{"id":186033,"date":"2026-05-04T08:01:55","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T16:01:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=186033"},"modified":"2026-05-04T16:32:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T00:32:13","slug":"the-new-haredism-revolution-in-the-seventies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=186033","title":{"rendered":"‘The New Haredism: Revolution in the Seventies’"},"content":{"rendered":"

I first heard about this Israeli historian of Haredi Judaism, Yair Halevy<\/a>, from Marc Shapiro’s lecture series on the Langer Affair<\/a>.
\nHalevy’s dissertation is titled \u05de\u05d4\u05e4\u05db\u05ea \u05d4\u05d7\u05e8\u05d3\u05d9\u05d5\u05ea \u05d4\u05d7\u05d3\u05e9\u05d4 \u05d1\u05e9\u05e0\u05d5\u05ea \u05d4\u05e9\u05d1\u05e2\u05d9\u05dd, “The New Haredism: Revolution in the Seventies.” He submitted it to Bar-Ilan University in Tishrei 5780 (October 2019), through the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry. His supervisor was Prof. Kimmy Caplan<\/a>, the established historian of Israeli Haredi society. The full work runs to about 333 pages of text plus a bibliography.
\nWhat it argues, from the abstract<\/a> I found on Halevy’s academia.edu page:
\nHalevy divides Israeli Haredi history at a sharp hinge. Before the 1970s, “Old Haredism” had three traits. It was pro-Zionist or at minimum not anti-Zionist, with rabbis and Hasidic Rebbes celebrating Independence Day, reciting Hallel, and waving flags. It was heterogeneous and open, with most Haredim working secular jobs, living among non-Haredi Jews, reading secular press, and dressing without uniformity. And political power sat with party functionaries and journalists, not with rabbis. Old Haredism’s pro-Zionism peaked twice, at the founding of the state and after the Six-Day War.
\nIn the early 1970s this collapsed, and “New Haredism” replaced it: alienation from the state, anti-Zionist rhetoric, the kollel society as the new norm, and authority transferred to a small set of Gedolim, above all Rabbi Shach<\/a>.
\nThe Langer affair<\/a> as the pivot:
\nChapter Two, the longest in the work, runs from page 82 to page 191. Halevy titles it “The Goren Affair (The Brother and Sister): The Beginning of the Revolution<\/a>.” The chapter has roughly forty subsections covering every facet: Goren’s<\/a> election as Chief Rabbi, the heter (permission) for Hanoch and Miriam Langer<\/a>, the additional dayanim, Haredi attempts to block Goren’s<\/a> election, Shach’s<\/a> reaction and the Bnei Brak rally, Elyashiv’s<\/a> response, the role of Zvi Weinman, Ovadia Yosef’s reaction, the Edah Haredit’s “tearing ceremony,” rabbinical posters at home and abroad, the Council of Torah Sages decision, the Haredi press response, the pamphlets against the ruling, the alleged opinions of the Chazon Ish, the limited drift to violence, the Hasidic leaders’ positions, the question of government pressure on Goren<\/a>, the halakhic case for and against the heter, the Galya Ben-Gurion and Helen<\/a> Seidman<\/a> parallels, and a closing comparison of Haredi versus statist halakhic approaches.
\nHalevy’s interpretive move, plain in the abstract: halakhically the case looked routine. Goren<\/a> had a defensible position. But media coverage and the reading by Elyashiv<\/a> and Shach<\/a> turned it into a precedent fight about state control over religious institutions. That reading licensed an outsized response, and the response itself reorganized Haredi society. The affair was both reflection and cause of the larger shift.
\nAdjacent chapters frame the Langer pivot. Chapter One reconstructs Old Haredism. Chapter Three covers the political processes inside Agudath Israel in the seventies, including the death of YM Levin, the rise of the Gedolim, the Hasid-Lithuanian split, and the move to coalition with Begin in 1977. Chapter Four covers the Eros detainees affair (Haredi youths who tried to set fire to a Tel Aviv sex shop<\/a>), and contains an extended treatment of Shach’s<\/a> rise relative to the older Gedolim and a quantitative survey of Independence Day coverage in HaModia and the official Haredi diaries to track the ideological shift in real time.
\nHalevy treats the Langer affair<\/a> the way Alexander treats Watergate<\/a>. A halakhic dispute that, in itself, was not extraordinary became the carrier of a much larger story about identity, authority, and the state, and the carrier function is what reshaped the community. <\/p>\n

Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe and the Mussar Revival<\/a> <\/strong><\/p>\n

The article works as straightforward intellectual history. Halevy knows his material, writes cleanly, and stays close to the sources. The structure is conventional: biography, exposition of Wolbe’s thought, Wolbe’s place in the postwar yeshiva world, his independence within it, his legacy. Nothing flashy. Nothing forced.
\nThe central argument is sharp and true. Mussar<\/a> in its original Salanter sense was demanding, individual, introspective, oriented to self-knowledge and the actual repair of character. The postwar Lithuanian yeshiva world kept the mussar<\/a> slot on the schedule and hollowed out the content. The “mussar<\/a> seder” became, in the yeshiva joke Halevy quotes, “half an hour of silence in memory of Rabbi Israel Salanter.” Wolbe<\/a> is the man who tried to keep the original thing alive. Halevy lets that conclusion build through accumulating detail rather than announcing it.
\nThe piece on Wolbe’s<\/a> hashkafah<\/a> (worldview) \/ mussar<\/a> tension is where the article earns its keep. Hashkafah<\/a>, Halevy says, is communal, normative, conformist, instinctive, transmitted by air rather than text, demanding obedience to the Gedolim. Mussar<\/a>, by contrast, demands self-knowledge, independence, introspection, the development of the individual. Wolbe holds both. Most don’t, and the article quietly shows how the institutions absorbed mussar<\/a> by neutering it. The line about the mashgiach role drifting from spiritual cultivation to barracks discipline plus hashkafah<\/a> propagation is the key sociological observation, and Halevy makes it without overstating it.
\nThree small things I admire:
\nThe Frumkeit<\/a> chapter. Wolbe’s argument that frumkeit is an instinct, not a virtue, that it’s egoistic, that it drives people toward stringencies in ritual but not toward generosity in interpersonal mitzvot, is reported faithfully and the implications are left for the reader. Halevy doesn’t editorialize. He doesn’t need to.
\nThe biographical detail on Wolbe’s German background, the partial university studies, the conversion to Lithuanian yeshiva mussar<\/a> in his teens, the years in Sweden saving lives, the awareness Wolbe had that he was a baal teshuvah of sorts. Halevy uses this without psychologizing it. He notes only that “the unforgiving demand to transmit mussar<\/a> in its original form” might draw on this past. That restraint is the right call.
\nThe handling of Shach<\/a>. Halevy shows that Wolbe declared Shach<\/a> “the only one left from the Gedolim of the previous generation” and meant it, while also being one of the very few in the Lithuanian world willing to speak publicly against the conscription of yeshiva students into the Degel HaTorah campaign. That’s the kind of contradiction the article respects rather than resolves.
\nWhat I’d push back on, gently:
\nThe closing section on the contemporary mussar<\/a> revival is thinner than the rest. The Alan Morinis, Ira Stone, Salant Foundation paragraph reads like a footnote turned into a coda. Halevy seems to want to say something about New Age echoes and globalized self-help, but he doesn’t develop it, and the piece would be stronger ending on the previous paragraph about institutional acquiescence as a sign of limited reach.
\nThe article is descriptive rather than evaluative. That’s a strength but also a limitation. Halevy never quite asks why the original Salanter project failed institutionally. He shows that it failed. He notes that the war and the social structure of Israeli yeshivot played a role. But the deeper question, why an interior, self-critical, individualistic discipline can’t survive inside a community whose survival strategy is conformity, sits in the article’s basement and is never brought upstairs.
\nThe paper is a good model of patient, sourced, untheoretical Israeli academic writing on Haredi society, the kind of work Kimmy Caplan<\/a> trained him to do. If the dissertation reads like this, you’ll get a lot from it.<\/p>\n

The Haredi Society in the Fourth Decade<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

