7-26-2016 Israel's Culture War Is Getting Ugly – Daniel Gordis Bloomberg View

http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-07-26/israel-s-culture-war-is-getting-ugly

 

…  Israel is in the grips of a renewed battle between an increasingly hard-line, anti-Western and extremist rabbinate, arrayed against Israeli liberal society, the army and even American Jews…What Israelis have to decide is whether they are ready — under the leadership of those moderate figures — to wage the painful social and political battle with the religious right now.  They can defer the conflict, but then they risk the possibility that the Israeli society that emerges will be one that most American Jews will find undeserving of their support. Even more dangerous, those in the secular and moderate religious camps could find themselves in an unrecognizable country, and with peace nowhere in sight, might begin to ask themselves whether a society so ugly is one in which they want to raise their children.


Posted by Judith Ferster, AIME member

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