Ethical Complexity among Israeli Jews: Self-Fashioning, Religious-Nationalism and Tolerance

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My ESRC fellowship will consolidate my PhD through developing publications, networks, and research and professional skills. In Israel, the demand for meditation practices drawn from Buddhism appears to be among the highest in the world when compared to the size of the country, and such practices are currently being employed by a striking variety of Jewish Israelis. My PhD in Social Anthropology at Cambridge relies on over 14 months of fieldwork. It contributes primarily to the burgeoning research field of the anthropology of ethics, which analyses people's attempts to lead good lives comparatively. In my dissertation, I examine the diverse ways in which nationalist orthodox Jews, and left-wing Jewish activists for Palestinians' human rights, employ Buddhist meditation techniques for pursuing their respective political and religious goals. My dissertation focuses on the ways in which among my different interlocutors, the development of virtue through meditation is linked with the dilemmas entailed in having multiple, and often-conflicting, political and religious commitments. The study thereby contributes to anthropological debates concerning self-transformation, encounters between different religious traditions and the relationship between ethics and politics. My fellowship will rely on the findings of my doctoral fieldwork but will focus on themes that exceed those of my PhD. First, it will analyse the confluence of individual self-improvement, capitalism and messianic Jewish nationalism among contemporary religious Zionists. Members of this group have been at the forefront of Israel's settlement project in the occupied West bank since 1967, which has had dramatic consequences on both Israel-Palestine and the broader region. Moreover, following the declining influence of Israel's secular and socialist Jewish 'pioneers' since the 1970s, religious Zionists are gradually establishing themselves as the country's new hegemonic group. Second, a part of my PhD dissertation analyses the limited cultural resonance between predominantly Ashkenazi (European-Jewish) left-wing Israeli activists and their Palestinian counterparts. In my proposed project, I shall compare these interactions with the non-liberal yet effective models of tolerance that Mizrahim (Middle-Eastern and North-African Jews) enact with Palestinians, which I also witnessed. In such Mizrahi-Palestinian ties, living together respectfully relies on maintaining firm national-religious boundaries. Academic discussions of tolerance tend to make liberal assumptions: they presume that the individual, understood in universal terms, is more significant than their group affiliations, and valorise the crossing of national and religious confines. Conversely, social scientists have illustrated that people ranging from indigenous Australians, to Latvians, to Israelis and Palestinians contest such suppositions, and that consequently, liberal tolerance-promotion initiatives are often ineffective. And yet there is no systematic comparative study of different understandings of tolerance, namely people's terms for accepting 'otherness' of different kinds. My project will instigate a new interdisciplinary field of research that will comparatively analyse diverse tolerance models. Additionally, I will provide insights into reconciliation that unlike the standard, internationally-sponsored 'peace process', culturally resonate with most Israelis and Palestinians. Third, my PhD has included an examination of the ways in which Haredi (ultra-orthodox) Jews adopt 'foreign' practices borrowed from Buddhism. Haredim have reportedly suffered unusually high death rates from COVID-19 in Israel, the USA and the UK. I will build on my findings to provide insights concerning the ways in which largely-secular societies may engage with religious minority groups in a manner that is less intimidating for their members, and thus more efficacious, than is usually the case.