This paper compresses an entire decade of Haredi political and social history into about fifteen pages, organized around a single thesis.
\nThe thesis is sharp and worth stating in plain terms. Aguda’s entry into the Begin coalition in 1977 looked like an integration. It was the opposite. The money and the power that flowed from coalition membership did not bring Haredim closer to the state. They built up the parallel institutions that allowed Haredim to live further from it. And the same money that bought separation from secular Israel destroyed Aguda from within, because once there were budgets and seats worth fighting over, the Hasidic-Lithuanian alliance that had held the party together for thirty years could not survive the fight.
\nThat’s the argument and Halevy makes it convincingly. The mechanism he describes is concrete. Lorincz becomes chairman of the Knesset Finance Committee. Yeshivot get 90 percent funding instead of a small subsidy. Draft deferments cross 10,000 in 1980 and 16,000 by 1985. The “society of learners” that had been growing slowly since the fifties suddenly has the fiscal infrastructure to grow fast. And the political price is paid in the Council of Torah Sages, which had functioned as a neutral coordinating body and now becomes a venue for proxy fights between Gur Hasidim and Lithuanians, between Shach<\/a> and the Gerrer Rebbe, between Sephardim and Ashkenazim.
\nThe Shach<\/a> portrait is the spine of the piece. Halevy is careful to distinguish two innovations. First, Shach<\/a> treats himself as the singular Gadol authorized to speak for Daat Torah, without needing to compromise with other Gedolim on the Council. Second, he speaks publicly on practically every question of the day. Both are breaks with the prior pattern, where the Council was collective and reticent. Halevy lets the sources do the work here. Lorincz quoting Shach on the apple-cart parable from the Chofetz Chaim is the kind of detail that earns its place: Shach’s rationale for entering the coalition isn’t ideological reconciliation with Zionism, it’s grab what you can while the cart is overturned. That single image carries the article’s thesis better than any analytic sentence could.
\nThe treatment of Shas<\/a> is shrewd. Halevy doesn’t tell the Shas<\/a> story as a Sephardi awakening, which is how it usually gets told. He tells it as a Lithuanian project. Shach<\/a> and the Steipler back the Sephardi list in Bnei Brak in 1978 because they want to weaken Aguda without yet being ready to break from it openly. By 1984, Shach<\/a> is willing to throw his Aguda voters at Shas<\/a> on election day. Aguda halves to two seats. Shas<\/a> takes four. Shach<\/a> now has a Sephardi vehicle that owes him as much as it owes Ovadia Yosef. Two years later he founds Yated Ne’eman to compete with HaModia. By 1988 he founds Degel HaTorah. Halevy’s chronological sequencing makes the strategy visible. Shas<\/a> was not a parallel development. It was the first move in Shach’s exit from Aguda, executed six years before the formal break.
\nThe Gerrer side gets less analytic attention than the Lithuanian side. Halevy reports the rotation demand, the Avraham Shapira appointment, the Shapira-Shach disputes over Golan and Gush Emunim, the conflict over conversion law, and the Purush hotel beating, but the Rebbe’s strategic logic remains opaque in a way Shach’s doesn’t. That’s a real gap. The Lev Simcha was making decisions of comparable consequence. Halevy notes them but doesn’t explain them.
\nA few smaller observations:
\nThe “separated institutions” section is short but does important work. The split of Bais Yaakov in Bnei Brak in 1979, with Gur establishing its own seminary because Gerrer girls were uncomfortable hearing Lithuanian classmates discuss multi-meeting courtships, is the kind of detail that shows the sub-sectarianization happening at street level rather than in party offices. The dating-practice difference is also a useful reminder that Hasidic-Lithuanian tension is not just political. It’s anthropological.
\nThe kashrut and press fragmentation sections feel slightly compressed. Halevy mentions Belz opening its own Badatz in January 1980, the Yaakov Landa succession fight, and the founding of She’erit Yisrael, but these are dispatched in a paragraph each. They deserve more room because they are the institutional infrastructure of permanent sectarian separation. Once each sub-group has its own kashrut authority and its own newspaper, the centripetal force of the Council of Torah Sages is gone for good.
\nThe Hozer biTeshuva paragraph drops in and drops out without much development. Uri Zohar and Pupik Arnon’s media-amplified returns to observance functioned as Haredi self-confidence boosters, Halevy says, and that’s right, but it’s also one of the few moments where his explanation feels like it could come from anywhere. Almost any account of the period would say the same thing in similar words.
\nThe conclusion is appropriately modest. Halevy doesn’t claim that Aguda’s fragmentation was inevitable or that Shach’s strategy was uniquely brilliant. He just says the structural conditions, money plus a dominant Gadol plus a high-fertility society building separate institutions, made the old Aguda coalition unsustainable. The 1988 election that produced Degel HaTorah<\/a> is presented as the conclusion of a process whose earlier steps the article has just laid out, and that framing is earned.
\nWhat the piece tells you about Halevy as a scholar is that he can do two things well at once. He can stay close to sources, and he can keep an argument visible across a long stretch of narrative. The dissertation chapter on the Langer affair was a microhistory. The Wolbe essay was an intellectual portrait. This is something more synthetic, and he handles the form. If you can read Hebrew comfortably, the dissertation is going to reward the time. He’s a serious historian.<\/p>\n

