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Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome. Our speaker today is Heather Munro, who not so recently received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Durham University.

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You know, I haven't received. Haven't visited yet. Yeah. All right. She should be receiving her Ph.D. student.

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She has completed her research work. Yes. Durham University.

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Uh, so this is recorded if the assessors can hurry up and.

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And provide assessment. The doctoral dissertation is entitled The Future is Female New Political Movement and Social Change in Society in Israel.

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Uh, and there is also a member of the Centre for the Study of Jewish Culture, Society and Politics at Durham.

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And the title of her talk today, which is derived from the page is um Ashkenazi Germany and how ready Israeli society.

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And I thank you for coming. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So I am not quite submitted yet, but I'm almost submitted.

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This is a presentation that focuses on one of my major chapters in the dissertation,

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and it really focuses on discriminatory discrimination against fighting in the

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Haredi world and the erasure of Sephardi culture and what that has brought forth,

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which may be surprising to some and maybe not to others.

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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?

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The hurried count for 12% of the total population of Israel, not the Jewish population, the total population.

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And that number is growing really, really quickly.

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And this is from the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research, who did a study of the projections of population.

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And as you can see, the blue left side is a normal demographic progression.

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That's the Jewish demography for the rest of Jewish society in Israel.

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And it's really healthy and normal looking on the left side in green is the hurray, the demography.

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And in 2017, when they completed this study, 50% of the population of Haredim was under the age of 16.

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They have an 82% marriage rate, and 44% of those marriages happened before the age of 24.

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So that greatly increases their fertility window.

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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.

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That is a slight drop in the last ten years and I believe it used to be about 7.5 per couple.

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But the Israel Jerusalem Institute for and the Israel Population Office doesn't believe it's going to drop much more than that.

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A lot of the demographic studies of Haredim show that they break the the rule of demography,

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where if you get more secular education, you should have less children.

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It doesn't work for her society.

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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.

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So really doesn't exist as a category until relatively recently.

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Of course it starts.

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The roots of this identity start in 19th century Eastern Europe and with some religious leaders starting to respond to the scholar,

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the Jewish Enlightenment, and starting to resist any incursion of secular ideology into Jewish communities later on in the 19th century,

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this turns into national Zionist ideologies in Eastern Europe and the rest of Europe.

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And so it becomes much more of a profound reaction to Zionism in general,

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and especially to religious Zionism, which is starting to grow at that point.

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And because that is to these religious leaders, a dilution of religion with secular nationalist ideology,

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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.

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Now, I would ask Israel creates a dilemma. It's a community organisation, it's a religious organisation.

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They're trying to systematise how Ashkenazi Jews observe around the world, especially over in North America.

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It is growing. But they also suddenly have to become political leaders.

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I would, as Israel was a political party in Poland before the Holocaust.

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And so in order to sort of secularise themselves, they start investing in the idea of dust, Torah.

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Dust Torah cements rabbinical authority.

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It's taken from a charity in the Talmud, which Gershon Barkan says is a misinterpretation.

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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.

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And in that way, rabbinical leaders become political leaders, and politics is religion.

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So the identity of charity at this point conflates religion and political identity as one and forms it as an inseparable thing.

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And that's what we're going to look at when we go into this existence, the state of Israel.

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So for the first six years of the state of Israel, Haredim society went through gradually increasing stringency.

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And what that meant for men was an increasing focus on yeshiva attendance and study.

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So in this one wacky graph to the left, which is a bit inverted, what you can actually see is the older men,

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75 and older in 28, only 56% of them have ever attended a great yeshiva, yeshiva, an adult.

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And then on the far side, where we have 90.2%, that's 25 to 34 year olds.

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So young men in 28, 90.2% of them are have attended or are attending yeshiva currently.

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And it's also an emphasis on spending more time in yeshiva.

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So traditionally, a learned Jewish man who was religious might go to yeshiva for a few years,

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and then he'd go and pursue a livelihood and study perhaps a bit in his spare time in.

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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.

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And about a third only have spent six or more years studying in Yeshiva.

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By the time we have middle aged people in 28 and so the men aged 45 to 54 are in the blue.

