Religion, war and Israel’s secular millennials: Being reasonable?

Abstract

Stacey Gutkowski, secularism, religion, and conflict studies, closely investigates the perceptions of Israel’s non-religious Jews. She studies Israel’s particular secular identity group, ‘ hiloni ’ Israelis (plural: hilonim ), through in-depth interviews largely with those in the millennial generation, born between 1980 and 1995 inclusive (51). In a society increasingly saturated with nationalist discourse and ethnic imperatives, Gutkowski argues that hiloni millennials are influenced by that discourse but also by a strong sense of pragmatism, personal experience, and a preference for socioeconomic success even at the expense of avoiding the elephant in the room, the Israeli occupation of Palestinians and their land. The book is an engaging extension to the non-religious realm of the many studies that evaluate religious people in the context of violent, nationalist struggles. Furthermore, in prior scholarship the usual understanding of the secular – as in both the general concept and the people who consider themselves as such – is grounded in western and Protestant settings. Gutkowski, however, asks a related but different question: What might the secular (or secular-ism) not rooted in Protestantism look like? Thus, the case selection is focused on Jewish people in Israel. She the right-wing, nationalist, militaristic, and/or religious on Israeli the air national is pervasive’