Musar Education and Guidance of Rabbi Shlom<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a longer, more ambitious version of the Wolbe<\/a> essay. Same author, same subject, but the scope has widened. The first piece was a portrait of Wolbe<\/a> inside the mussar<\/a> tradition. This one is a portrait of Wolbe inside Lithuanian Haredi society as a whole. The biographical material is fuller, the source apparatus is denser, and Halevy adds three substantial new sections: Wolbe’s role as a propagator of hashkafah, his 1969 polemic with Yisrael Spiegel in HaModia, and his guidance literature on child-rearing and marriage. The mussar<\/a> exposition that was the spine of the earlier piece is here too, though more compressed.<\/p>\n

The Spiegel exchange is the find. It changes what Wolbe looks like. In 1969 the editorial line at HaModia, the official Aguda daily, was still pro-Zionist enough that the deputy editor could publish a Yom Ha’atzmaut essay arguing that Zionism had ceased to exist with the founding of the state, that the state is a neutral instrument, and that its accomplishments include physical security and the conditions for full Torah life. Wolbe’s response, three weeks later, attacks that framing directly. He says the state was given a soul by its secular founders, that everyone who lives in it including yeshiva students absorbs that soul, and that the only correct posture is opposition on three fronts: halakhic compromise, symbolic flattery (Independence Day), and educational independence. He cites the Brisker Rav and reports a private remark from the Chazon Ish that the state may be the last test before the Messiah.<\/p>\n

What is striking about this is the dating. 1969 is years before Shach<\/a> consolidates the new anti-Zionist line. Halevy’s other essay on the 1970s argued that the New Haredism’s anti-Zionism crystallized around the Langer affair in 1972-3 and Shach’s rise after. Here we see Wolbe<\/a> articulating the mature anti-Zionist position three years earlier, in print, in the official Aguda paper, and being met by a counter-essay from a member of the editorial staff who can still credibly defend the older pro-Zionist consensus. The fact that Spiegel’s piece appeared at all, and that the only published rebuttal came from Wolbe rather than from a pile of rabbis, tells you the line had not yet hardened. Wolbe is one of the people pushing it to harden.<\/p>\n

This complicates the picture from the first essay. There Wolbe<\/a> was the man holding the line on individualist mussar<\/a> against the conformist pressure of hashkafah. Here he is a propagator of hashkafah in the political-ideological sense. Halevy doesn’t paper over the tension. He says directly that out of Benny Brown’s ten components of Lithuanian hashkafah, Wolbe lines up with eight of them almost completely. He opposes Zionism, opposes drafting yeshiva students, expresses reservations about Hasidism, declares Shach<\/a> the only anchor of the generation. The independence shows up only in the two areas Halevy isolates: stringency culture (the frumkeit critique) and the demand for innocent rather than reasoned faith. Everywhere else Wolbe is inside the camp.<\/p>\n