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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,

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and only about a quarter of them spent between one and eight years.

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So everybody is supposed to study in Shiva and spend as long as possible doing so.

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So I want to now explain a little bit about the streams of your vote.

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When you in the U.S. but remember is a very Ashkenazi institution when non Ashkenazi Mizrahim and Sephardim olim arrive in Israel,

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they are told the only way to be religious is to attend yeshiva.

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And so you see here at the top, the two major groups, the literate and the Hasidic Hasidic refer to this as nothing.

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You might have heard of or I sometimes call them yeshivas.

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And then there's a tiny 6% of Chabad that is really different in Israel.

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And I'm not going to talk much about them today, but if you have questions, you ask me later.

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And then you see at the bottom here, a significant portion of yeshiva attendance in 2014 is through the Sephardic Yeshiva.

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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

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and yet were discriminated against and excluded from the little fish and her seat as she she was.

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And so Shas opened their own stream of U.S. votes, and these are generally considered not as well respected.

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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.

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And then you have a really interesting segment over here of Mizrahi Jews educated in Litvack institutions.

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Yes, they're using the advanced party interchangeably here a bit.

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And we'll get to why that happens later.

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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?

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The 60 years worth of increasing stringency has been an emphasis on modesty and gender separation.

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There have been increasingly strict codes of dress to which they've had to conform.

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And for Mizrahi and society, Alene, this was incredibly difficult, especially because the Ashkenazi mentality believes that loud colours are immodest.

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Traditional things from Morocco, etc. would become considered very immodest and almost sexualised in the Ashkenazi hurried world.

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And there's also been increasing emphasis on gender separation in formerly shared public spaces.

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I'm sure many of you are aware of the removal of images of women from advertisers, magazines, even children's books.

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And there's also an increasing emphasis on Kobi Arafa, sometimes called Kol Isa.

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It's a tiny tract of the Talmud that says the voice of a woman is like nakedness.

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And this is the rationalisation behind preventing any women from running for

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office in the Haredi parties are excluding them from secular leadership roles.

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And it has also created a really thriving by Women for women arts space, which I do a lot of my research in.

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I'm not going to talk about it today, but some of the women I'm speaking about are also artists.

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So feel free to ask me later on.

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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.

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So your haredi. Her parents originally came from Morocco.

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They are olim. But when they came here to Israel, they were teenagers and they came to really schools.

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This happened a lot. You take religious kids who are coming in, having fled home and immediately putting them into an Ashkenazi Haredim school.

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Then they got married and they made a whole Haredi family. I was the oldest child in a big family of 12.

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My mother got married. She was very young. She was about 17 as a Mizrahi girl.

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I was educated through the Ashkenazi schools. So as you grew up, in fact, and there wasn't a short school for her,

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so she went as a minority to Bass Yaakov basically being the famous Ashkenazi Variety Girl School.

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I have Sephardi friends, but we are a minority in the class.

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Again, she's using this, he and Sephardi interchangeably, and we're going to get to that in a minute.

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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.

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Yeshiva. There was a lot more secular education for them.

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This created a big crisis in the home. They literally talk about it to me as the marriage crisis.

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If you want to read a book about the lead up to it, Nurit Stadler.

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His book on Yeshiva Fundamentalism captures the conflict really well.

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She's published it in 2009, so it was right before the change sort of happened.

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But now rabbis have seen that maybe it would be good to educate men a little more in secular studies.

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So this has led to the creation of the Haredim campuses all over Jerusalem in Bnei Brak.

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And it's also a there's a changing situation because the rapid growth of the population has led to a lot of pressure.

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Of course, there's already housing pressure in the centre of the country, as we all know.

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Now, the haredim who I speak to are moving to settlements in non-haredi neighbourhoods.

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A lot of the settlements, the people I did research with and lived in and where they lived,

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it wasn't places like Beitar, which are the Haredi settlements.

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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.

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So they're moving to non-haredi places and they're starting to see new ways of being Jewish.

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This they're realising that their neighbours are not bad Jews after all.

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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.

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So that means that they do the yeshiva subjects, but they also do secular subjects in high school.

