Politics of Boundary-Making

English Abstract

This article examines the post-Second World War restructuring of Judaism in the United States and Israel through the lens of symbolic boundary-making. It shows how contemporary Jewish self-classification diverges fundamentally across the two contexts: whereas American Judaism is organized along denominational lines (Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform), Israeli Jewish identity is structured through socio-political categories such as Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox), Dati (religious), Masorti (traditional), and Hiloni (secular). These classificatory schemes are not descriptive givens but the outcome of historically contingent processes in which symbolic boundaries are continuously produced and stabilized.

Engaging Robert Wuthnow’s thesis of religious “restructuring,” the article argues that his model, while analytically productive, rests on a Christian-centered understanding of religious differentiation and therefore only partially captures the dynamics of American Judaism. It is, however, used heuristically to reconstruct processes of boundary reconfiguration in Israel. The analysis identifies two key drivers of Israeli restructuring. First, intra-Jewish ethnic stratification, particularly the political mobilization of Mizrahi Jews, which contributed to the emergence and public consolidation of Masorti identity and destabilized the established Haredi/Dati/Hiloni triad. Second, the 1967 War and its aftermath, which transformed Religious Zionism into a politically and theologically reconfigured actor, reinterpreting statehood and territorial expansion through redemptive frameworks.

Overall, the article demonstrates that Judaism in general and Israeli Judaism in particular cannot be reduced to a logic of denominational differentiation. Instead, it is shaped by the entanglement of religion with ethnicity, nationalism, culture, and peoplehood.