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The Temple Mount, located in Jerusalem, is the most sacred site in Judaism and the third-most sacred site in Islam, after Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. The sacred nature of the site for both religions has made it one of the focal points of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount is an original and provocative study of the theological roots and historical circumstances that have given rise to the movement of the Temple Builders. Motti Inbari points to the Six Day War in 1967 as the watershed event: the Israeli victory in the war resurrected and intensified Temple-oriented messianic beliefs. Initially confined to relatively limited circles, more recent "land for peace" negotiations between Israel and its Arab neighbors have created theological shock waves, enabling some of the ideas of Temple Mount activists to gain wider public acceptance. Inbari also examines cooperation between Third Temple groups in Israel and fundamentalist Christian circles in the United States, and explains how such cooperation is possible and in what ways it is manifested.
The Six Day War in 1967 profoundly influenced how an increasing number of religious Zionists saw Israeli victory as the manifestation of God's desire to redeem God's people. Thousands of religious Israelis joined the Gush Emunim movement in 1974 to create settlements in territories occupied in the war. However, over time, the Israeli government decided to return territory to Palestinian or Arab control. This was perceived among religious Zionist circles as a violation of God's order. The peak of this process came with the Disengagement Plan in 2005, in which Israel demolished all the settlements in the Gaza Strip and four settlements in the West Bank. This process raised difficult theological questions among religious Zionists. This book explores the internal mechanism applied by a group of religious Zionist rabbis in response to their profound disillusionment with the state, reflected in an increase in religious radicalization due to the need to cope with the feelings of religious and messianic failure.
In Jewish Radical Ultra-Orthodoxy Confronts Modernity, Zionism and Women's Equality, Motti Inbari undertakes a study of the culture and leadership of Jewish radical ultra-Orthodoxy in Hungary, Jerusalem and New York. He reviews the history, ideology and gender relations of prominent ultra-Orthodox leaders Amram Blau (1894–1974), founder of the anti-Zionist Jerusalemite Neturei Karta, and Yoel Teitelbaum (1887–1979), head of the Satmar Hasidic movement in New York. Focussing on the rabbis' biographies, the author analyzes their enclave building methods, their attitude to women and modesty, and their eschatological perspectives. The research is based on newly discovered archival materials, covering many unique and remarkable findings. The author concludes with a discussion of contemporary trends in Jewish religious radicalization. Inbari highlights the resilience of the current generations' sense of community cohesion and their capacity to adapt and overcome challenges such as rehabilitation into potentially hostile secular societies.
Over the centuries, the messianic tradition has provided the language through which modern Jewish philosophers, socialists, and Zionists envisioned a utopian future. Michael L. Morgan, Steven Weitzman, and an international group of leading scholars ask new questions and provide new ways of thinking about this enduring Jewish idea. Using the writings of Gershom Scholem, which ranged over the history of messianic belief and its conflicted role in the Jewish imagination, these essays put aside the boundaries that divide history from philosophy and religion to offer new perspectives on the role and relevance of messianism today.
A comparative look at female political activism in today's most influential Israeli and Palestinian religious movements How do women in conservative religious movements expand spaces for political activism in ways that go beyond their movements' strict ideas about male and female roles? How and why does this activism happen in some movements but not in others? Righteous Transgressions examines these questions by comparatively studying four groups: the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, the ultra-Orthodox Shas, the Islamic Movement in Israel, and the Palestinian Hamas. Lihi Ben Shitrit demonstrates that women's prioritization of a nationalist agenda over a proselytizing one shapes their activi...
The Jewish settlements in disputed territories are among the most contentious issues in Israeli and international politics. This book delves into the ideological and rabbinic discourses of the religious Zionists who founded the settlement movement and lead it to this day. Based on Hebrew primary sources seldom available to scholars and the public, Moshe Hellinger, Isaac Hershkowitz, and Bernard Susser provide an authoritative history of the settlement project. They examine the first attempts at settling in the 1970s, the evacuation of Sinai in the 1980s, the Oslo Accords and assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in the 1990s, and the withdrawal from Gaza and the reaction of radical settler groups in the 2000s. The authors question why the evacuation of settlements led to largely theatrical opposition, without mass violence or civil war. They show that for religious Zionists, a "theological-normative balance" undermined their will to resist aggressively because of a deep veneration for the state as the sacred vehicle of redemption.
Describes and examines the attempts of Gush Emunim, a religious nationalistic social movement, to construct Israeli identity, collective memory, and sense of place.
The life and politics of an American Jewish activist who preached radical and violent means to Jewish survival Meir Kahane came of age amid the radical politics of the counterculture, becoming a militant voice of protest against Jewish liberalism. Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League in 1968, declaring that Jews must protect themselves by any means necessary. He immigrated to Israel in 1971, where he founded KACH, an ultranationalist and racist political party. He would die by assassination in 1990. Shaul Magid provides an in-depth look at this controversial figure, showing how the postwar American experience shaped his life and political thought. Magid sheds new light on Kahane’s radi...
Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History includes a series of essays in its symposium section that treat the dramatic development of the visual arts in Jewish life from the beginning of the 20th century, focusing on the proliferation of Jewish museums after the Holocaust.
Featuring a selection of brand new essays by a group of accomplished scholars, Arthur Koestler's Fiction and the Genre of the Novel covers all of Koestler's novels published in his lifetime, the first book to attempt this in English since Mark Levene's Arthur Koestler, published thirty-seven years ago. The team of contributors, with research backgrounds in history, political science, religious studies, law, linguistics and journalism besides literature, offers a truly multidisciplinary take on how Koestler's novels utilize, and at times transcend, the genre of the novel, and argues for their enduring relevance and appeal in the twenty-first century, inviting the reader to revisit and reassess them. With the topics of Koestler's novels including terrorism, massive migration, espionage, rape trauma, war trauma, the crisis of faith, propaganda, fake news and the role and responsibility of intellectuals in major international crises, as the volume aims to show, these texts are just as topical today, as they were at the time of their publication.