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And so there's a bit of a reinvention of the identity going on.

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It has not, however, seemed to change attitudes about accepting Sephardi culture of Mizrahi culture.

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And so I spoke to all my Ashkenazi women about how they felt about Sephardim as well.

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And it's always surprising what people will say to you.

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It really reveals how deeply ingrained and totally accepted some of the discrimination and racist ideas are.

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So this is Miriam. She's a little this woman who grew up in Monsey.

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She's lived in in Israel since she was married to mostly lived in Jerusalem.

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She lives elsewhere now. She said to me, yes, there is a problem today in the hurried world with Sephardim.

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There is a difference. I don't know why their homes are more violent.

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Maybe because in Arab society there is more violence.

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Yeah. So I had to hide my face and not react when I when I got that quote.

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But this obviously is going back to really traditional Orientalist tropes about the violent brown body.

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Haredim don't serve in the army, but it doesn't mean that they have any less prejudice against the Arab.

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In fact, I found incredible prejudice about Arabs everywhere at once in the Haredi world.

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And so to call a Jew an Arab is almost the worst insult that you could do.

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So it's conflating a Jewish other with the worst sort of non-Jewish other.

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And there's been a lot of of work published in America in the last 20 years or so

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about the racist tropes that centre racial dysfunction in the family unit and saying,

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you know, African-Americans don't achieve as much as white people because their families are dysfunctional.

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So that kind of mentality has entered into Miriam's whole mentality about and Sephardim and Mizrahim this is Syria.

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She's a Diala Hasan Hasidic woman. And she says to me, it's not colour based, it's cultural.

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You know, if they really want to culturally fit in, they can get in.

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But if not, then you're not fit to go to that school.

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We were talking about excluding starting from base of I don't want my sweet Hasidic little girl

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exposed to that because Sephardi culture is more she looks for a word and she says expressive.

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They're just less refined. They're loud.

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It's about refinement. So here we have the racist trope of the loud, loud, brown body.

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When she says expressive, I think it is fairly clear that she's suggesting they're certainly more immodest and probably more sexualised.

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And so, again, that's more orientalist themes.

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And this idea that it's not a colour problem, it's a culture problem is a very neoliberal, racist idea.

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And cultural racism is just as much racism as traditional racism is just using different words to say the same things.

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Now, BNA is interesting because it almost looks like she's not so prejudiced on the surface.

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She's a leftist woman, but she worked for 20 years for Shas.

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She has been part of the Sephardi community.

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She gets along and has many friends in the Sephardi world.

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And so when I asked her about it, she said to me, in ten years, look, it's not going to matter.

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No one cares these days. My nephew just married this beautiful Moroccan girl.

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She's so dark and lovely. Their kids will just be Jewish.

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Everyone is intermarrying now by the next generation.

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We will all just be Jewish. The differences will be gone.

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And that's where you get to the crux of it. The differences will be gone. She's not happy.

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Her son is married to a party girl because her son is going to get fena.

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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.

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So she she says some very, you know, exotic brown beauty kind of tropes that, again, go back to Orientalism.

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And what she's really talking about is the erasure of Sephardi culture.

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No one cares, so long as Sephardi heritage Jews conform to Ashkenazi cultural norms.

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And talking to Esti, who's very aware of all this discrimination and has responded to it powerfully,

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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.

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And this this goes to the crux of why everyone is using Mizrahi and Sephardi interchangeably.

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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.

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I have Sephardi friends, but we are a minority in the class.

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So I said to her, We Mizrahi, not Sephardi.

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She just told me she was Moroccan. As he says, These are his party.

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It's all the same here. It's the same like it's not the same meaning.

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But in Israel, when you say society or Mizrahi, it's the sea.

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It's all the. People who came from the Islamic countries to Israel.

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And so I want to press her on this and see how much she's. She's sort of a race this internally.

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And so safe at North African is different from Yemen.

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Yes. And as she says, it's totally different.

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Yes, but but here it's all the same class. And I said they're not Ashkenazi.

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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.

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So what she's talking about is the erasure of these distinctions because it really is the creation of an underclass.

