Last week, university students in Israel once again took to the streets in protest; setting tires ablaze near the Hebrew University campus, snarling traffic by releasing live chickens outside Prime Minister Netanyahu's home and blocking streets at a Tel Aviv rally that left a dozen briefly behind bars. Fueling the protests were standard-issue complaints about politics and money, alongside more exotic complaints about, for instance, whether Israeli kids should be forced to learn math and science. And it was because of this last thing -- the grade school and high school curriculum -- that student leaders described their protests as a struggle for no less than the survival of the country itself.
The objects of the students' rage were Haredim, ultra-orthodox Jews, who in the last six months have achieved two major political victories that have cast them as antagonists of the country's undergrads. The first came during the summer, when the Knesset voted to continue funding ultra-orthodox schools that refuse to teach the country's mandatory core curriculum of math, science, civics and gym. The second came earlier this month, when the government agreed to continue funding monthly stipends for the 11,000 ultra-orthodox men who choose to study Torah instead of working. Taken together, the two decisions convinced university students, most of whom are secular, that the country was slinking away from the enlightened rationality of science towards the dark folds of fundamentalist religion. Which is how a dispute of money -- who should get limited government fellowships, those studying Talmud or those studying physics -- became enmeshed with a dispute about teaching science in grade school and high school.
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