When I was growing up in the little modern-day American
shtetl of Monsey, New York (it was much smaller then that it is today), it used to be axiomatic when discussing Israeli culture: Unless Israelis were already religiously Jewish, they were not going to be interested in Judaism or in cultural offerings that were based in Torah and Judaism. Secular was secular, religious was religious, and never the twain shall meet. It was understood three quarters of a century ago that Labor Zionism had sought to create a “New Man,” one who was interested in creating a new, Israeli cultural identity separate from the traditional Torah-centered identity that had existed for Jews for thousands of years. These were a new kind of Jew called Israelis. Although the ideologies of the likes of A.D. Gordon and Dov Ber Borochov by the 1990s had receded into the pages of the history books, their legacy – an Israeli rather than a Jewish cultural legacy – had been created. By the 1990s,