How does the secular state of Israel now perceive the Judaic tradition and culture that led to its creation?
Zionism was a secular movement, very specifically so, and most of the early Zionists were aggressively secular and anti-religious. They saw Zionism, or Jewish nationalism, as something different from the traditional Jewish religion, which they either ignored or positively rejected. To some extent the enthusiasm for Zionism among the Jewish Diaspora was a kind of surrogate nationalism, in that it allowed them to maintain Jewish identity while no longer being very involved in Judaism. This has led to great complications today, because although Israel is technically a secular state, Jewish identity is invariably connected with religion. Paradoxically, you have a secular state where the religious leaders determine who can live there. When Israel was created, did its leaders hope or expect that a wave of assimilated western Jews would move there? I’m not sure whether they really did believe that would happen, but what happened was this. David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel,
