WAVE: Haredim and Society

Labor has long struggled with the stigma of being the party of Israel’s secular elites. Not quite as left as the smaller Meretz perhaps, but nonetheless, a problematic fit for strictly Orthodox voters. Yet in recent months, thanks to an unprecedented and largely under-the-radar recruitment drive, several hundred ultra-Orthodox Israelis have signed up with the…

Esty Weinstein, a formerly ultra-Orthodox woman who committed suicide and left behind a manuscript telling the story of her life, will be buried Tuesday in Tel Aviv’s Yarkon Cemetery. In the suicide note that accompanied the manuscript, Weinstein said she killed herself mainly because she missed her daughters. She left the ultra-Orthodox world eight years…

Weinstein had left the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, world seven years ago, but the community was up in arms when she disappeared last week, not only because she came from a very well-known, prestigious family but because her story is rattling social skeletons in the closets of Gur, the country’s largest Hasidic sect, as well as…

… For more than a century there has been an ideological conflict between Haredi and secular Jews. At the core lies the Zionist elite on one side, offering or indeed hoping to replace all religious Jews and Haredim in particular, with a new Israeli or Canaanite figure. Opposing them stands the Haredi narrative claiming that…