Tel Aviv’s Not-So-Black Hats: Hasidism in Tel Aviv

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.

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

Much has been written about the theological, cultural, and social basis of the Zionist movement and its historical development. However, so little has been said about the Hasidic leaders active in Palestine between the two world wars and their positive approaches to Zionism. My paper will look at this untouched epoch by focusing on one figure: the Admor ha-Tsayar (painter), Avraham Yaakov Shapira (1886–1962) of the Drohobych dynasty. This will be the first academic study to examine his book of sermons, Netivot Shalom, and I will show how he coherently used the Hasidic homiletical style, textual and oral traditions to enhance the commitment to settling Zion and to a positive approach to the people of Israel, including the secular settlers. Shapira was born in Sadigura to his father, the Rebbe R. Chaim Meir Yechiel, and his mother, Batsheva, the daughter of the Rebbe R. Yitzchak of Bahush. He moved with his father later to Drohobych, then to Vienna, and finally arrived in Palestine in 1922. Uncommon for a Hasidic rebbe, at the age of 63, after the loss of his wife, and as a therapeutic endeavour, he devoted himself to painting. In the context of the well-known portrayal of the violent controversy between Tzans and Sadigura, it is also important to stress both the father’s and the son’s consistent writing about the importance of love, peace, and unity among the people of Israel. Telling of his approach is the fact that R. Avrham Yitzhak ha-Cohen Kook wrote an abbreviation for "Netivot Shalom". Kook praised the author’s use of his ancestor’s lore, R. Yisrael of Rozhin and the Rebbe of Sadigura, filled with his love for holiness, Zion, and the people of Israel (klal Yisrael). Thus, his book is a treasure for exploring an untouched cultural chapter in the history of Hasidism in Zion. The analysis will shed new light on the multifaceted response of 20th century Hasidic leaders to contemporary controversies towards Zionism and modernity in the evolving community in Israel, between the two world wars.

Nova Religio, 2010

ABSTRACT: American Neo-Hasidism in Israel today is part of a sustained revival of traditional Judaism that began in the late 1960s among followers of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, who sought to restore meaning to Jewish practice and identity. This unique religious subculture ...

Shofar, 2023

The geography of Hasidism has long been one of the most contentious issues in the history of the movement. This article represents an attempt to free hasidic geography from outmoded preconceptions by proposing a new conceptualization of the hasidic leadership and its following in Eastern Europe. Based on an original, extensive database of hasidic centers, the authors drew five maps in sequence showing the development of Hasidism from its inception to the Holocaust. The five periods into which the database is divided are demarcated by four historically significant landmarks: the years 1772, 1815, 1867, and 1914. The article offers some possible interpretations of the maps, and draws a number of conclusions arising from them. The authors examine the dynamics and tendencies of the expansion of the movement within geographical frameworks, including the shift of hasidic centers from Podolia and Volhynia in the eighteenth century to Galicia and the southeastern provinces of Congress Poland in the nineteenth century, and subsequently to Hungary and Romania in the twentieth century; hasidic penetration into Jewish Eastern Europe, reaching its peak in the period between 1815 and 1867; and the metropolization of the hasidic leadership after 1914. The article also analyzes the patterns of concentration and diffusion of the hasidic leadership, and the impact of political factors upon these parameters.

Studying Hasidism: Sources, Methods, Perspectives, 2019

Hasidism, a Jewish religious movement that originated in Poland in the eighteenth century, today counts over 700,000 adherents, primarily in the U.S., Israel, and the UK. Popular and scholarly interest in Hasidic Judaism and Hasidic Jews is growing, but there is no textbook dedicated to research methods in the field, nor sources for the history of Hasidism have been properly recognized. Studying Hasidism, edited by Marcin Wodziński, an internationally recognized historian of Hasidism, aims to remedy this gap. The work’s thirteen chapters each draws upon a set of different sources, many of them previously untapped, including folklore, music, big data, and material culture to demonstrate what is still to be achieved in the study of Hasidism. Ultimately, this textbook presents research methods that can decentralize the role community leaders play in the current literature and reclaim the everyday lives of Hasidic Jews.

It is now more than fifty years since the State of Israel was established. It has passed the initial stages of nation building and is today, in many respects, a Western, technological society. It was never, however, a "new nation," created ex nihilo. It was built, in large measure, on the experience of ideologically driven Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel (Palestine), which began in the nineteenth cen tury. It also had as its background the Holocaust and its tragic results for the Jewish people; war and an ongoing military struggle with neighboring coun tries; and the necessity of absorbing unprecedented numbers of new immigrants from very different backgrounds. It has a multiethnic population, comprising groups that vary widely in their degree of Jewish cultural traditionalism as well as their level of modernization. While the challenges of immigration, absorp tion, and the external threat of war served as unifying factors for Jewish society in Israel for much of Israel's history, the situation has shifted in recent years. Partly as a result of the establishment of formal relations with a number of major Arab neighboring states and the ongoing search for reconciliation with the Palestinian Arabs-a relationship which again flared up and doused aspira tions for a speedy accord-the strengthened self-assurance of Israel's long-term existence shifted the focus of Israeli public discourse to domestic matters. In addition, Israel has experienced significant socioeconomic development and, along with it, the emergence of a pattern of individualism characteristic of other advanced Western societies. Additional Western, mainly American, cultural influ ences, particularly in the area of consumerism, have also, through rapid growth in electronic communication, increasingly penetrated, inter alia, into Israel's so cial structure. Israel of today is thus a society in transition where different sets of values occasionally increase intergroup tensions and challenge social cohe sion. The rhythm of events, trends, and innovation in various areas is intense. Israel continues to be a living laboratory for social research. This book consists primarily of new articles, as well as a few that are expan sions and elaborations of previous work, by foremost specialists on the central issues of contemporary Israeli Jewish society. Our approach to understanding Jewish life in Israel is largely interdisciplinary but with an overriding sociologi cal perspective. We focus on the behaviors of people, rather than institutions or organizations, within the many social, cultural, and political realms. We begin with a social history of Jews in Israel over the last century (Rebhun), to provide background for the rest of the volume. This is followed by a detailed analysis by

Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture, 2024

This article discusses the question of whether or not a specific Hasidic architecture emerged in Eastern and East-Central Europe from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. It deals with the architecture of the courts of Hasidic masters, paying special attention to kloyzn, residences, the new types of courts that emerged in big cities, and the symbolic usage of the images of court kloyzn as identification markers by contemporary Hasidic groups. The article also discusses the ohalim on the graves of the tzaddikim and regular Hasidic synagogues. The main conclusion is that Hasidim did not develop a specific architectural language that defined their places of worship: the Hasidic nature of a synagogue was a function of the worshippers’ behavior, not its architectural features, spatial configuration, or urban location.