Halevy’s solution is to say Wolbe<\/a> was independent in style and conformist in content. He spoke against the lack of personal autonomy in yeshiva pedagogy. He criticized rote frumkeit. He pushed back against a Tarbut of Lev Simcha-style political mobilization in the 1988 Degel HaTorah campaign. But his actual positions on Zionism, conscription, Hasidism, and Daas Torah were standard Lithuanian. The way he expressed himself was more individualistic than the average mashgiach; what he expressed was substantially the same.<\/p>\n

That’s a defensible reading of the evidence. It also undersells the problem a little. The 1969 essay is a more aggressive piece of ideological work than Halevy fully acknowledges. Wolbe<\/a> is writing in HaModia, against another writer in HaModia, taking the harder line. He’s not just refusing to celebrate the state; he’s saying the state has a malign metaphysical essence that infects its yeshiva-student inhabitants whether they like it or not. The earlier piece’s mussar<\/a> Wolbe, the man who insisted every individual is unique and must work out his own path, sits awkwardly next to the Wolbe of this essay, who tells Yisrael Spiegel that anyone living in the state is contaminated by its secular soul regardless of their personal choices. Halevy doesn’t quite reckon with how forceful the second voice is.<\/p>\n

The marriage and child-rearing section is the other major addition, and it’s the most useful for understanding why Wolbe became influential beyond the mussar<\/a> audience. The handling is clear-eyed. Halevy notes that Wolbe’s manuals are now standard reading for grooms and brides in Lithuanian premarital counseling, that they have done more practical work than Alei Shur, and that they show Wolbe accommodating contemporary realities rather than recapitulating prewar norms. The wife may have more Tanakh and Halakha than the husband, may be the primary breadwinner, deserves to share or even control household finances; the husband should not raise his voice, should not hit children, should manage his anger because his wife is functioning as the “midat hadin” mirror reflecting his spiritual state back at him; the kabbalistic frame is enlisted to demand emotional accountability from men. This is patriarchal in its premises but practical in its operation. Halevy is good at showing how Wolbe makes accommodations look like applications of received wisdom rather than capitulations to modernity.<\/p>\n

A few smaller things worth marking:<\/p>\n

The footnote about Wolbe’s possible university studies in Berlin is interesting and Halevy handles it carefully. Anne Ruth Cohen’s 1960 letter to Jewish Tribune says Wolbe was influenced by an Orthodox student organization at university and was effectively a baal teshuva. Marc Shapiro gets the credit for one of the source pointers in note 4. Weinberg’s letter from 1965 places Wolbe in the lower classes of the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin. Halevy concludes Wolbe was probably doing partial seminary studies alongside university. This matters because Wolbe’s later critique of secular university psychology and his insistence that mussar<\/a> is not philosophy or Machshevet Yisrael hits differently if he had studied psychology in Weimar Berlin and chose mussar over it. Halevy doesn’t editorialize on this but the placement is deliberate.<\/p>\n

The Lev exchange in HaMa’ayan is restated more sharply here than in the earlier essay. Yaakov Kamenetsky said after Avraham Grodzinski’s death “the era of mussar<\/a> is over and will not rise again.” Wolbe’s response is that this is true in America but not in Israel. The unstated implication, that Wolbe sees himself as the holdout, is more visible in this version.<\/p>\n

The Goren-Langer<\/a> reference is buried in a footnote about Golda Meir but it’s revealing. Wolbe published a public response to Meir in HaModia during the Langer affair. He opens by saying she “hurled words against Heaven” and then explains he is debating her despite the prohibition on debating an apikoros, because her conduct does not yet clearly place her in that category. This is the Wolbe of the 1972 mainstream Haredi consensus, not a marginal figure but a participant in the central polemic of the decade. It connects this essay to the Langer chapter of the dissertation.<\/p>\n

The closing paragraph is honest about Wolbe’s reach. The mussar<\/a> revival was limited. Most yeshiva students do not study his books carefully. The pedagogy and marriage manuals reached more people than Alei Shur did. Halevy ends with a careful estimation: Wolbe has a place in the Lithuanian pantheon, perhaps not at the head table but at the table of distinguished guests. That sounds modest but it tracks the evidence.<\/p>\n

