% of the population. In the earlier stages of the study, Rosner and Fuchs called them the Canaanites.
The second group, the Jews, or conservatives, comprise 17% of Israelis. Members of this group put the emphasis on tradition but keep national rituals to a minimum. (They likely overlap with the ultra-Orthodox population.)
The third group is the universals, who have little interest in Jewish tradition and also in Jewish nationalism. This group is the smallest, comprising 13% of the population.
These three groups, however, make up less than half of the population – only 45%, in fact. The largest and most dominant tribe by far, they found, is what Rosner and Fuchs characterized as Jewish Israelis. These Jewish Israelis can be religious or secular by the old definitions, but these definitions don’t apply today, they argue. This fascinating group comprises 55% of the relevant population – they engage in Jewish and Israeli rituals and traditions. They don’t obey any rabbi or the laws of Judaism but they don’t shun tradition and aren’t completely secular. A Jewish Israeli is someone who says a blessing on Friday night, waves an Israeli flag on Independence Day and feels that it is important to be Jewish even without observing all the laws of Judaism. A Jewish Israeli is secular but observes Passover and Purim.
The survey, which is the basis for the book, is one of the largest and most in-depth of its kind – an attempt to map the characteristics of the Jewish population of Israel. Rosner suggested plotting the interviewees along two axes: tradition and nationalism. “Camil analyzed all the answers and put them into the model, and then he called me, excited. Suddenly everything fell into place,” Rosner recalls. “We realized what it was that we were looking for. The data led us there. We didn’t operate on assumptions. We watched the data organize itself, giving us answers to everything we were trying to understand.”
Fuchs identifies as “entirely secular” – one of the seven options interviewees were given to describe themselves. He was born in Romania and immigrated to Israel at age 15. He is a professor emeritus in the Faculty of Exact Sciences at Tel Aviv University and a veteran pollster. Rosner identifies somewhere between “liberal religious” and “traditional.” He wears a small kippah. He edits nonfiction for a large Israeli publisher, is a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and writes columns for The New York Times, The Jewish Journal and Maariv.
The three of us meet at Rosner’s home in Tel Aviv. When Fuchs answered his own survey, he found that he belongs in the universals column. Rosner found himself among the Jewish Israelis.
Q: Were you surprised by where your answers placed you on the graph?
Fuchs: “I was surprised to see a high percentage of completely secular people, like me, who believe in God. Seventy-eight percent of Jews in Israel believe in God, and 50% of the completely secular believe in him. Half of the secular people aren’t atheists! That means that in Israel, being secular is behavioral, not faith-based. When researchers in the world ask people what religion they are, they give the option ‘atheist.’ In Israel, the vast majority have a religion. The Jewish religion. They don’t observe its laws, but it is still their religion, so they wouldn’t view themselves as atheists.”
Rosner: “What surprised me about my religious friends? First of all, I’m not sure my friends are religious. As for the religious sector, I was surprised by the dropout rate. The level of observance is in decline if you compare the level of observance in the home a person grew up in to the level of observance in their home today. The religious public is having trouble keeping the next generation religious. I think that the group that is most challenged by Israeli Judaism is the religious Zionist sector. When 55% of the people are Jewish Israelis, it makes religious nationalism unnecessary.”
Fuchs, nodding in agreement: “The decline in the level of observance from childhood to adult homes is consistent and verifiable. Everyone loves to talk about religification [the effort to infuse religious elements into secular institutions] but the fact is that there are more people who are less religious today than they were yesterday. There is more secularization than religification.”
Rosner clarifies: “That doesn’t mean that the public sphere is less Jewish. We are living inside this white noise that maintains a minimum of Judaism in the background at all times. A person identifies as ‘completely secular’ in a poll and then, out of 350 questions about rituals and Israeli customs and traditions, it turns out that he does observe 150. He observes Passover Seder, he observes Purim, celebrates bar mitzvahs for his son.
“The State of Israel allows us to be ‘lazy’ Jews. We can do nothing and still be under a constant barrage of Jewish culture. I’ll give you an example: A secular Israeli turns on the television one week before Shavuot and gets bombarded with 20 advertisements for cheese. You want to forget Shavuot? You can’t. Not in Israel. On the other hand, it’s very easy to forget Tisha B’Av. Not everything works. There is a culture in the making here.”