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I don't know much about this situation in the broader Israeli society,

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but I have the sense that it's not just an underclass situation in the current world.

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I think this is somewhat mirroring generally Israeli society, but please feel free to tell me more about that after when I'm done.

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And this is a really strong example about how anti society discrimination works and also how religious

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women use their agency in a very non-liberal religious way to achieve what they need to achieve.

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So this is its story roots and its clean forms.

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The Haredim Women's Party, which I will talk more about in a little while.

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She lives in Petah Tikva and the good dog overseen by Yaakov is much better than the Shas School.

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So she wants to send her daughter there and she kind space Yaakov and they reject it.

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So she seeks help of the Sephardi Shas rabbi and he says his daughter that already at that base

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ya'acov he doesn't want to jeopardise her position so he's not going to advocate for roots.

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So she sort of takes it into her own hands and she calls up very she's got lots of

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chutzpah and gives them a fake Ashkenazi name that has a lot of religious uses,

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like the respected in the holy community. It's a name that comes from lots of great rivers.

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And immediately she is offered a space and they say, Come over and sign the papers.

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So she arrives. And as soon as they see her, they say, No, we're not letting you sign these papers.

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So she appeals the decision first to the school board and then all the way up to the top to the

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Minister of Education for Independent Schools who oversees the authority schools in Israel on.

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And eventually she gets told to come in and sign the enrolment papers.

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So this is what happens when she gets the office. It's very small, so I'll read it for you.

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I arrived at the office of the headquarters for the Independent Schools and he said, no.

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I said, Why? You just told me I could come and sign the enrolment papers.

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He started screaming, Shame on you. All these people doing work for you.

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And do you? You speak? He's implying she is impertinent.

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No, we will not accept you. I waited in the office for two and a half hours telling the secretary.

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I told my daughter I would buy her a backpack today. I'm not leaving until I can buy my daughter a backpack.

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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.

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He says, You have no shame. All these people are looking at you.

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It's rude to stay here. I heard him, but I didn't listen.

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I just kept crying and praying. He left and I kept reciting.

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To whom? I waited another hour and a half, crying and praying.

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Then his secretary called me, saying, Are you still there?

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Come upstairs. The rabbi wants to speak with you. I go upstairs and he said, okay, here's the enrolment paper sign.

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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,

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the sexualisation potentially of her and she is reading to healing, which in her 88 cosmology has a lot of power religiously for women.

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So she's embodying female pious ness in the most any way possible.

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And and not interrupting to heal is the correct thing to do.

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And so she's using all of her pious ness and all of her religious knowledge, basically.

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To achieve her goal, and she does in the end.

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So we have this crux happening around 2010 of incredible discrimination against Vadim in this him and

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we have the increasing secular education while facing incredibly strict modesty codes for women.

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And so it really is no surprise that we get the new Harry Feminists movement, which is what they call themselves.

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It's not my name for them. And an incredibly large proportion of them are Sephardi women.

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And so it all begins with anonymous chat rooms.

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People can go online and say things about fear of retaliation,

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and people start realising that they're not alone in having these criticisms of her aid society,

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these transfer into WhatsApp groups, and then eventually a group of women.

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It's about 15 or 20 women who decide to meet at a bakery in a Tel Aviv mall somewhere.

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No haredim will be. And there's a lot of disagreement.

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I've talked to about half the women at this meeting and some say 2012 and some say 2013.

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So around that time they met,

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they sat in a circle and they shared all their opinions that they were afraid to say at home with their families to anyone,

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and they started to realise they were not alone. I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about me.

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Culture Novitsky. She does feature heavily in my work, but she's not Sephardi, so we're not spending time on her today.

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She was there and being at this meeting was what gave her the feeling that she could join Avatar.

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She was a member of Avatar for four or five years before she started running for office,

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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.

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Nobody does. But she did fairly well. But this group that met in the mall became lonely hearts, no voice, no vote.

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And the spearhead person at the heart of it was Saudi Shushan, who we heard from earlier.

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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.

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And so the original goal of learning about her was to not vote for her parties until they allow women candidates.

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Now the organisation is much bigger, it's just in the current and they run women's leadership program courses and mentoring programs

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and I have sorry karate women who've been taking on more leadership teach younger women.

