Whose Israel? Jewish-Americans and the transnational battle for Jewish identity

In September 1999, on the eve of the Jewish New Year, members of the Reform and Conservative Jewish movements funded a public campaign on Israel's city billboards and in the Israeli media, calling on secular Israelis to experience their religious identity afresh. In a backlash against the monopoly and religious coercion of religious orthodoxy - which has led many Israelis to shed their religious identities even beyond their socialization to do so by secular Zionism - the campaign called upon Israelis to embrace religious pluralism under the slogan 'there is more than one way to be a Jew'. The campaign, financed by a grant from a Jewish family foundation in San Francisco, met with a harsh and somewhat violent response from the Israeli ultra-Orthodox sector. A leading ultra-Orthodox figure stated: 'If this situation continues, we will have a cultural war here, the likes of which we have not seen in a hundred years'.