The Haredi Moment Has Arrived

In July 2020, while attention was focused on COVID-19 and the presidential campaign, the American Jewish establishment was mobilizing out of the spotlight to resist an “affront to Zionist ideals” from which they had to “save the Zionist movement.” This threat came not from one of the usual suspects, from Arab nationalism, say, or from left-wing anti-Zionism, but from the Ḥaredim, the bearded and black-hatted representatives of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, whom one of the members of that establishment accused of plotting a “hostile takeover.”

While the establishment rhetoric verged on melodrama, the circumstance it reacted to was indeed evidence of a tectonic shift in the power balance of American and global Jewry.

Every five years the Congress of the World Zionist Organization meets, with representatives sent by the political parties in the Knesset, major Jewish organizations, and those representing Diaspora Jewry. These Diaspora representatives are chosen through elections in which any Jew can vote on condition that he or she parts with $7.50. In 2020, a rejuvenated progressive slate, named Hatikvah, launched a well-funded campaign to flood new voters into a traditionally low-turnout election. Hatikvah wanted to change the agenda of the World Zionist Organization thoroughly by prohibiting financial support for settlement activities in the West Bank, by devoting Diaspora resources to pressure the Israeli government into territorial compromise, and by promoting American-style progressive Judaism in Israel. The Zionist right, however, had an unexpected rejoinder: a new slate was put together to counter Hatikvah that sought, for the first time, the support of the American ḥaredi community. This slate, called Eretz Hakodesh, was created by a ḥaredi rabbi and activist in collaboration with a ḥaredi member of the Knesset in an unprecedented intervention of Ḥaredim in Zionist politics.