Nitzan Waisberg, a lecturer on design thinking at the Tel Aviv University business school, was born in Israel forty-four years ago, the daughter of a psychologist and a yoga instructor. She attended Jerusalem’s Bezalel School of Arts and Design and the Royal College of Art, in London; lived in Los Angeles, London, and Sydney; and consulted for companies like Procter & Gamble and Gallup. In 2012, she returned to Israel, leaving a teaching appointment at Stanford University. She was determined to bring “Bay Area optimism and Silicon Valley problem-solving,” she told me, to what she knew was a changing public life in Israel. (Her uncle is Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister.) She has four children—three of whom attend mamlachti, or secular, public schools in Tel Aviv—and she was naturally preoccupied with helping them adjust to their new life. “But I found I was living in an emotional bunker,” she said. “I came back to a country my grandparents founded, to raise my children. I didn’t recognize the place.”
Two years ago, Waisberg’s preschooler came home just before Rosh Hashanah, talking about a “big man” who had visited her class and talked about “dead animals.” A few days later, the teacher sent home a picture of an Orthodox rabbi blowing the shofar in class. “This was right at the beginning of the school year, just as my daughter was learning to trust her space, with no sense of who was in authority,” Waisberg said. “God knows what this guy said about Temple sacrifices.” Her second grader’s classes, meanwhile, were regularly interrupted to prepare for an extracurricular ceremony in which each child received a text of the Torah, girls got chocolate coins, and boys got yarmulkes. “They gave the children a paper with the word ‘Torah’ smeared with honey and invited them to lick it,” to indicate Torah study as sweet. She said that she doesn’t mind teaching children about traditions, but this was a custom from cheder—the Eastern European rabbinic schoolhouse from the Middle Ages—and, she said, “It was not presented as a history lesson.”
Waisberg’s older children had subtler experiences. “A fourth-grade class had an online lesson, ostensibly about biological categorization, but also dividing animals into shratzim and non-shratzim, kosher and non-kosher creepy-crawly things,” she said. “Introductory chemistry classes taught that molecules will bond, or not, the way grooms bond with brides, but not with other men.” Math classes taught Gematria, in which numerical values are assigned to the letters in Hebrew words and calculated to imply mystical coincidences with significant dates, such as Jewish holidays. “This is kind of cute if you do it once, like astrology,” Waisberg said. “But when you repeat Gematria every year, you have to wonder why.” Historical timelines advanced “identity with the land,” starting with the creation, then the flood, then exodus—eventually getting to the Holocaust. But “no kibbutzim, no Haskalah”—the Jewish enlightenment of the nineteenth century, out of which Zionism emerged—were mentioned. The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin was taught not as the act of a national-Orthodox fanatic but as just another sad example of “Jews fighting with each other over disagreements about God’s will.”
Israel celebrates its seventieth anniversary on April 18th, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is straining to exude a sense of mastery. Polls show the Prime Minister capable of winning another election, but, if the ongoing corruption investigations topple him, the ultra-nationalist parties that anchor his coalition—Likud, Jewish Home, and Shas—seem poised to prevail without him. Israel has an intimacy with the American President, reinforced by a ceremonial move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem; a stable democracy in the face of regional chaos; technological leadership in global markets; and budding, discreet alliances with Sunni regimes—an iron fist containing Palestinian terror. Skyscrapers are rising, high-speed trains are rolling, wastewater is being recycled. That is Netanyahu’s story, and he’s sticking to it. For people like Waisberg—descendants of those people who “founded the country”—the story is different. They feel left in internal exile, exasperated not only by Netanyahu’s preëmptions of a Palestinian state but, even more, by the encroachments of his Jewish one. “I was raised on modern Zionism”—the movement to transform Jews from a defensive religious people into a normal Hebrew nation—“a Jewish commonwealth integrated in the structure of the new democratic world," as a pre-state Zionist conference famously described it. Waisberg added, “My children are instead being indoctrinated into a neo-Zionist theocracy.”
Waisberg began registering her concerns with school administrators a year and a half ago, but was told that she was overreacting. She scheduled a session with a psychologist, to explore her motives. “After this psychologist implied I was a lunatic, I decided that the situation in the country was even worse than I thought.” So she began protesting “on the only real estate I could control,” which was her children’s lunch bags. “I sent them to school every day marked up with quotes from Socrates, Mark Twain, Florence Nightingale, Frank Lloyd Wright, Bugs Bunny—or Mary Quant, the fashion designer who invented the miniskirt.” She took pictures of the bags and posted them online. Surprisingly, other parents followed suit.
“I had this dormant Facebook account, and so I wrote a frustrated post and got twenty likes,” Waisberg said. “I thought, ‘Wow, there are twenty other people who think like me.’ ” She posted a video of an end-of-year party in another mamlachti, in which “every song, dance, and speech was about rebuilding Jerusalem.” Other parents shared more videos, including one of kindergarten kids in a secular preschool wrapping shoe boxes in gold foil—“bricks for a rebuilt Temple.” Waisberg’s campaign made Channel Two’s nightly newscast, which is the most watched in the country. She now has almost five thousand “friends” and posts nearly every day. She helped start a parents’ organization, connected to Molad, a liberal think tank, and consults with the Labor Knesset members Merav Michaeli and Stav Shaffir. She also testified before the director-general of the education ministry. “The religious schools get between three and five thousand shekels more per student, because, they say, they have the added expense of separating boys from girls,” she said. “They actually think this is a favor they are doing for the Jewish people.”
