Offers a pedagogical and sociological analysis of Shoah education in Israeli state schools. It explores issues such as materials and methods, beliefs and attitudes, messages imparted, pedagogical challenges, and implications for national and religious identity and universal values.

Acknowledgments 8 Introduction 9 Chapter 1. The New Religious-Zionist Halakhah: A Conceptual Outline 18 Chapter 2. The Shift in the Discourse: Autarchic Male Sexuality 26 Mapping Reactions 34 The Pastoral Discourse 52 A Haredi Alternative 70 Chapter 3. The Shift in the Discourse: Autarchic Female Sexuality 78 Female Sexuality: Masturbation and Lesbianism 79 Mapping Reactions 85 The Effects of the Value Discourse on Halakhic Rulings 93 Chapter 4. Real and Imagined Women 120 Defining Women 123 The Conflict Discourse 135 Excluding Real Women 166 The Female Refusal 180 On Female Sexuality 183 Chapter 5. The Other Voice 193 Attitudes toward Homosexuality and Lesbianism in the New Discourse 194 The Haredi Responsum 200 The Religious Protest 206 Looking Back 214 Chapter 6. Concluding Reflections: From a Realist Disposition to an Imagined Realm 231 Appendix. The Discourse on Sexuality, Metaphysics, and Messianism 243 Bibliography 276 Index 293

This book analyzes the new religious-Zionist discourse about the body and sexuality, and the term “new” refers to the period it covers—the first decade of the twenty-first century. Even a cursory glance reveals that this decade does indeed open up a new era, not only because of the new political questions it considers—withdrawal from the occupied territories, the religion and state relationship, and more—but also, and mainly, because it deals with many questions that had been excluded from the classic religious-Zionist discourse. We have chosen to grapple with the most distinct expression of this shift—the discourse about the body and sexuality.

Dealing with change has been a persistent feature in the history of religious-Zionism from its earliest days. As a modern movement, religious-Zionism participated in the developments affecting the modern Zionist world. But the pace of its relationship with these developments has at times been slow and contingent on its capacity, as a religious movement, to digest and internalize changes, and on the unique voice that emerges in the encounter between religion and modernity. Hence, a discourse that had long been commonplace in secular Jewish-Israeli society often enters religious-Zionist society at a later stage. . . .