Review of Yohai Hakak, Haredi Masculinities Between the Yeshiva

Vol. 7, no. 1 (2017), 126-128 | DOI: 10.18352/rg.10200 Review of Yohai Hakak, Haredi Masculinities Between the Yeshiva, the Army, Work and Politics: The Sage, the Warrior and the Entrepreneur, Leiden and Boston: Brill 2016, 254 pp., ISBN 978-90-04-31933-2 BY BJÖRN KRONDORFER, DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE CULTURAL STUDIES, NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY, USA In this study, cultural anthropologist Yohai Hakak examines how ultra-orthodox (Haredi) men negotiate the Haredi ideal of Jewish masculinity as they come into contact with different spheres of modern Israel. Despite popular misper- ceptions that all Haredi communities seek and enforce absolute separation from their non-religious environment, a growing number of Haredi men venture out from their enclosed world of Torah learning and enter into what they consider ‘earthly sites.’ By doing so, these men are confronted with the social realities of secular Israeli society, forcing them to relate to unaccustomed expectations of what it means to be ‘manly’ and how to function as a man in environments adhering to different rules of engagement. The three earthly sites examined by Hakak are the Israeli Armed Forces (IDF), the Merkaz Haredi Institute of Technology, and the secular, center-right political party of Likud. To each of these spheres, Hakak devotes a full chapter. Thus, three essential pillars of society are covered: national identification through mandatory military service, economic success through professional training, and political power through participation in civic life. Hakak adds a final chapter on the Israeli media treatment of the Haredim, but there he shifts the focus away from observing the accommodation processes of Haredi men to, instead, an analysis of filmic representations of them. Haredi Masculinities is very much a deepening of what Hakak introduced in Young Men in Israeli Haredi Yeshiva Education: The Scholars’ Enclave in Unrest (2012, also published by Brill). In that earlier work, Hakak looked at how the traditional ideal of masculinity was challenged by the actual practice of lived religion among these yeshiva students. In both books, Hakak studies the Haredi community as an example of religious fundamentalism, presuming – for good reasons – that fundamentalism is a modern religious response to modernity and hence constantly in need of making adjustments to the secular world. As This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (3.0) Religion and Gender | ISSN: 1878-5417 | www.religionandgender.org | Uopen Journals much as the Haredim try to preserve their enclave against what they consider modernity’s ills and dangers with admonishments and defensive ‘enforcement violence’ (Ehud Sprinzak, 1993: 463), they are also flexible in embracing select aspects of modernity – a dimension that has largely escaped the attention of secular people who frequently perceive the Haredim in ‘unflattering terms’ (p. 8) as a ‘big, menacing, dark mass’ (p. 192). Hakak, a secular Israeli himself, is keen in avoiding an othering and ‘exoticiza- tion’ (p. 28) of Haredi men by embedding himself as participant observer into the earthly sites that these men are negotiating. Permitted to observe basic IDF training programs with young Haredi men, he shows us the manners by which those recruits negotiate their complex national identification with the state of Israel through military service. He accompanies Haredi students in an information system management program at the Merkaz Haredi Institute of Technology that prepares them for the professional labor market, often against their ingrained habit to stand aloof from economic efficiency and consumerism. And he gains access to the Haredi headquarter of the Likud party where ultra- orthodox men find a political voice outside their religiously-acceptable parties of SHAS, Degel Hatorah, and Agudath Israel. Hakak, who situates himself within critical masculinity studies as well as his- torical studies on the Jewish body, provides a context-rich microanalysis of a subgroup of Jewish men, thus bringing to our attention the fluid boundaries of dominant and subordinated ideals of manliness, subject to day-to-day negotia- tions. For the Haredi men, the encounters with secular Israelis always bear dangers. Within their enclave, the hegemonic ideal of the ‘male religious scholar’ is unquestioned, but when stepping outside they inevitably become aware of their non-hegemonic status among other Israeli men. For centuries, Torah- Talmud loyal men had to defend and define themselves over against Gentile men in Christian Europe, and they took this identity with them when they escaped the Holocaust-ravaged countries and moved to Israel. Once in Israel, they found themselves a minority again, this time within a secular Jewish nation state. Hakak describes the ideal Haredi model in the following way: [T]he Haredi man is expected to be a spiritual person who devotes most of his time to studying the Torah and who avoids any earthly dealing, as much as possible. Moreover, Haredi men are expected to refrain from reacting violently even when attacked, most of them avoid any sports activity, and their sexuality is reserved for marital relations (p. 205). For such men to enter the battlefields of the national military, market compe- tition, and political power is, not surprisingly, unsettling. As a matter of fact, the Zionist enterprise, with its ambition of territorial conquest, of nation-state building, and of creating a new Jewish muscular man, has been foreign to the Haredim. Over the last decades, however, they learned to accommodate to this new state, more out of necessity than conviction. For example, expected to always practice modesty and deflect public attention, young Haredi IDF recruits ridicule the pride and self-assuredness of military body gestures. Comment- ing on the posturing of an overconfident secular commander, a Haredi recruit felt that he looked ‘like a pimp who goes with his chest wide open’ (p. 49). Another example: In a business class at the Merkaz Institute, Haredi men challenged the secular instructor’s basic assumptions about the economic goal of steady growth. ‘What if I do not want to grow?’ a Haredi man countered; and Religion and Gender vol. 7, no. 1 (2017), pp. 126–128 127.

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