Even before Israel existed, its founders dreamed of what an Israeli should be: a Jew who was bronzed from the sun, muscled from working the fields, and ready to defend themself against everything from mosquitoes to raiders.
The New Jew would be fearless because there would be nothing to fear. They would speak their ancestral language, work their ancestral lands, and build a Jewish utopia, where their children would grow up safe and free.
It’s easy to imagine the brawny Jew living in the land of milk and honey, but dreaming is one thing, reality is another.
After nearly a century of cold, hard reality: Do the Israelis of today resemble the ones Israel’s founders imagined?
Israel is home to 10 million people, which means it’s home to 10 million complicated, intricate stories.
Whether Jewish or Arab, recent immigrants or 20th-generation, no Israeli fits neatly in a box. Spend enough time in Israel, though, and you’ll start to pick up trends, especially among Israeli Jews.
After enough time, you’ll start to slot people into categories, trying to understand how a nation of refugees and Holocaust survivors transformed into what we see today: A tiny, diverse, fractious country crowded with tech bros and farmers, scholars and hippies, pious folks in religious garb and secular guys with gold chains around their necks and cigarettes hanging casually from the corners of their mouths.
From the outside, this is a nation of people with very little in common, a mix of everything from ultra-Orthodox Haredim, atheists, LGBTQ+ activists, and everything in between.
It’s safe to say that this isn’t exactly what the founders of Israel envisioned, after all, they were building a society that didn’t exist yet; there was so much they couldn’t foresee. They knew that this new country would be a hub for Jews from all over the world, that the religious and secular would live side by side, despite their competing visions of Judaism, and that they had to create a new national culture that united 2,000 years of diaspora traditions.
No one could have predicted the chaotic, vibrant, multilayered mish-mash that resulted when avowed atheists collided with people of faith, or when Jews from across the diaspora began to mingle and marry, producing new families with unlikely combinations of cultures and customs.
Israel’s founders didn’t know what they didn’t know. Yet, they hoped that no matter who these future Israelis turned out to be, they’d unite around a sense of shared destiny.
It took some time to get there, but nearly 80 years into this hectic Israeli experiment, we’ve definitely got a distinct culture. With that culture comes all the fun and ridiculous stereotypes that we both mock and embrace.
For Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur, Israelis are “loud and Israelis are tribal. Stereotypes of Israelis, I think, are those that they’re loud, that they’re cliquish, and it’s fun, it’s part of the fun of being Israeli.”
It is often fun to be Israeli. We’ve got thousands of years of Jewish culture to draw on, and we’re masters of turning everything into a punch line – even our intergenerational trauma.
It took time for us to develop these kinds of tongue-in-cheek inside jokes, though. In its first five years as a country, Israel more than doubled its population, absorbing wave after wave of Jewish refugees from across the world. Every subsequent wave transformed Israeli culture.
The country’s founders were well aware that neighboring countries had no interest in sharing a border with a Jewish state. Still, few predicted that the Muslim world would soon expel hundreds of thousands of its Jews, many of them stripped of their assets and sent packing with only the clothes on their backs. No one predicted that these refugees would upend Israel’s character.
Israel’s founders had envisioned a European-style socialist utopia, full of high-minded secularists who worked the fields by day and read Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy by night. They hadn’t counted on other types of Jews with their own ideas of what it meant to be Jewish.
As the wide-ranging Jewish diaspora finally came home, East smashed headlong into West, and the results weren’t always pretty.
Up until the 1970s, most immigrants to Israel came from Arab and Muslim countries. These Jews became known as Mizrahim. Literally, “easterners.” This label set up a false binary between the Jews of the East, who were seen as backwards and primitive, and the Jews of the West, who were considered cultured and enlightened.
Many Mizrahim looked and sounded like their Arab neighbors. In early Israel, Arabs were the enemy, and that put Mizrahi Jews in a strange and contradictory position. They were too Jewish for their Arab neighbors, and too Arab for Israeli Jews.
Depending on who you ask, that trauma still stings. Yet, despite these early traumas, both Ashkenazim and Mizrahim poke fun at their own stereotypes – and at each other. The stereotypes are silly, but they crop up again and again. They go something like this: Mizrahim are associated with joy, good food and music, and celebrations. Ashkenazim, in contrast, are humorless and uptight, with a strong sense of propriety and an uninspiring cuisine.
Seventy years ago, these stereotypes might have carried real resentment. Some older folks, who experienced discrimination firsthand, still feel angry about the way they were treated during Israel’s early years. But for young people today, ethnic stereotypes are just another thing to laugh about – even to celebrate. Everyone agrees, if you want to celebrate, you gotta learn from the Mizrahi community.
Over the years, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi cultures softened into each other, creating something new and uniquely Israeli. Today, Israeli culture is firmly and proudly rooted in the Middle East. In fact, in 2014, a popular Mizrahi singer released a song called “This Ain’t Europe,” which pokes fun at Israelis’ desire to be “worldly” and “Western.” The song ends by reminding Israelis, “You’re not from London or Amsterdam.” No matter where you go, you can’t escape your Israeli-ness. Israeli identity is itself a mashup of East and West, conservative and liberal, religious and secular.
