American Neo-Hasids In the Land of Israel

Between 2004 and 2007, I conducted participant observation and in-depth interviews among American neo-Hasidic ba'al teshuvahs (newly religious Jews) in two yeshivas in and around Jerusalem. Among the practices I observed was the blending of "spirituality," American 1 counterculture, Hasidic theology and Orthodox Jewish practice. Students at these schools, like other ba'al teshuvahs, enact an all-encompassing narrative of return. In this narrative, the unfamiliar (Israel) becomes familiar and "real," while the familiar (America) becomes strange and false. In this paper, I will explore how this narrative is constructed and experienced, how time and place are reconfigured to facilitate this narrative, and how this mythic narrative of return relates to the actual social trajectory of students at these schools.

American Jewish History, 2003

Segula, 2021

Shoppers on Tel Aviv’s fashionable Shenkin Street and high-tech workers on their way to the city’s Ramat Ha- ayal district might perhaps come across a bearded, black-hatted, and black-clad Hasid striding along, eyes downcast, accompanied by his young son, with his sidecurls, shaven head, and black, velvet skullcap. Such Hasidim are remnants of Tel Aviv’s forgotten past as the Hasidic center of the young State of Israel.

Already at the beginning of the 20th century several prominent neo-Hasidic writers confessed that nostalgia for the attractions and charms of Hasidism in their writing did not reflect any honest attempt on their part to adhere to the religious beliefs of true Hasidim. Modern literary use of the charms and treasures of Hasidic tradition was now meant to serve the purpose of constructing a secular Jewish identity, or at least one which could serve as a distinct alternative to rabbinic notions of Jewish identity and tradition. Secular modern writers and thinkers promoted an amended version of Hasidism precisely because they hoped to rely upon it as leverage for legitimizing their newfound resentment of Halakha, of the rabbis and of the practice of basing Jewish attachment on philosophical and dogmatic properties of the old classical theology. The next generation of Jewish writers – operating in the following decades of the 20th century from a modern and secular vantage point - features a long line of literary attempts to cling to the unique heritage of Hasidism and reformulate it, not only by abandoning pretensions of ‘returning to the religious fold’, but also by attempting to ground and justify the spiritual distance felt by both the writers and their new readership from Rabbinic and Orthodox Judaism. However, these writers also exhibit attempts to blur and dull the sense of a chasm dividing between their secular and humanist sensibility and an authentic atmosphere of ‘Jewish spirituality’. Such attempts deliberately make life difficult for anyone who would propose to draw a clear distinction between the religious longing manifest in genuine Hasidic writing and its secular parallel. Drawing such distinctions becomes even more complicated when we attempt to compare such literary phenomena with contemporary tendencies in American Jewry that speak of ‘Jewish Renewal’ via open and uninhibited return to Jewish mystical and Hasidic sources. On the one hand, such tendencies do not signify a simple ‘return’ to the original fold of the Hasidic movement. On the other hand, they should also not be taken merely as limited expression of superficial nostalgia for the traditional past. Rather, they represent an attempt to found a new, modern Jewish identity, aided and abetted by Hasidic precedent. Moreover, even the specific ’renovations’ or stereotypes through which Hasidism is currently portrayed appear very familiar to anyone who has already witnessed them in the writings of neo-Hasidic secular writers at the beginning of the 20th century. Despite these similarities, I wish to point to a basic difference between recent attempts to revive the Hasidic heritage as a tool or source of inspiration for religious worship, and prior secular attempts to enlist Hasidism for the purposes of constructing a modern Jewish identity that stands in clear opposition to rabbinical Judaism, challenging the assumption that Jewish identity mandates maintaining specific theological positions or dogmas.

Tablet Magazine, 2020

Zionist scholars are battling the religious left for the Hasidic legacy By Shaul Magid Today we are in the midst of an internal battle in the academic study of Hasidism, an attempt by more conservative readers to appropriate Hasidism, particularly as seen from the viewpoint of the academy, from its more radical neo-Hasidic frame. Neo-Hasidism has historically been congenial to left-wing and revolutionary religious readings. Its conservative critics, whom we might call neo-Haredim, comprise a loose group of scholars, mostly within the Orthodox world, who have been engaging in a synthetic project merging Hasidism with the Zionist writings of Abraham Kook (1865-1935) and with various other forms of a new nationalized Jewish spirituality. My intention in this essay is not to delve into the arguments and counterarguments of each side, nor to weigh in on which view is more compelling. Rather, I explore how and why this is happening when it is. What prompted this scholarly backlash, this challenge to the neo-Hasidic frame of Hasidic scholarship? First, the background. There were at least two waves of neo-Hasidism, movements that have appropriated and transformed what they loved most in the original 18th-century Hasidism for their own creative and religious purposes. The first wave comprised literary figures, artists, and theologians in the early 20th century. The second wave emerged in 1960s and 1970s counterculture, using Hasidism as a Jewish source for nontraditional religiosity that cohered with the revolutionary spirit of the age. In both of these waves, neo-Hasidism was interested in Hasidism's radical, critical perspective of normative religious practice. And this was true not only for practitioners, but also for scholars who used neo-Hasidism as a scholarly frame, concerned more with explication than with praxis. Frequently, of course, there was overlap between neo