Remaking Israeli Judaism: The Challenge of Shas » (New Edition)

Cambridge University

Hebrew University, Jerusalem

This is the first comprehensive account of Shas, which is the most significant religious and cultural movement to have emerged in Israel since the rise of Likud in 1977. Shas represents an explosive mixture of the religious and ethnic tensions that continue to simmer beneath the surface of Israeli Jewish society and politics. This Sephardi religious revival movement is also giving birth to the first truly Israeli form of Orthodox Judaism, distinct from the still-dominant Ashkenazi Yiddish-speaking version. Shas appeals especially to underprivileged Israelis, among whom a significant minority adopts ultra-orthodox Judaism. As a social phenomenon, Lehman and Siebzehner argue, Shas exemplifies how a fundamentalist movement invents and reinvents ethnic and quasi-ethnic frontiers, even to the point of acquiring the markers of those it denounces, and how it draws on popular religion and culture. This groundbreaking book will be the primary source of information on this fascinating, important, and troubling movement, as well as representing a rare example of the application to the study of Judaism of the same perspective that has been used to study fundamentalist and charismatic movements in other religious traditions.