"Maybe if we met under different circumstances." The Impact of Religion on Dating Patterns of Secular Israeli Jews
Abstract
The paper focuses on the construction of ethno-religious identity with questions of relationship preferences and dating patterns among secular Israeli Jews.
By placing matters of personal status and family affairs under the jurisdiction of the rabbinical courts in Israel, which is defined as the nation-state of the Jewish people by law, each person is born into a legal category with specific rights and obligations on both the civil and religious levels. The ethno-religious construction of Jewish identity thus operates not only on a symbolic level, but also has very concrete implications and practical consequences for the lives of its subjects.
Relational patterns and preferences may thus represent certain latent meta-narratives linked to questions of belonging and the preservation of collective identity and nationhood.
The paper discusses preliminary findings obtained from in-depth interviews with secular Israeli Jews as a part of the author's dissertation thesis.
The contribution of the paper is the opening of a new topic in the field of Israel studies, which, however, is based on the post-secular paradigm, which has long been addressed in the works of Yaacov Yadgar and Hagar Lahav, for example.