Word: secularized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...swampy field just beyond Werzansky's new home in suburban Pardess Hannah. Then one day came a different cacophony. Werzansky's new, ultra-Orthodox neighbors had set up a loudspeaker and were broadcasting sermons from a rented house they had turned into a synagogue. Infuriated, the community's secular majority retaliated, organizing a weekly Sabbath-night disco in the next house to outblast the worshippers. A fire bombing and a melee soon followed...
Such is the state of relations, generally, between religious and secular Israelis these days. As Israel celebrates its 50th anniversary, its citizens identify the rift over religion as their No. 1 problem. With the country well established and peace in the region a growing reality, Israelis are fighting among themselves as never before. "For 50 years, we had an external enemy who obliged us to lower the tenor of our internal tensions," says author A.B. Yehoshua. "But the external enemy doesn't unite us anymore...
...conflict is rooted in an old and unresolved question of national identity: Is Israel a Jewish state, with the emphasis on Jewish, or is it a state for the Jews, a regular, modern, democratic place where Jews are in the majority? Israel's Zionist founders were almost exclusively secular--in many respects, antireligious--and they saw Judaism principally as a nationality. But in deference to tradition, and as a way of securing the support of the Orthodox minority, they made certain concessions to religion: restricting commerce on the Jewish Sabbath, for instance, and leaving such matters as marriage and burial...
...cultural establishment by storm ("I am not English, I am Irish--which is quite another thing," he stipulated). And here's the coup de grace: reviled as the leading bad influences of their day, both the King of Rock and the King of the Epigram have been resurrected as secular saints, albeit with slightly different constituencies...
Ashrawi drew an ovation and loud applause fromPalestinians and Palestinian sympathizers in theaudience when she raised the possibility of thedeclaration of a "non-sectarian, secular,democratic Palestinian state" in the future...