The “New Haredim” Return to Israeli Television Screens

Unlike the Israeli drama Shtisel, which achieved success with its realist portray of the life of a ḥaredi family, the newer series Shababnikim strikes a more lighthearted tone, and focuses on four young men who can’t quite make it as yeshiva students, and are eager to engage with the outside world even if they have no intention of breaking with their communities. Sarah Rindner reviews the second season, and its portrayal of those Israeli media have dubbed “the new Ḥaredim.”

When Shababnikim was introduced to Israeli audiences in 2017 by the religious filmmaker and showrunner Eliran Malka and Daniel Paran (who passed away the following year), its edgy and fast-paced combination of style, romance, and sophisticated religious content was a first. The show detailed the experiences of four shababnikim (Hebrew/Arabic slang for “wayward yeshiva youth”) as they vacillated between the social expectations of their ultra-Orthodox community and the larger Israeli society, not to speak of their own ambitions and desires, and some genuine philosophical and religious questions about how best to live a Jewish life.

In season two, important changes take hold. Avinoam, Meir, and Dov Laser continue to sip lattes, slink around in bathrobes, and generally enjoy the good life. . . . At risk of losing their social capital and marriageability, they decide to establish a yeshiva of their own. . . .

Yet just as the shababniks finally seem to be growing into their (designer) ḥaredi garments, their presence in Rehavia, “the last secular neighborhood in Jerusalem,” threatens to complicate things. A secular yeshiva moves in right next door. Secular yeshivas, where young Israelis can engage with Jewish texts and strengthen their Jewish identity in a religiously open environment, are in fact a growing phenomenon in modern Israel. This one is a spiritual commune whose members write poetry, smoke marijuana, and observe their religious neighbors with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. While Malka is bound to attract some opprobrium for his cynical portrayal of Ḥaredim, he is also ready to show that life without tradition has its own pitfalls. The cheerful neohippies of the secular yeshiva are certainly less neurotic than Gedaliah, Dov Laser, and company, but they, too, lack a framework for finding love and meaning.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: Haredim, Israeli society, Judaism in Israel, Television

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF