Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome. Our speaker today is Heather Munro, who not so recently received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Durham University.
You know, I haven't received. Haven't visited yet. Yeah. All right. She should be receiving her Ph.D. student.
She has completed her research work. Yes. Durham University.
Uh, so this is recorded if the assessors can hurry up and.
And provide assessment. The doctoral dissertation is entitled The Future is Female New Political Movement and Social Change in Society in Israel.
Uh, and there is also a member of the Centre for the Study of Jewish Culture, Society and Politics at Durham.
And the title of her talk today, which is derived from the page is um Ashkenazi Germany and how ready Israeli society.
And I thank you for coming. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So I am not quite submitted yet, but I'm almost submitted.
This is a presentation that focuses on one of my major chapters in the dissertation,
and it really focuses on discriminatory discrimination against fighting in the
Haredi world and the erasure of Sephardi culture and what that has brought forth,
which may be surprising to some and maybe not to others.
But one thing I sort of always preach to everyone about first is why do we have to start caring about the haredim in Israel studies right now?
The hurried count for 12% of the total population of Israel, not the Jewish population, the total population.
And that number is growing really, really quickly.
And this is from the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research, who did a study of the projections of population.
And as you can see, the blue left side is a normal demographic progression.
That's the Jewish demography for the rest of Jewish society in Israel.
And it's really healthy and normal looking on the left side in green is the hurray, the demography.
And in 2017, when they completed this study, 50% of the population of Haredim was under the age of 16.
They have an 82% marriage rate, and 44% of those marriages happened before the age of 24.
So that greatly increases their fertility window.
And right now, the fertility rate is the highest of any segment in the country, higher than the Arab-Israeli rate, with 6.9 births per couple.
That is a slight drop in the last ten years and I believe it used to be about 7.5 per couple.
But the Israel Jerusalem Institute for and the Israel Population Office doesn't believe it's going to drop much more than that.
A lot of the demographic studies of Haredim show that they break the the rule of demography,
where if you get more secular education, you should have less children.
It doesn't work for her society.
And we'll get the reasons for that are complicated, but generally have to do with the Haredi identity, which I'm going to get into now.
So really doesn't exist as a category until relatively recently.
Of course it starts.
The roots of this identity start in 19th century Eastern Europe and with some religious leaders starting to respond to the scholar,
the Jewish Enlightenment, and starting to resist any incursion of secular ideology into Jewish communities later on in the 19th century,
this turns into national Zionist ideologies in Eastern Europe and the rest of Europe.
And so it becomes much more of a profound reaction to Zionism in general,
and especially to religious Zionism, which is starting to grow at that point.
And because that is to these religious leaders, a dilution of religion with secular nationalist ideology,
and eventually all these leaders who often disagree with each other coalesce into the formation of our good us, Israel, which was founded in 1912.
Now, I would ask Israel creates a dilemma. It's a community organisation, it's a religious organisation.
They're trying to systematise how Ashkenazi Jews observe around the world, especially over in North America.
It is growing. But they also suddenly have to become political leaders.
I would, as Israel was a political party in Poland before the Holocaust.
And so in order to sort of secularise themselves, they start investing in the idea of dust, Torah.
Dust Torah cements rabbinical authority.
It's taken from a charity in the Talmud, which Gershon Barkan says is a misinterpretation.
But party leaders today would say it's not a misinterpretation that rabbis, through their great wisdom, can make rulings on any aspect of life.
And in that way, rabbinical leaders become political leaders, and politics is religion.
So the identity of charity at this point conflates religion and political identity as one and forms it as an inseparable thing.
And that's what we're going to look at when we go into this existence, the state of Israel.
So for the first six years of the state of Israel, Haredim society went through gradually increasing stringency.
And what that meant for men was an increasing focus on yeshiva attendance and study.
So in this one wacky graph to the left, which is a bit inverted, what you can actually see is the older men,
75 and older in 28, only 56% of them have ever attended a great yeshiva, yeshiva, an adult.
And then on the far side, where we have 90.2%, that's 25 to 34 year olds.
So young men in 28, 90.2% of them are have attended or are attending yeshiva currently.
And it's also an emphasis on spending more time in yeshiva.
So traditionally, a learned Jewish man who was religious might go to yeshiva for a few years,
and then he'd go and pursue a livelihood and study perhaps a bit in his spare time in.
The second graph, you see, the orange is the 75 and older men in 28 men, more than half of them have spent between 1 to 8 years of study iniciativa.
And about a third only have spent six or more years studying in Yeshiva.