Thirty years ago, when Waisberg was in public school, about seventy per cent of Israeli students attended the secular stream. Today, just thirty-nine per cent do. “National-religious” schools, which are also public schools, enroll fifteen per cent of Israeli students, including most children in the settlements. About twenty-five per cent attend Arabic-language schools. (The privately run but publicly funded Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, schools enroll twenty-two per cent.) All public school streams are subject to curricular standards mandated by the Minister of Education, a position currently held by Naftali Bennett, a former settlement leader and Army commando who is the head of the far-right Jewish Home Party. His insistence on this portfolio was shrewd. More and more, Israeli Jews define themselves as politically “right” and, as the opinion researcher Dahlia Scheindlin has found, the stronger their identification with “religion,” the stronger their rightist views.
More than two-thirds of Israeli Jews, concentrated in Tel Aviv and on the coastal plain, define themselves as “secular”—wanting buses to run on the Sabbath, for example. But a significant proportion of those people consider themselves “traditional”—perhaps a third of all Jews. They are a natural constituency for ideological radicalization, especially those of Mizrahi—Middle Eastern and North African—origin, who tend to be less affluent, less educated, and live in peripheral “development” towns, where they have cultivated resentments for the Labor aristocracy of European Zionists who put them there. A recent poll from the Institute of National Security Studies asked what Israelis value most. About half of respondents said a “state with a Jewish majority,” and sixteen per cent said “Greater Israel”—annexation of the West Bank. Only about a sixth of Israelis said “peace,” and the same number said “a democratic state with equality for all.” Clearly, how the meaning of a “Jewish majority” will be taught to the children of the next generation is going to matter a great deal.
This is where Bennett’s Jewish Home ideology comes in—a teachable roster of historical simplifications, claims to national exceptionalism, and romanticized Torah culture, all claiming to be Israel’s raison d’être, but hostile to “Israeliness,” which is too potentially inclusive. Jewish Home is “proving that the people of Israel can live in the land of Israel, according to the Torah of Israel,” Bennett says—people, land, Torah, a kind of holy trinity. The state should be shadowed by Jewish rabbinic law and morally swayed by rabbinic courts. “Jewish and democratic,” in this view, means a national consensus, the general will of “the Jewish majority,” which must be protected at all costs. The Holocaust proved that the modern West, with its “liberal theology”—its “Hellenism”—is just another Gentile trap. Western Jews, especially Reform Jews, are thus a kind of counterfeit. They intermarry in high numbers and, Bennett has argued, losing six million American Jews to assimilation is comparable to losing them to the Final Solution.
For theocrats in power, this means life by a thousand cuts. Molad has reported that the government coalition has funnelled millions of dollars to settlements and to ultra-Orthodox parties. It has sought to remove funding for films and plays that it deems subversive. It introduced a law opening up advocates for boycotting of the settlements to civil lawsuits. It forced the Council on Higher Education to normalize university status for the West Bank’s Ariel College, a settlement school. It packed the Supreme Court with acolytes, and now seeks to limit the Court’s ability to declare laws that are inconsistent with the Basic Law of Human Dignity—in effect, Israel’s Bill of Rights—so as to be able to expel asylum seekers. It has undermined I.D.F. rules of engagement and other norms in order to request the exoneration of soldiers who killed Palestinians who posed no threat. It has resisted the official recognition of marriage and burial for those not deemed Jews according to Jewish rabbinic law. It passed a law requiring outlying towns to close commercial life on the Sabbath. It has published national maps erasing Palestinian territory. And almost all the education budget for public-school enrichment programs, Waisberg told me, goes to “Zehut, an ultra-rightist N.G.O. in the business of molding Jewish identity.”
The more highly educated leaders of Israel’s judiciary, military, universities, business, and media—including President Reuven Rivlin—now speak of the need to restore “mamlachtiyut,” which roughly translates as “state institutional dignity.” Among many in the old élite, there is an impulse to satirize the government’s religious coercion and bureaucratic maneuvering in the hope that common sense will prevail, which is another way of saying that the ideals of the founding generation will make some kind of comeback. Lior Schleien, the partner of the Knesset member Merav Michaeli, is the country’s Stephen Colbert. Each week, hundreds of thousands of viewers tune into his program, “Gav Hauma” (“The Nation’s Back”) on Channel Ten, a commercial station which, alone among Israeli broadcast outlets, skewers Bennett’s ideology and often seems the custodian of secular values.
But it’s hard to know whether élite satire—or grassroots resistance—is building opposition or just chasing the past. “The pioneers early in the last century wanted a practical, pragmatic solution to injustice—a new expression of Judaism,” Waisberg said. Zionists were fleeing Eastern European synagogues and study halls, the rabbinically controlled religious institutions that were suffocating them. Children today, Waisberg fears, are presented “a Jewish Narnia,” with rabbinic enablers, and without boundaries, in all senses of the word. There is a culture war, and she fears that she is losing it. “The country is seventy years old and we are horribly divided,” she said. “But when I hear calls for Jewish unity I get queasy.”