“We used to say that there’s the Eastern Jews and then there’s the Ashkenazi and the Western Jews or the European Jews,” Rettig Gur explained. “But so many now are the product of intermarriage that you know a very significant percentage of Mizrahi Jews have an Ashkenazi parent and a very significant percentage of and vice versa.”
“My son’s best friend has a father who is half Tunisian, half Turkish, and a mother who is Russian Ashkenazi, so what the heck is that kid? The answer is, he’s just Yonatan, is what he is. So that mashing together of those identities, I think, created a much more unified sense of Israeliness, even as political polarization has risen,” Rettig Gur added.
For some people, this Israeli-ness is all that matters. So when asked to identify their ethnic background, they look at you like you’re an alien.
In fact, the more people we’ve talked to, the more we’ve heard some variant of this. Despite deep and abiding disagreements, outside pressure seems to have brought Israelis much closer to one another than before, changing their sense of who they are.
The Middle East is famous for its warmth and hospitality, and in this regard, Israelis are exactly like all their other neighbors.
For a country that takes up all the headlines, Israel is surprisingly tiny, which makes its culture clashes all the more pronounced. It’s an exaggeration to say that everyone knows everyone, but everyone is connected in some way – like six degrees of Kevin Bacon, hold the bacon. That’s one reason that Israelis, like other Mediterranean people, have a reputation for being so involved in one another’s lives.
It’s not just our social lives we yell about. We yell about everything. Including what we want our country to look like. You’ve heard the expression “two Jews, three opinions.” Well, there are over 7 million Jews in Israel, and our opinions are all over the place. Especially when it comes to our shared religion.
Not everyone agrees on what life in the Holy Land should look like. Although religious and secular might share the same spaces and speak the same language, they may as well live in different countries.
For many Haredi Jews, to be an Israeli is to live in the land of Israel; that’s it. It’s not about a fusion of East and West, of left and right, of religious and secular. For much of the Haredi community, Israeliness is only meaningful if it’s part and parcel of a religious Jewish identity.
That creates some real tensions, because of course, 20% of Israel isn’t Jewish, and those that are might not be religious in the least. Even the most secular Israelis can’t really escape religion, though, and often don’t want to. It’s everywhere, permeating the culture in ways that are both subtle and obvious.
Israel’s founders might not have used the word whatever, but in fact, this was their whole ethos.
It sometimes surprises people to learn that Israel’s founders were mostly non-religious, and in some cases, actively hostile to religion. They made a distinction between being culturally Jewish, observing Jewish law, or having faith in a Jewish God. For them, the Bible was a cultural and historical artifact, not the word of God. Although that didn’t stop Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, from using Biblical quotes to win arguments with his religious counterparts in the Israeli parliament. An avowed secularist, using the Bible as a trump card: so petty, so Israeli.
In Israel, “secular” doesn’t always mean… secular. That’s because in Israel, and in much of the Middle East, the lines between culture and faith are easily muddled. You might have Shabbat dinner with your family, and then go hit the club, without seeing any contradiction between the two.
Most Israelis fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between strict observance of Jewish law and total disconnection from religion. That’s because Israel is a Jewish state – no matter what form your Judaism takes. For many, their Judaism is inextricable from their love of the country.
When Israeli pop superstar Omer Adam was asked to name “the most Israeli thing he could think of,” he answered tefillin – those little black boxes that Jewish men use to pray. That blend of Jewish ritual and Hebrew pop culture has come to define the Israeli mainstream. Adam sings about romantic love and the party culture of Tel Aviv and Dubai – not exactly religious themes, but in Israel, you don’t have to be traditionally observant to be… traditional.
Of course, for some Israelis, traditional observance is part and parcel of Israeli-ness – a seamless marriage of religious and national identity. These Israelis are known as dati’im le’umi’im – National Religious. It sounds better in Hebrew.
In some ways, Israel’s national-religious community sees itself as modern Israelites, continuing the legacy of our Biblical ancestors. The prophet Ezekiel foretold a community that would come alive from “dry bones.” And for many, many Israelis – not just the religious ones – this prophecy resonates across the generations. For centuries, we were scattered all over the world. We shared a religion and an identity, but not a national culture.
And then, we came back home. And we built that culture together.
There are so many things about this fractious, beautiful society that its founders could not have imagined. And there are so many things that we don’t really understand about what it was like to build a country from scratch. To create a haven, to bring together a scattered people. But from a gulf of nearly 80 years, there are a few things we know for sure.
We may not all look like the brawny, muscular New Jew that our founders envisioned. We may not be secular socialists, like they were. And we may not agree with each other on much, except for one thing: We are lucky, despite the uncertainty and chaos, despite the bloodshed, and despite the rancor that sometimes splits us apart.
We are lucky because we live in the land of our ancestors. We are lucky because we get to come together, all of us, from different backgrounds but with the same ancient roots, and create a new society in a very old land.
So who are the Israelis?
They’re a hectic mash-up of Eastern and Western, old-world tradition and cutting-edge modernity, a collectivist society with a stubborn individualist streak. A society where everyone is in each other’s businesses.
Like brothers and sisters, we might not always get along, but like brothers and sisters, we are there for one another, no matter what, because who are the Israelis? We’re the loudest, most tribal, most dramatic family you can imagine. Each of us is woven together. Each of us connected by the ancient tether of history… and by the endless possibilities of our shared future.
