Israeli ‘secular’ identity is only definable negatively as not-religious.

Evidence

A focus on our (humanity’s) attitudes about tradition also sheds new light on the matter of Israeli Jews’ Jewish identity. Examining tradition exposes the negative and distorting influence of the “cleavage discourse,” which tends to view the binary distinction between “secular” and “religious” as the constitutive axis of Jewish identities in Israel. Take, for example, the “secular majority.” The positive meaning of its “secularity” is so enigmatic that the surveyors of the most comprehensive poll on Jewish beliefs, observance, and costumes among Israeli Jews replaced the label “secular” in their questionnaires with the negative designation “not religious” (Arian and Keissar-Sugarmen 2011; S. Levy, Levinsohn, and Katz 2002). — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 774

Categorization

• CANDY: Pollsters literally had to relabel Israeli ‘secular’ as ‘not religious’ because no positive secular content existed — a striking, self-contained fact.
• XREF: connects to: A secular majority depends on the religion it claims to resent. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 773; Secular ideology itself enables racial exclusion, not the religion it blames. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 690; The secular cannot be conceived without the category of religion. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 972 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• The secular cannot be conceived without the category of religion. #corroborates (0.85) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 972
• All-pervasive religion makes isolating the secular nearly impossible #complicates (0.75) — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 806