By the time we have middle aged people in 28 and so the men aged 45 to 54 are in the blue.
I'm trying to make this really clear for people who back on 61% of the middle aged men in 2008 have spent six or more years studying in yeshiva,
and only about a quarter of them spent between one and eight years.
So everybody is supposed to study in Shiva and spend as long as possible doing so.
So I want to now explain a little bit about the streams of your vote.
When you in the U.S. but remember is a very Ashkenazi institution when non Ashkenazi Mizrahim and Sephardim olim arrive in Israel,
they are told the only way to be religious is to attend yeshiva.
And so you see here at the top, the two major groups, the literate and the Hasidic Hasidic refer to this as nothing.
You might have heard of or I sometimes call them yeshivas.
And then there's a tiny 6% of Chabad that is really different in Israel.
And I'm not going to talk much about them today, but if you have questions, you ask me later.
And then you see at the bottom here, a significant portion of yeshiva attendance in 2014 is through the Sephardic Yeshiva.
What happened was as Sephardim arrived, they sort of became part of the culture of yeshiva study as the only way to be properly religious
and yet were discriminated against and excluded from the little fish and her seat as she she was.
And so Shas opened their own stream of U.S. votes, and these are generally considered not as well respected.
It's sort of more of a second class yeshiva. You're not going to get as good of marriage match if you go to a yeshiva.
And then you have a really interesting segment over here of Mizrahi Jews educated in Litvack institutions.
Yes, they're using the advanced party interchangeably here a bit.
And we'll get to why that happens later.
But what that 12.4% is, is society even mizrahim, who have completely conformed to Ashkenazi culture to fit in and go to a better yeshiva for women?
The 60 years worth of increasing stringency has been an emphasis on modesty and gender separation.
There have been increasingly strict codes of dress to which they've had to conform.
And for Mizrahi and society, Alene, this was incredibly difficult, especially because the Ashkenazi mentality believes that loud colours are immodest.
Traditional things from Morocco, etc. would become considered very immodest and almost sexualised in the Ashkenazi hurried world.
And there's also been increasing emphasis on gender separation in formerly shared public spaces.
I'm sure many of you are aware of the removal of images of women from advertisers, magazines, even children's books.
And there's also an increasing emphasis on Kobi Arafa, sometimes called Kol Isa.
It's a tiny tract of the Talmud that says the voice of a woman is like nakedness.
And this is the rationalisation behind preventing any women from running for
office in the Haredi parties are excluding them from secular leadership roles.
And it has also created a really thriving by Women for women arts space, which I do a lot of my research in.
I'm not going to talk about it today, but some of the women I'm speaking about are also artists.
So feel free to ask me later on.
But SD here is telling us a little bit about that experience of a Sephardi family arriving in Israel and being told, okay, your religious.
So your haredi. Her parents originally came from Morocco.
They are olim. But when they came here to Israel, they were teenagers and they came to really schools.
This happened a lot. You take religious kids who are coming in, having fled home and immediately putting them into an Ashkenazi Haredim school.
Then they got married and they made a whole Haredi family. I was the oldest child in a big family of 12.
My mother got married. She was very young. She was about 17 as a Mizrahi girl.
I was educated through the Ashkenazi schools. So as you grew up, in fact, and there wasn't a short school for her,
so she went as a minority to Bass Yaakov basically being the famous Ashkenazi Variety Girl School.
I have Sephardi friends, but we are a minority in the class.
Again, she's using this, he and Sephardi interchangeably, and we're going to get to that in a minute.
In the last ten years, we've seen some really rapid change in the Haredi world because her women ended up being the wage earners while men were in.
Yeshiva. There was a lot more secular education for them.
This created a big crisis in the home. They literally talk about it to me as the marriage crisis.
If you want to read a book about the lead up to it, Nurit Stadler.
His book on Yeshiva Fundamentalism captures the conflict really well.
She's published it in 2009, so it was right before the change sort of happened.
But now rabbis have seen that maybe it would be good to educate men a little more in secular studies.
So this has led to the creation of the Haredim campuses all over Jerusalem in Bnei Brak.
And it's also a there's a changing situation because the rapid growth of the population has led to a lot of pressure.
Of course, there's already housing pressure in the centre of the country, as we all know.
Now, the haredim who I speak to are moving to settlements in non-haredi neighbourhoods.
A lot of the settlements, the people I did research with and lived in and where they lived,
it wasn't places like Beitar, which are the Haredi settlements.
They were living in very dirty Leumi, hardly kind of settlements like beds L and parts of the guts etzion even though they're haredim.