What this essay shows about Halevy as a writer, beyond what the earlier pieces showed: he can hold a complicated subject without flattening it. The first Wolbe<\/a> essay made Wolbe sound like a quiet hero of individualist resistance. This essay makes him sound like a man whose loyalty to the Lithuanian project was deep and operative, whose independence was real but local, and whose biggest practical legacy was a body of advice literature on marriage and child-rearing that quietly carried his mussar<\/a> sensibility into precincts of Haredi life that mussar<\/a> proper never reached. Both readings are defensible. Halevy is sophisticated enough to write the second one even though the first would be flattering to his subject and easier to sell.<\/p>\n

The Rabbi of Brisk: Rabbi Yitschak Zeev<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Rotenberg and Halevy essay does several things well and a few things poorly, and it leaves the most interesting question half-asked.
\nThe strongest move is their distinction between Brisk as method and Brisk as idea. R. Chaim’s direct students all walked away with independent approaches. Shkop developed his own logic, Boruch Ber developed “pshat amok,” and so on. If the Brisker derech survived as a unified thing rather than fragmenting into a half-dozen rival schools, someone had to embody the unbroken transmission. Griz did. The authors see this clearly. He was not just a continuator of his father; he was a curator who held the brand together by refusing to deviate from it even by a hair, and by insisting on a fixed vocabulary (chefetz\/gavra, shnei dinim, chalos). The brand survives him too. That move deserves more credit than the essay gives it.
\nThe pas solet example is the most useful thing in the piece for an outsider. Two dinim in matzah eating, where the practical kashrut outcome is identical regardless of which conceptual map you adopt. Brisker analysis here is closer to analytic philosophy than to halakhic decision-making. The conclusions do not change practice. The structure of the concepts changes. This is a school of learning where psak is delegated to others and the lomdus has no operational stakes. The authors notice this but do not press on what it means for a tradition to organize itself around analysis whose practical yield is zero.
\nTheir handling of the anti-Zionism is the part most worth keeping. They show Griz’s opposition runs primarily on pikuach nefesh, not on the messianic-theological lines Satmar used. The 1948 letter to Abramsky is striking. He calls for ceasefire, worries about endangering the whole yishuv, and notes that even gentile nations intervene to stop bloodshed. That is not Satmar. It also pushes back on the nephew’s claim in Boston that Griz had no halakhic category for the state. Footnote 48 is sharp on this point. The Rav wanted his uncle apolitical. The uncle was campaigning against Mizrachi, which the Rav led in America. Family politics shape the historiography.
\nThe weak spot is the question of how a man with no formal post, a yeshiva of eight to twenty students, and a reclusive temperament built such reach. The authors gesture at Friedman’s “gadol” model and move on. They do not work out how the influence operated. He needed Agudah operatives, American rabbis, sympathetic journalists, couriers to Boston, pressure points in the Sokhnut. Aharon Kotler’s eulogy claims he depended on no one. The record shows he depended on a wide network of people willing to act on his instructions. The hesped is doing ideological work the authors leave unexamined.
\nThe contradiction at the close deserves more weight than they give it. Griz forbade taking state funds. The society of learners his stance helped consecrate runs on them. The Brisker yeshivot today preserve the prohibition while sitting inside a system that violates it. The authors note this and stop. The interesting question is what the prohibition is doing now that it has become symbolic rather than operative.
\nThe final irony they catch is good. American bochurim fill the Brisker yeshivot in a country whose existence Griz refused to recognize.<\/p>\n

