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ID:
146980
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Summary/Abstract |
This article explores the “fundamentalist dilemma,” or how fundamentalist movements participate in secular political systems, especially when they gain prominent political positions that allow them to impose their extreme ideology on the entire society. After analyzing prevailing responses to this dilemma, ranging from political integration to aggressive takeover, the article turns to the case of Israeli Haredim. It explores three models of political integration through which Haredim have applied religious practices in the public sphere: protest, consolidation, and takeover. The study's main finding is that, opposite to a commonly accepted assumption that fundamentalists’ integration into secular politics causes them to moderate, the more political power that fundamentalists accrue the stronger is their tendency to promote their religious agenda. Yet the Israeli Haredi case also reveals the limitations of this tendency: fundamentalists often restrain their expansionist instinct when having to take nonfundamentalist reactions into consideration.
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2 |
ID:
154501
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Summary/Abstract |
This article reveals how non-Jewish volunteers who joined kibbutzim in Israel in the early 1970s created a situation that brought about the establishment of an Israeli state conversion system. Contrary to the prevailing idea that issues related to non-Jewish immigrants and conversion became practical and urgent only from the 1990s on, the central argument in this article is that a structured conversion system had already been established 20 years earlier, as a result of the unique collaboration between the secular Kibbutz Movement and Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren, who assisted non-Jewish volunteers to convert to Judaism. This collaboration proves the ability of religious and secular to cooperate in order to promote the preservation of Israel’s Jewish character, but also points out the difficulties involved in doing so, which reflect the tensions that still exist between religion and secularism in Israel.
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