We Must Make Them Modern Orthodox: State Religious Education in Israel and Its Attitude to Mizrahi Religiosity in the Nineteen Eighties

ABSTRACT The Israeli state-religious-education system (SRES) held an unfavorable view of Mizrahi religiosity in the 1980s. Text analyses of religious-education heads’ writings indicate that they saw Mizrahi religiosity as a primitive relic of the past and as a “low-level religiosity” and regarded Mizrahi students as uncommitted and compromising. The large numbers of Mizrahi students in the SRES and the “melting pot” ideology prevalent at the time led to a systemic view of Mizrahi students as “religiously disadvantaged”—that is, children whose religion was flawed but rectifiable, with the task of rectifying it entrusted to the system.