So they're moving to non-haredi places and they're starting to see new ways of being Jewish.
This they're realising that their neighbours are not bad Jews after all.
There's also much more of a focus now, and a lot more families are choosing to send their sons to Yeshiva High schools instead of yeshiva time.
So that means that they do the yeshiva subjects, but they also do secular subjects in high school.
And so there's a bit of a reinvention of the identity going on.
It has not, however, seemed to change attitudes about accepting Sephardi culture of Mizrahi culture.
And so I spoke to all my Ashkenazi women about how they felt about Sephardim as well.
And it's always surprising what people will say to you.
It really reveals how deeply ingrained and totally accepted some of the discrimination and racist ideas are.
So this is Miriam. She's a little this woman who grew up in Monsey.
She's lived in in Israel since she was married to mostly lived in Jerusalem.
She lives elsewhere now. She said to me, yes, there is a problem today in the hurried world with Sephardim.
There is a difference. I don't know why their homes are more violent.
Maybe because in Arab society there is more violence.
Yeah. So I had to hide my face and not react when I when I got that quote.
But this obviously is going back to really traditional Orientalist tropes about the violent brown body.
Haredim don't serve in the army, but it doesn't mean that they have any less prejudice against the Arab.
In fact, I found incredible prejudice about Arabs everywhere at once in the Haredi world.
And so to call a Jew an Arab is almost the worst insult that you could do.
So it's conflating a Jewish other with the worst sort of non-Jewish other.
And there's been a lot of of work published in America in the last 20 years or so
about the racist tropes that centre racial dysfunction in the family unit and saying,
you know, African-Americans don't achieve as much as white people because their families are dysfunctional.
So that kind of mentality has entered into Miriam's whole mentality about and Sephardim and Mizrahim this is Syria.
She's a Diala Hasan Hasidic woman. And she says to me, it's not colour based, it's cultural.
You know, if they really want to culturally fit in, they can get in.
But if not, then you're not fit to go to that school.
We were talking about excluding starting from base of I don't want my sweet Hasidic little girl
exposed to that because Sephardi culture is more she looks for a word and she says expressive.
They're just less refined. They're loud.
It's about refinement. So here we have the racist trope of the loud, loud, brown body.
When she says expressive, I think it is fairly clear that she's suggesting they're certainly more immodest and probably more sexualised.
And so, again, that's more orientalist themes.
And this idea that it's not a colour problem, it's a culture problem is a very neoliberal, racist idea.
And cultural racism is just as much racism as traditional racism is just using different words to say the same things.
Now, BNA is interesting because it almost looks like she's not so prejudiced on the surface.
She's a leftist woman, but she worked for 20 years for Shas.
She has been part of the Sephardi community.
She gets along and has many friends in the Sephardi world.
And so when I asked her about it, she said to me, in ten years, look, it's not going to matter.
No one cares these days. My nephew just married this beautiful Moroccan girl.
She's so dark and lovely. Their kids will just be Jewish.
Everyone is intermarrying now by the next generation.
We will all just be Jewish. The differences will be gone.
And that's where you get to the crux of it. The differences will be gone. She's not happy.
Her son is married to a party girl because her son is going to get fena.
She still wants him to eat chocolate on Chavis and she doesn't want him to go to your Shiva in a beautifully embroidered shirt made by his wife.
So she she says some very, you know, exotic brown beauty kind of tropes that, again, go back to Orientalism.
And what she's really talking about is the erasure of Sephardi culture.
No one cares, so long as Sephardi heritage Jews conform to Ashkenazi cultural norms.
And talking to Esti, who's very aware of all this discrimination and has responded to it powerfully,
we see she also is sort of experiencing a certain kind of erasure of the distinctions and the uniqueness of this high and Sephardi culture.
And this this goes to the crux of why everyone is using Mizrahi and Sephardi interchangeably.
So at the end of that last quote I use for her, she says, As a Mizrahi girl, I was educated through the Ashkenazi schools by Ya'acov.
I have Sephardi friends, but we are a minority in the class.
So I said to her, We Mizrahi, not Sephardi.
She just told me she was Moroccan. As he says, These are his party.
It's all the same here. It's the same like it's not the same meaning.
But in Israel, when you say society or Mizrahi, it's the sea.
It's all the. People who came from the Islamic countries to Israel.
And so I want to press her on this and see how much she's. She's sort of a race this internally.
And so safe at North African is different from Yemen.
Yes. And as she says, it's totally different.
Yes, but but here it's all the same class. And I said they're not Ashkenazi.