Rosner met Fuchs when Rosner was working at the news desk of the Haaretz newspaper and Fuchs conducted polls for the paper. They have since published a number of collaborative papers. During the interview, the gaps between their respective views become apparent at times. For example, when Rosner uses the word “assimilation” in regard to Diaspora Jews, Fuchs lashes out: “I don’t view it as a threat. We are not responsible for this. We mustn’t intervene in the life of another person, particularly in such an intimate act as marriage.”
In the book and in their joint research, they try to avoid judgment. “We tried to not be shocked,” they say. “We are not in the business of educating or ranking. The data told us a story that we agreed on.”
Creating a new culture
Among the many figures in the book, it is interesting to look at the two holidays that took on an independent shape, from the ground up, without rabbinical influence on the icons that represent them – Hanukkah and Yom Kippur. According to Jewish law, Hanukkah is not a particularly important holiday. It holds far less weight than Sukkot, for example. And yet, almost all the Israelis interviewed said they do light candles on Hanukkah (and 73% light candles on every one of the holiday’s eight nights). This compared to only 58% who said they sit in the Sukkah on Sukkot.
During Hanukkah, it is impossible for Israelis to avoid the Hanukkah spirit. Every convenience store sells candles and menorahs, producers stage children’s festivals, the bakeries compete for the title of most creative sufganiyot and the streets light up with holiday symbols.
Yom Kippur also received an Israeli makeover – a departure from its traditional character. Israelis can’t seem to agree on the meaning of this holy day, with many opposing the popular practice among children of bicycling and rollerskating on the empty streets – as Israel takes a daylong break from cars. The survey found that many Israelis think that bicycling on the empty streets is a deviation from what Yom Kippur should represent – a day of prayer, fasting and reflection. Two-thirds of Jews, 67%, said they fully fast on Yom Kippur. But when asked about the bicycle tradition, 43% of parents said their children ride on Yom Kippur.
Q: Is bicycle riding on Yom Kippur a characteristic of Israeli Judaism?
Rosner: “The riding is intertwined with an important date on the Jewish calendar, and stems from it. Only on this holiest of days do the streets fully clear. And it happens only in Israel. A Jew living abroad will find the streets full of cars on Yom Kippur. The special circumstances experienced by the majority of Jews in Israel created this link between Yom Kippur and bicycles.
“For some people, this is an indication that Jewish in Israel are becoming less Jewish. But it is possible that the rise in the number of bicycles on Yom Kippur doesn’t indicate an erosion of commitment to the Jewish culture, but rather a shift in the Jewish culture. Two out of every three Israelis go to synagogue on Yom Kippur. About half of them stay at the synagogue for most of the day, and the other half go just for [initial] Kol Nidre or [closing] Neila services. At the same time, the children of many of those same people ride bicycles.”
Fuchs and Rosner found quite a few customs that an overwhelming majority of Jews in Israel partake in: Passover Seder, Rosh Hashanah, the moment of silence on memorial day, bar and bat mitzvah, the Friday night family dinner, resting on Shabbat, and circumcision. A tiny minority, 4%, said that they don’t observe Yom Kippur or Passover in any way.
A large majority (76%) believes that in order to be a good Jew, one must be a good person and that Jews should help other Jews wherever they may be. A similar majority (84%) believe that to be a Jew means remembering the Holocaust. Most of the Jews, 94%, eat apples dipped in honey on Rosh Hashanah, 91% eat jelly doughnuts on Hanukkah, 76% eat from the Afikoman on Passover, 63% eat barbecued meat on Independence Day and 82% eat dairy on Shavuot.
“We don’t jump to conclusions, we only assess the reality,” Fuchs says. “But it is impossible not to see that something new has been created here. Israeli Judaism. The story isn’t complete, it’s still developing. We are in the midst of the creation of a new culture.”
