Podcast: Yehoshua Pfeffer on the Future of Ultra-Orthodox Politics and Culture in Israel

This Week’s Guest: Yehoshua Pfeffer

Every election in Israel’s history has yielded a governing majority—until now. Though a bloc of right-wing parties emerged from the April 2019 Knesset elections with a clear majority, coalition negotiations fell apart when Avigdor Lieberman, head of the secular rightist Yisrael Beytenu party, made demands regarding the conscription of ultra-Orthodox Jews (Ḥaredim) into the Israel Defense Forces that were unacceptable to the ultra-Orthodox and their parties. Israelis will go back to the polls in September, but the key conflicts surrounding the place of the Ḥaredim within Israeli society are not going away any time soon.

To examine these conflicts, we are joined this week on the Tikvah Podcast at Mosaic by Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer, editor of the influential journal Tzarikh Iyyun and one of the most important figures thinking about and helping to shape the future of ḥaredi politics and culture in Israel. Pfeffer discusses the complicated relationship between the ultra-Orthodox and the IDF, the shifting attitudes toward broader Israeli society among younger Ḥaredim, and whether the ḥaredi community needs to craft a new, non-exilic politics for life inside a thriving Jewish state.