And she says, yeah, they are the others. So as the other, that is one more reason to make criticisms we were talking about when she started to rebel.
So what she's talking about is the erasure of these distinctions because it really is the creation of an underclass.
I don't know much about this situation in the broader Israeli society,
but I have the sense that it's not just an underclass situation in the current world.
I think this is somewhat mirroring generally Israeli society, but please feel free to tell me more about that after when I'm done.
And this is a really strong example about how anti society discrimination works and also how religious
women use their agency in a very non-liberal religious way to achieve what they need to achieve.
So this is its story roots and its clean forms.
The Haredim Women's Party, which I will talk more about in a little while.
She lives in Petah Tikva and the good dog overseen by Yaakov is much better than the Shas School.
So she wants to send her daughter there and she kind space Yaakov and they reject it.
So she seeks help of the Sephardi Shas rabbi and he says his daughter that already at that base
ya'acov he doesn't want to jeopardise her position so he's not going to advocate for roots.
So she sort of takes it into her own hands and she calls up very she's got lots of
chutzpah and gives them a fake Ashkenazi name that has a lot of religious uses,
like the respected in the holy community. It's a name that comes from lots of great rivers.
And immediately she is offered a space and they say, Come over and sign the papers.
So she arrives. And as soon as they see her, they say, No, we're not letting you sign these papers.
So she appeals the decision first to the school board and then all the way up to the top to the
Minister of Education for Independent Schools who oversees the authority schools in Israel on.
And eventually she gets told to come in and sign the enrolment papers.
So this is what happens when she gets the office. It's very small, so I'll read it for you.
I arrived at the office of the headquarters for the Independent Schools and he said, no.
I said, Why? You just told me I could come and sign the enrolment papers.
He started screaming, Shame on you. All these people doing work for you.
And do you? You speak? He's implying she is impertinent.
No, we will not accept you. I waited in the office for two and a half hours telling the secretary.
I told my daughter I would buy her a backpack today. I'm not leaving until I can buy my daughter a backpack.
I read to him sons and cried. The rabbi came back, but I made him wait because I was in the middle of it to hear.
He says, You have no shame. All these people are looking at you.
It's rude to stay here. I heard him, but I didn't listen.
I just kept crying and praying. He left and I kept reciting.
To whom? I waited another hour and a half, crying and praying.
Then his secretary called me, saying, Are you still there?
Come upstairs. The rabbi wants to speak with you. I go upstairs and he said, okay, here's the enrolment paper sign.
I hope I never see you again. So you see a lot of the tropes that we talked about earlier, the the shame, the impertinence, loudness,
the sexualisation potentially of her and she is reading to healing, which in her 88 cosmology has a lot of power religiously for women.
So she's embodying female pious ness in the most any way possible.
And and not interrupting to heal is the correct thing to do.
And so she's using all of her pious ness and all of her religious knowledge, basically.
To achieve her goal, and she does in the end.
So we have this crux happening around 2010 of incredible discrimination against Vadim in this him and
we have the increasing secular education while facing incredibly strict modesty codes for women.
And so it really is no surprise that we get the new Harry Feminists movement, which is what they call themselves.
It's not my name for them. And an incredibly large proportion of them are Sephardi women.
And so it all begins with anonymous chat rooms.
People can go online and say things about fear of retaliation,
and people start realising that they're not alone in having these criticisms of her aid society,
these transfer into WhatsApp groups, and then eventually a group of women.
It's about 15 or 20 women who decide to meet at a bakery in a Tel Aviv mall somewhere.
No haredim will be. And there's a lot of disagreement.
I've talked to about half the women at this meeting and some say 2012 and some say 2013.
So around that time they met,
they sat in a circle and they shared all their opinions that they were afraid to say at home with their families to anyone,
and they started to realise they were not alone. I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about me.
Culture Novitsky. She does feature heavily in my work, but she's not Sephardi, so we're not spending time on her today.
She was there and being at this meeting was what gave her the feeling that she could join Avatar.
She was a member of Avatar for four or five years before she started running for office,
that she she's the only woman who ran on the Labour Party ticket in the April elections and she doesn't have money to do with her life right now.
Nobody does. But she did fairly well. But this group that met in the mall became lonely hearts, no voice, no vote.
And the spearhead person at the heart of it was Saudi Shushan, who we heard from earlier.
And she said to me, I never would have started fighting for women's rights if I hadn't already been discriminated against for being Sephardi.
And so the original goal of learning about her was to not vote for her parties until they allow women candidates.
