Navigating Gender, Ethnicity and Class in Religious Zionist Identity and Culture Elana Sztokman* Bar Ilan University, Israel

International Journal of Children’s Spirituality, Vol. 11, No. 2, August 2006, pp. 217–235 To be an Arab Jewish girl in a state religious school in Israel: Navigating gender, ethnicity and class in religious Zionist identity and culture Elana Sztokman* Bar Ilan University, Israel TaylorCIJC_A_179668.sgm10.1080/13644360600797222International1364-436XOriginal2006112000000JulyElanaelana@lookstein.org MarylesSztokman and& Article Francis Francis (print)/1469-84552006 Journal Ltd of Children’s (online) Spirituality This paper examines the ways in which gender, religion, ethnicity and class intertwine in a state religious girl’s junior high school in Israel. It is based on ethnographic data collected from 1999–2002, including interviews with staff and students and observations of classes and other school events. The claim is made that in this school, hierarchies overlap, such that ethnic hierarchies mesh with academic hierarchies, and Ashkenazi religious rhetoric becomes a tool with which to keep certain girls perpetually marginalized. The paper brings in a particularly poignant observation of Noa, a student of Moroccan descent, arguing with her Ashkenazi religious studies teacher about social justice and moral goodness as they find expression in Genesis and in the hallways of the school. Keywords: Gender; Ethnicity; Religion; Mizrahi girls; Israel; State schooling; Identity formation; School ethnography On 4 November 1995, when Israeli Prime Minister Yizhak Rabin was assassinated by Bar-Ilan University student Yigal Amir claiming religious imperative, the world of religious Zionism trembled. The media interrogated rabbis as religious institutions devoted days to the question: did religious Zionism do this? Some, like veteran religious Zionist head of Har Ezion Yeshiva Rabbi Aaron Lichtenstein answered with a resounding ‘yes’. ‘At times we educated towards simplicity… not only simplistic messages but also a simplistic way of thinking’ (Silence in our Camp, Channel 1, 9 November 1995). Still others, like Rabbi Haim Drukman, leader of the century-old religious Zionist Bnei Akiva youth movement, expressed offense at the question. ‘Why should we say “we have sinned”? … The education that we give is for the values *Dr Elana Sztokman, Yizchak Rabin 57/1, Modiin, Israel 71700. Email [email protected] ISSN 1364-436X (print)/ISSN 1469-8455 (online)/06/020217–19 © 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13644360600797222 218 E. Sztokman of truth. We cannot give up on even one letter of the Torah. We cannot give up on even one Jew, we cannot give up on one piece of the Land of Israel. It’s wholeness, perfection’ (Mabat News, Channel 1, 8 November 1995). The split in responses reflects some of the frictions and tensions that have existed within the religious Zionist identity perhaps from its inception but exacerbated by the act in which Yigal Amir threw religious Zionism into turmoil. Religious Zionism, a nineteenth century construct, initiated by European Jewish religious leaders and adopted by Rabbi Yizchak Hacohen Kook (1865–1935) in early twentieth century Palestine, envisions a modern Jewish state resting on ancient Jewish religious principles. This movement is something of an ‘awakening’, with modern Israel becoming part of a dynasty from the time when ancient Temple stood in Jerusalem. The movement rests on ‘the belief that the State of Israel is the beginning of the sprout- ing of our redemption … and the ingathering of all the Diasporas therein … It is defi- nitely the beginning of the assured redemption of Israel’ (Tirosh, 1974, p. 72). However, the philosophy was founded initially in the absence of the political reality of a state, and thus many pragmatic questions of application were glossed over, ignored or deferred. A fundamentally problematic issue is the relationship between religious Zionism and surrounding secular cultures.1 Leaders have taken different approaches to this issue. Rabbi Kook argued that secular Israelis should be treated like ‘babies that were kidnapped’, uneducated about Judaism but not responsible for their ignorance. This two-sided position, that ‘rather than deprecate the positive secular Zionist effort, let the religious harmoniously enhance the hallowed’ (Yaron, 1991, p. 219), constructed a discernible moral hierarchy in which religious Zionists saw themselves both as superior to secular Jews, and compassionate towards them. For others, the issues were political rather than moral. ‘The fact that today prime ministers are secular and don’t follow our beliefs,’ argued Rabbi Zvika Landau, then Director of Religious Education in Jerusalem and the south, in an expression of candor, ‘hurts us a lot. But we bless the government every Sabbath … that they