In the wake of an explosion of violence in Lod in May 2021, the city’s “Torah seed” group has come under increasing attention and criticism within and beyond Israel/Palestine. While this national-religious Israeli Jewish activist group has typically been analyzed in terms of political ideology, religious coercion, and gentrification, such frameworks elide the group’s emphasis on social uplift and integration as an ethical project rooted in an expansive hesed (charity, loving-kindness, volunteering, covenantal faithfulness). Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, in this paper I focus on a central aspect of the group’s hesed: “strengthening Jewish identity.” These efforts have been criticized as attempts at “Judaization” and “religionization.” However, rather than seeing such interventions as will to power masked by claims of ethicality, I take the group’s self-characterization seriously, but argue that such efforts act from a moral imagination that is nonetheless shaped by political inclinations, histories, and relations of power. I suggest that while the central role of national-religious publics in ongoing upheavals in Israel’s theopolitical landscape is often read in terms of political ideology, religious coercion, and histories of racism, adequate explanation of the diverse attachments driving these upheavals also requires sustained attention to the moral imagination.

The paper, to be read in advance of the workshop, is available here (password: hesed): Andrew Katzenstein Atwell – Resuscitating Torah – AJS 2023