Meet the young, secular Israelis flirting with religion

There’s a new play on at Beit Lessin Theatre in Tel Aviv called “Datilonim”, a combination of dati (religious) and chilonim (secular). It's a romantic comedy that follows a young secular couple, Dafna and Avichai, navigating the lead up to their wedding when the unimaginable happens: Avichai is propelled by an unrelenting, deep desire to turn religious.

"Would you say this is common?" I turn to my Israeli friend Amit*, while we wait for the split dati and chiloni crowd to take their seats.

"A lot more than you’d think," 25-year-old Amit, who is Jewish, non-binary and raised secular, replies. "I was seriously thinking about this exact trend this morning, I was thinking about how if all else fails, at least we’ll have our Judaism."

The traditional image of the secular Israeli is someone who rejects religion as the dregs of the shtetl. But since making aliyah a year ago, I have come across many secular Israelis like Amit, who are driven to fill in the blanks of their Jewish identity rather than erase it.

It’s hard to define today's generation of secular Israelis because the last reputable survey about religious observance in Israel was done almost a decade ago in 2016 by the Pew Research Centre. Most religious observance surveys – the most recent being pre-COVID in 2020 – only classify observance as Orthodox or secular, ignoring grey areas in which Jewish culture, spirituality and literature are being infused into the lives of many of Israel's secular Gen-Zs (those born after 1995).

Amit is interested in exploring Judaism in part to integrate their queer and Jewish identities, and to see if they can be compatible.