should succeed’ (quoted in Sztokman, 1996). For Landau, the moral hierarchy was offset by a reverse political hierarchy, in which religious groups were seen as occupy- ing the bottom rung. Another view is that the role of religious Zionism is to promote a grass-roots transformation of the hierarchy, by ‘connect[ing] with sinners who constituted the majority in the [secular] Zionist camp, [and] simultaneously penetrat[ing] society … in order to make Torah dominant in the public sector’ (Tirosh, 1996, p. 22). Thus, because religious Zionism espouses absolute faith in a linear, God-driven historical progression, one that stands at odds with contemporary realities, the construction of religious Zionist identity contains inherent conflicts to attend to, notably, here, the secularism in modern-day Israeli culture. The movement, then, continues to struggle with its own hierarchical social constructs, and with tensions between perceived divine imperative and political realities. The construction of religious Zionist culture as resting within a rigid dichotomy vis- à-vis secular culture intensified in the 1970s, particularly with the emergence of the messianic Gush Emunim movement (Sheleg, 2000). Bnei Akiva had been a sympa- thetic image of religious Zionism, in which young religious Israeli boys looked almost Navigating gender, ethinicity and class 219 identical to secular Israeli boys, with muscular bodies and a proud but easygoing demeanor—the only difference being the small skullcap or the ‘small head covering for women’ (Sheleg, 2000, p. 25). But the 1980s symbol of Gush Emunim, with the men’s huge skullcaps long, unkempt beards, and visible guns, turned religious Zionism into a fanatical fringe, removed from ‘normal’ in Israeli society (Aran, 1986). Moreover, the more fanatical imagery as well as certain absolutist values gradually dominated the entire movement (Ravitzky, 1993; Sheleg, 2000). ‘We are guilty of educating an entire generation with primitive thinking, slogans, and clichés,’ argued Rabbi Mordechai Elon. ‘Our youth is incapable of looking at a complex reality’ (Silence in our Camp, Israel Channel 1, 9 November 1995). Religious Zionism became a movement of singular rather than complex cultural indoctrination. Some indications, however, are that post-Rabin youth are not as single-minded vis- à-vis secular culture as the adults. According to Shechter (1999), post-Rabin religious Zionist youth is also perhaps more ‘postmodern’ than their predecessors—that is, they are less interested in the land of Israel than in its people. Similarly, Rabbi Yoel Ben-Nun (2000) argues that national–religious youth is in a crisis of ideology and identity, and that young people are stuck between ultra-religiousness and secularism, in a fading middle ground that lacks focus and direction. In other words, young adults may be struggling because they do not necessarily accept the linear, polar constructs of religion versus secular life. Moreover, while the cultural symbolism became almost exclusively male-owned (skullcaps, ritual fringes, and guns), religious women were constructing more complex identities. Anthropologist Tamar El-Or (1998), in examining the contrast between religious Zionist indoctrination and young women’s identities, found that the women who struggled with these issues typically reported, ‘I am not representative’ of the movement. El-Or concludes that this complexity is in fact exactly representative. But further research into the identities of religious Zionist young women is sorely lacking. Just as religious Zionist identity is male, it is similarly an Ashkenazi, or western European construct. According to Sami Shalom Chetrit (1999), an Israeli writer of Arab descent (also known as Oriental, Sephardi, or Mizrahi Jews), the view of religious Zionism as an identity in polarity with secularism is an Ashkenazi, or European Jewish construct, a smokescreen masking underlying ethnic and socio-economic trends. Zionism, he argues, is a post-colonial construct, in which European Jews, who wanted to assimilate and ‘become’ secular Europeans but were prevented from doing so by anti-Semitism, looked instead to Israel to become a secular Western state, one that colonializes Middle Eastern Jewry and Western religion in one fell swoop. Mizrahi feminist Henriette Dahan-Kalev explains that ‘what distinguished Oriental Jews from Israelis of European origin was that they lived at peace with their traditional religious practice, while the European Zionists discarded it’ (2003, p. 96). This is why, for example, the Zionist elites, according to Chetrit, detest the religious, political Mizrahi movement of Shas. The Shas movement, which is described within secular-Ashkenazi elite circles as ‘one of the most enigmatic phenomena in Israeli society and politics’ (Yadgar, 2003,

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