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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,

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which is end to their female merit, which is formed to be a women's party.

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It first was formed in 2015 and received about zero 4% of the vote,

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which isn't terrible actually, and shows that there is interest in the haredi world.

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But she has a very clear identity of refusing to cooperate with any non-haredi parties or organisations,

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and she feels in the long run that that will gain her more haredim women followers and have them trust her more.

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And she she feels it will help them trust that they can come to her.

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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.

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The reason why Sephardi women are becoming the feminist leaders is because really all the women's issues are society issues.

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When you create an underclass, the underclass will be disproportionately more affected by all the social problems that affect your society anyways.

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And so root, as we call everyone, agrees that these are the main issues today addressing domestic violence in her society, breast cancer education.

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Because of the increasing emphasis on modesty,

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there has been a really big increase in fatality from breast cancer in the Haredi world because people aren't checking themselves,

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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.

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And there's other public health issues that are being addressed too,

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such as pelvic floor issues with having so many babies on improving nursery teacher salaries.

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Almost a third of women work as nursery teachers.

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And they get paid next to nothing because it's considered part of what needs to happen for the community.

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And it limits women's independence and addressing issues such as poverty and the social economy, where people do things without getting paid.

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And creating more, better wage equality of genders, of course.

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Representation, parity, women's rights in the in the Knesset, improving education, access for both genders.

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And, of course, Argonauts, which are women who've been denied, gets by their husbands.

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So it's a synthetic feminism in that they're taking feminist ideology and applying it to secular areas where

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it doesn't conflict with rabbinical authority or authority or halacha and not applying it to religion.

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They're not doing what the dirty loony feminists are doing,

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which is trying to have a Torah in the women's section of the Kotel or and trying to have egalitarian

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minions or women only minions and things like that that doesn't enter into their feminist ideology at all.

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Although that being said, there was a recent article in Haaretz about two weeks ago with a woman who is part of,

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I believe, Belles Hasidim, and she is pushing very hard for more Torah learning for women.

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So she has she has the status in the classroom to be able to do this.

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So we'll see. I think it may switch over time to be more religious feminism to.

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Some like me call them like SD. Take a very western ideological, secular, religious distinction on.

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And so Mikal, for instance, supports equal marriage, supports buses on Shabbat,

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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.

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Keeps it very pure and very charity only, and I think that's very representative of sort of a future generally in British society.

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So what does it mean for the future? I think her society is becoming more plural.

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There is the emergence of a hardy middle class and especially with increasing higher education.

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Lots of families having two incomes instead of one right now and the middle classes very accepted by the rest of the Haredim world.

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It's not considered a poor choice.

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It's just not the mainstream of the husband spending his whole time in yeshiva and because of the introduction of both Shiva.

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So people who were raised not religious or less religious, who become haredim as adults, they view their decision as a religious one,

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not a political one, and very clearly separate their ideologies of religion and politics.

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And that's true. I found among both the Israeli beauty and the Anglo, the English speaking beauty,

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who are they're very different populations, but they still distinguish between a religious and political identity.

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And that is starting to affect all the other haredim as well.

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And it's becoming less simple that if you vote a certain way.

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So whereas they used to vote as a bloc, it might not happen quite so much anymore.

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And there's going to be new, more liberal movements coming out of hard.

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There are rabbis who take very liberal positions on.

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On things like wage equality and.

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Inc, what it what it really will look like is a syncretic incorporation of these secular ideologies

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where they'll take what works for the hurried world and they'll leave what doesn't.

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There will still always be a heritage identity, a pure we are the true Jewish, unadulterated religious purity identity within the community.

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But they're going to use secular ideas as it works for them, and that will gradually change them.

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There's also always going to be an extreme part. There's always going to be people who tend towards nature.

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Carter and the extreme anti-Zionist. But they're they're already considered a minority.

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They were considered sort of their own thing separate from Haiti in 1934 or five when they were formed.

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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,

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because they will be a very, very big portion of the future of Israel's population and therefore decision making and political process.

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And so things you. Thank you so much.

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Thank you.