Against the Tide: Resistance to Ultra Orthodox Judaism<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Halevy’s central finding deserves more weight than he gives it. The Haredi world we know, reflexively anti-Zionist, posed against the state, sealed off in its own neighborhoods, is recent. The Haredi mainstream of the 1950s and 60s lived in mixed neighborhoods, served in the IDF, read secular newspapers, and after June 1967 published prose about clouds of fire and the Exodus. That world ended in the early 1970s. The stance most contemporary Haredim treat as timeless is about fifty years old.
\nThe article documents this transformation but does not account for it. Halevy names four dissenting voices in 1967: Mendelsohn<\/a>, Wolf<\/a>, Schoenfeld<\/a>, Shach<\/a>. Three softened their published positions compared to what they had written before. Shach<\/a> published nothing at all in the Haredi press during the war or after. He spoke to small audiences in private. Within five years, his position was the official Lithuanian Haredi line. How did that happen?
\nHalevy gestures at the yeshivot as the carriers of the change but does not show the transmission. The article ends with the smoldering coals metaphor. Coals become flame. But who fanned them? What changed between 1967 and 1973? The Sabbath conflicts at the Wall, the conscription pressure, the proposals for liturgical reform: each year gave the dissenters fresh evidence that Religious Zionism was failing to protect Torah life. The war did not produce Haredi anti-Zionism directly. It produced the conditions under which Haredi anti-Zionism could win.
\nThe Shach<\/a> material is the most original part of the article. His response to the war is striking for its refusal to interpret. He cites the Talmudic line about the wicked man for whom the hour smiles. The hour smiles, but you draw no conclusions. The state’s success is theologically meaningless because temporary success of evil is a familiar pattern. This move lets him neutralize the pressure to read 1967 as redemption without committing to any rival theology of history. He lowers the temperature by refusing to play the game.
\nLorincz’s anecdote about Shach’s prayer during the war shows the same pattern in miniature. If he prays for victory, secular pride grows and divine honor shrinks. If he does not pray, soldiers die. The solution: pray that no soldier dies but divine honor still grows. The splitting is so neat it gives away the position. For Shach<\/a>, religion and Israeli nationalism are opposed categories. Even praying for Jewish victory in war becomes a problem to work around.
\nA few threads Halevy could pull harder.
\nThe Leibowitz citations in the Haredi press deserve a longer look. Daglenu and Modi’in quote him approvingly. He is useful because he attacks the same enemies (Religious Zionism, the Chief Rabbinate as state functionaries, the language of redemption applied to military victory) from a position the Haredi press cannot occupy in public. A secular philosopher gives the Haredi editors permission to say what they want to say. The alliance is instrumental and short-lived. It also shows how thin the ideological line was between certain forms of secular and Haredi anti-Zionism in this period.
\nThe Schoenfeld case is more interesting than Halevy makes it. Schoenfeld charges Zionism with historical complicity in the Shoah, in detail, with specific names and dates. Neturei Karta translates and distributes his books. But Schoenfeld stays inside Agudah and writes for its press. The line between him and Satmar is doctrinal but not strategic. Halevy notes the Neturei Karta translation and moves on. Why did Schoenfeld stay inside Agudah while making arguments that logically should have pushed him out? What did Agudah get from keeping him?
\nThe softening of the dissenters’ published positions is treated as a concession to public mood. It might be the opposite. A frontal attack on a euphoric public fails. Quiet accumulation of dissent in yeshiva settings, paired with mild public statements that do not draw fire, wins the long game. Halevy sees the pattern but does not name it. The dissenters might have been more strategic than the article credits them with.
\nOne last thing. The article is structured as a survey of voices rather than as an argument. Each figure gets his pages. The claim that this minority became the majority is asserted in the conclusion, not demonstrated. A stronger version of the article might trace the institutional pathways: the rise of yeshiva heads as authorities displacing Agudah politicians, the growth of the kollel system, the consolidation of Shach’s network in Bnei Brak. Through these the marginal voices of 1967 became the central voices of 1980. That is the article that needs to be written. Halevy’s piece is a useful first step toward it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I first heard about this Israeli historian of Haredi Judaism, Yair Halevy, from Marc Shapiro’s lecture series on the Langer Affair. Halevy’s dissertation is titled \u05de\u05d4\u05e4\u05db\u05ea \u05d4\u05d7\u05e8\u05d3\u05d9\u05d5\u05ea \u05d4\u05d7\u05d3\u05e9\u05d4 \u05d1\u05e9\u05e0\u05d5\u05ea \u05d4\u05e9\u05d1\u05e2\u05d9\u05dd, “The New Haredism: Revolution in the Seventies.” He submitted it … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[598,43117,29185],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-haredi","category-r-shlomo-goren","category-r-yosef-shalom-elyashiv"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t