“The charm of Jewish culture over the course of history, and the reason it has not disappeared, is that we adapt quickly to new circumstances,” Rosner adds. “The State of Israel qualifies as new circumstances – a new, unfamiliar reality – and Judaism adapts to it.”
“Zionism sought to eradicate anti-Semitism and ensure the safety of Jews’ lives. That didn’t happen. Anti-Semitism has not been eradicated. But something else happened – Zionism won an important victory in managing to rejuvenate Judaism and renew it in the modern era. It enabled people who don’t observe the laws of Judaism to live a life that accommodates their personal preferences while simultaneously supplying a thick layer of Jewish culture that accompanies them. It is like an ancient suitcase that they take with them everywhere they go.”
Fewer tribes, more variations
I ask the two whether the vast overlap between the different groups doesn’t contradict the general sense of hostility and conflict among Israelis today.
Rosner: “There are people with clear interests who are working to exacerbate the incessant need to fight, to sharpen the edges: politicians, journalists and organizations looking to raise money.”
Q: Wars on religion and state also fuel the internal Israeli conflict, but your study found that secular Israelis generally feel sympathetic toward religion.
“It is important to distinguish between tradition and religion,” he says. “Israelis love tradition but they associate religion with rabbis and the religious establishment and they reject it. Who’s to blame? Everyone has an answer. Being Israeli affords people a comfortable Jewish existence. Within the daily grind, it doesn’t take too much effort to be a Jewish Israeli. It’s right here. And if we don’t fight about it, it comes naturally to everyone. We found a very high incidence of Israelis who insist on having family dinners on Friday night, where they say kiddush and eat a kosher meal. The Rabbinate can intervene, the politicians can try to step in but Israeli culture is what most Israelis choose to practice. Tisha B’Av, for example, is omitted almost entirely from Israeli culture. It is observed almost exclusively by the observant. There is no use trying to change that with legislation or activism.”
One of the surprising revelations in the book is the number of Israelis who identify as Reform or Conservative even though they don’t belong to Reform or Conservative congregations or to the movements in any way. “This is a red flag for the Orthodox establishment,” the authors explain. “People identify as Reform because Orthodox has come to be perceived as derogatory in the eyes of many secular Jews. They associate Orthodoxy with religious political parties, the Chief Rabbinate and corruption. The interviewees didn’t read Reform books on theology.”
Q: You didn’t ask any diplomatic-political questions in your survey. But isn’t the political divide the most obvious rift among Israelis?
Fuchs: “There is a massive rift in terms of views. But both as a pollster and as a citizen I will say that it is a far less relevant issue in the private individual’s day to day conduct. There is support for separating from the Palestinians, but for most Israelis that already exists. It’s not an issue that occupies their minds.”
Rosner: “In Israel, 5% identify as left-wing, another 11% identify as center-left. That means that the majority of Israelis are on the right or center. Whether [Zionist Union Chairman Avi] Gabbay or [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu heads the government, you wouldn’t see a huge difference in policy on the Palestinian issue.”
Q: What about President Reuven Rivlin’s tribes speech?
“I don’t see separate tribes in Israeli society. I see an open fan with a lot of variations. The tribes discourse was effective in understanding society but the tribes are drawing closer together.”
I ask Rosner whether he thinks that the national-religious sector, to which both he and I belong, is a leading force in the Israeli Judaism they describe. We grew up on the same street, went to the same youth movement, and were both brought up on Torah and labor, Torah and science, Torah and art. He answers sharply: “Religious Zionism likes to take undeserved credit for things it did not achieve. It needs a bit of modesty. The sector is one of the groups that brought us this link, but so did Bialik, A.D. Gordon, Ahad Ha’am, Berl Katznelson. There were factions that tried to create a new kind of Israeli, detached from the past, but most of the Zionists, including the Labor party, tried to create a new Jew, not a Canaanite Hebrew.
I ask them both if the study made them more optimistic or more pessimistic. “I feel much calmer,” says Fuchs. “We found a dynamic society that is headed in the right direction.”
“I’m very optimistic,” Rosner concurs. “It’s worthwhile to take a step back from the Twitter wars and find that we are generally united in Israeli society. We hardly found any Israelis on the fringes.”
