Messianic Religious Zionism Confronts Israeli Territorial Compromises

The Six Day War in 1967 profoundly influenced how an increasing number of religious Zionists saw Israeli victory as the manifestation of God's desire to redeem God's people. Thousands of religious Israelis joined the Gush Emunim movement in 1974 to create settlements in territories occupied in the war. However, over time, the Israeli government decided to return territory to Palestinian or Arab control. This was perceived among religious Zionist circles as a violation of God's order. The peak of this process came with the Disengagement Plan in 2005, in which Israel demolished all the settlements in the Gaza Strip and four settlements in the West Bank. This process raised difficult theological questions among religious Zionists. This book explores the internal mechanism applied by a group of religious Zionist rabbis in response to their profound disillusionment with the state, reflected in an increase in religious radicalization due to the need to cope with the feelings of religious and messianic failure.

This volume explores the processes that led several modern Jewish leaders – rabbis, politicians, and intellectuals – to make radical changes to their ideology regarding Zionism, Socialism, and Orthodoxy. Comparing their ideological change to acts of conversion, the study examines the philosophical, sociological, and psychological path of the leaders’ transformation. The individuals examined are novelist Arthur Koestler, who transformed from a devout Communist to an anti-Communist crusader following the atrocities of the Stalin regime; Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, who moved from the New Left to neoconservative, disillusioned by US liberal politics; Yissachar Shlomo Teichtel, who transformed from an ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist Hungarian rabbi to messianic Religious-Zionist due to the events of the Holocaust; Ruth Ben-David, who converted to Judaism after the Second World War in France because of her sympathy with Zionism, eventually becoming a radical anti-Israeli advocate; Haim Herman Cohn, Israeli Supreme Court justice, who grew up as a non-Zionist Orthodox Jew in Germany, later renouncing his belief in God due to the events of the Holocaust; and Avraham (Avrum) Burg, prominent centrist Israeli politician who served as the Speaker of the Knesset and head of the Jewish Agency, who later became a post-Zionist. Comparing aspects of modern politics to religion, the book will be of interest to researchers in a broad range of areas including modern Jewish studies, sociology of religion, and political science.

Judaism in the twenty-first century has seen the rise of the messianic Third Temple movement, as religious activists based in Israel have worked to realize biblical prophecies, including the restoration of a Jewish theocracy and the construction of the third and final Temple on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Through groundbreaking ethnographic research, Messianic Zionism in the Digital Age details how Third Temple visions have gained considerable momentum and political support in Israel and abroad . The role of technology in this movement’s globalization has been critical. Feldman skillfully highlights the ways in which the internet and social media have contributed to the movement's growth beyond the streets of Jerusalem into communities of former Christians around the world who now identify as the Children of Noah (Bnei Noah). She charts a path for future research while documenting the intimate effects of political theologies in motion and the birth of a new transnational Judaic faith.

The aim of the volume is to offer interdisciplinary insights unknown to many into the interior of the religious, cultural and political laboratory that is Israel. Europe can learn a lot from Israel: The handling of religious diversity within the country; the meaning of the Hebrew language; the integration of more than a million Jewish immigrants; the development of a dynamic economy; a flourishing education and science system; a rich culture in the field of literature and above all film; and last but not least the lively, constant and conflictual struggle for democracy. Additionally, the question of Israel-related anti-Semitism is debated from the perspective of Jewish studies, social sciences and Catholic theology.

The Middle East today is characterized by an astonishingly bloody civil war in Syria, an ever more highly racialized and militarized approach to the concept of a Jewish state in Israel and the Palestinian territories, an Iraqi state paralyzed by the emergence of class- and region-inflected sectarian identifications, a Lebanon teetering on the edge of collapse from the pressures of its huge numbers of refugees and its sect-bound political system, and the rise of a wide variety of Islamist paramilitary organizations seeking to operate outside all these states. The region's emergence as a 'zone of violence', characterized by a viciously dystopian politics of identity, is a relatively recent phenomenon, developing only over the past century; but despite these shallow historical roots, the mass violence and dispossession now characterizing Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Iraq have emerged as some of the twenty-first century's most intractable problems. In this study, Laura Robson uses a framework of mass violence - encompassing the concepts of genocide, ethnic cleansing, forced migration, appropriation of resources, mass deportation, and forcible denationalization - to explain the emergence of a dystopian politics of identity across the Eastern Mediterranean in the modern era and to illuminate the contemporary breakdown of the state from Syria to Iraq to Israel.

One of the most striking contemporary religious phenomena is the world-wide fascination with Judaism. Traditionally, few non-Jews converted to the Jewish faith, but today millions of people throughout the world are converting to Judaism and are identifying as Jews or Israelites. In this volume, leading scholars of issues related to conversion, Judaising movements and Judaism as a New Religious Movement discuss and explain this global movement towards identification with the Jewish people, from Germany and Poland to China and Nigeria.

Radical thoughts and acts are merely a non-conformist attitude; they are usually marginal and are directed against the ruling society. Thereby, these radical thoughts and acts could be classified as politcally left or right, progressive or reactionary. The volume wants to sharpen the term “Jewish Radicalism” and provide different perspectives on the historical phenomenon and its dimensions.