Called Sacrilegious and Unpatriotic by Its Detractors, a Popular Israeli Comedy Provides Loving, if Biting, Satire

While some Israelis are protesting against the prime minister, in favor of the prime minister, or for stricter punishments for sexual assault, hundreds more took to the streets to demonstrate against the newest season of the television series Ha-Y’hudim ba’im (The Jews Are Coming). The show’s many Orthodox detractors seem incensed by its send-ups of biblical figures, but others object to its portrayals of the heroes of more recent Jewish and Zionist history. After dismissing calls for the Knesset to investigate the program as authoritarian, Lazar Berman defends The Jews Are Coming on its merits:

First of all, The Jews Are Coming takes aim at much more than just biblical stories. It portrays characters from Jewish history in Israel and the Diaspora, key episodes in the pre-state era, and memorable, even painful, chapters in Israel’s history. It comments on the giants, the stories, and national myths of the collective memory of Israeli Jews, religious and secular. The show is created entirely for the audience at which it takes aim. It is a real and enjoyable conversation within the family. Only those who are steeped in Tanakh and Jewish history will appreciate the sophistication of the sketches; it is hard to imagine someone who is not both Jewish and Israeli gaining anything beyond a shallow understanding of most of the episodes.

This is not the nasty work of anti-religious secularists. The script and acting show a love for the details of the stories, the nuances of the characters, and yes, the humorous and even uncomfortable aspects of the tales our people has preserved through the generations.

What’s more, anyone who thinks the show is really about the biblical characters themselves misses what makes it so popular. Through the vehicle of Jewish history, The Jews Are Coming makes profound statements about contemporary Israeli society and politics. Does anyone think the sketch about Deborah trying to prophesy to the people—only to have them grill her about her personal life and her choice not to have children—is about anything other than women in today’s workplaces in Israel?

Some might assume that the show unfairly targets the Israeli right, but it hits left-wing Israel just as hard. . . . The national heroes of the Israeli left—including Ben-Gurion, Peres, and Rabin—are all fair game.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Deborah, Israeli culture, Satire, Television

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society