Traditional, modern or postmodern?

recent religious developments among Jews in Israel

Stephen Sharot

pp. 118-133

in: Kieran Flanagan, Peter C. Jupp (eds), Postmodernity, sociology and religion, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

Many social scientists believe that the nature and magnitude of the economic, political and cultural changes that Western societies have undergone over the last two to three decades justify the use of the term "postmodern society". Although the depictions of the characteristics of postmodern society are by no means uniform, there does appear to be a fair consensus that the characteristics of postmodern society began to display themselves during the late 1960s and early 1970s. David Harvey pinpoints 1973 as a benchmark year: it was the year when the long postwar boom came to an end, and since then there has been a transition in capitalism ("from Fordism to flexible accumulation"), an intense phase of time-space compression, and considerable changes involving uncertainty and disruption in political and cultural life.¹ For Israel, 1973 was the year of the October or Yom Kippur War, a war that ended the feelings of confidence and optimism that characterised the Israeli-Jewish population after the Six Day War in 1967.

Cited authors

Harvey David