The Mass Yeshiva Revolution and the Formation of Orthodox Robust Countercultures

Abstract

This article contributes to the theorization of Orthodoxies as robust countercultures. Under secular conditions that no longer guarantee communal life, Orthodox projects turn to technologies of subject formation that center on the enculturation of the individual (rather than the community), cultivating a counter-habitus that enables him to inhabit a secular environment while countering it. I develop this theorization by conceptualizing the mid-twentieth-century “mass yeshiva” revolution. These mass institutions—marked by the unprecedented expectation that every young Orthodox spend years studying in yeshiva—are read not as schools in the conventional sense but as a technology that produces, shapes, and empowers hyper-committed Orthodox selves. The article advances a historical-theoretical argument that whenever an Orthodoxy establishes itself as a robust countercultural project vis-à-vis its surroundings, it requires technologies such as the mass yeshiva that can form counter-subjects. This argument clarifies why mass yeshivas were adopted with the consolidation of normative Haredism in the 1950s and within the Religious Zionist settlement project of the 1970s.