Now the organisation is much bigger, it's just in the current and they run women's leadership program courses and mentoring programs
and I have sorry karate women who've been taking on more leadership teach younger women.
They lobby in the Knesset for Harry women's interests and generally broadly work on improving the status of women groups also formed over time,
which is end to their female merit, which is formed to be a women's party.
It first was formed in 2015 and received about zero 4% of the vote,
which isn't terrible actually, and shows that there is interest in the haredi world.
But she has a very clear identity of refusing to cooperate with any non-haredi parties or organisations,
and she feels in the long run that that will gain her more haredim women followers and have them trust her more.
And she she feels it will help them trust that they can come to her.
And she may be very right. So she, like the others, is espousing a very syncretic feminist agenda, which I will explain in one minute.
The reason why Sephardi women are becoming the feminist leaders is because really all the women's issues are society issues.
When you create an underclass, the underclass will be disproportionately more affected by all the social problems that affect your society anyways.
And so root, as we call everyone, agrees that these are the main issues today addressing domestic violence in her society, breast cancer education.
Because of the increasing emphasis on modesty,
there has been a really big increase in fatality from breast cancer in the Haredi world because people aren't checking themselves,
people aren't letting their doctor check them. And so it's getting caught far too late and therefore there's higher morbidity from it.
And there's other public health issues that are being addressed too,
such as pelvic floor issues with having so many babies on improving nursery teacher salaries.
Almost a third of women work as nursery teachers.
And they get paid next to nothing because it's considered part of what needs to happen for the community.
And it limits women's independence and addressing issues such as poverty and the social economy, where people do things without getting paid.
And creating more, better wage equality of genders, of course.
Representation, parity, women's rights in the in the Knesset, improving education, access for both genders.
And, of course, Argonauts, which are women who've been denied, gets by their husbands.
So it's a synthetic feminism in that they're taking feminist ideology and applying it to secular areas where
it doesn't conflict with rabbinical authority or authority or halacha and not applying it to religion.
They're not doing what the dirty loony feminists are doing,
which is trying to have a Torah in the women's section of the Kotel or and trying to have egalitarian
minions or women only minions and things like that that doesn't enter into their feminist ideology at all.
Although that being said, there was a recent article in Haaretz about two weeks ago with a woman who is part of,
I believe, Belles Hasidim, and she is pushing very hard for more Torah learning for women.
So she has she has the status in the classroom to be able to do this.
So we'll see. I think it may switch over time to be more religious feminism to.
Some like me call them like SD. Take a very western ideological, secular, religious distinction on.
And so Mikal, for instance, supports equal marriage, supports buses on Shabbat,
even though she wouldn't use them as she works with women's Zionist organisations and very much well will find funding wherever she can recruit.
Keeps it very pure and very charity only, and I think that's very representative of sort of a future generally in British society.
So what does it mean for the future? I think her society is becoming more plural.
There is the emergence of a hardy middle class and especially with increasing higher education.
Lots of families having two incomes instead of one right now and the middle classes very accepted by the rest of the Haredim world.
It's not considered a poor choice.
It's just not the mainstream of the husband spending his whole time in yeshiva and because of the introduction of both Shiva.
So people who were raised not religious or less religious, who become haredim as adults, they view their decision as a religious one,
not a political one, and very clearly separate their ideologies of religion and politics.
And that's true. I found among both the Israeli beauty and the Anglo, the English speaking beauty,
who are they're very different populations, but they still distinguish between a religious and political identity.
And that is starting to affect all the other haredim as well.
And it's becoming less simple that if you vote a certain way.
So whereas they used to vote as a bloc, it might not happen quite so much anymore.
And there's going to be new, more liberal movements coming out of hard.
There are rabbis who take very liberal positions on.
On things like wage equality and.
Inc, what it what it really will look like is a syncretic incorporation of these secular ideologies
where they'll take what works for the hurried world and they'll leave what doesn't.
There will still always be a heritage identity, a pure we are the true Jewish, unadulterated religious purity identity within the community.
But they're going to use secular ideas as it works for them, and that will gradually change them.
There's also always going to be an extreme part. There's always going to be people who tend towards nature.
Carter and the extreme anti-Zionist. But they're they're already considered a minority.
They were considered sort of their own thing separate from Haiti in 1934 or five when they were formed.
And so there will there will be an increasingly wide spectrum of the Haredi world, but we're going to have to care about it,
because they will be a very, very big portion of the future of Israel's population and therefore decision making and political process.
And so things you. Thank you so much.
Thank you.