Israel is, on top of everything else, a gigantic open-air laboratory for experiments in Judaism and Jewish identity, mixing and matching old and new forms, deliberately and on the fly, with vision and no little improvisation. One of the more interesting recent specimens is Religiozionisticus Postreligious. Everyone, including the species itself, calls them datiyim l'she'avar, Religious Zionists (datiyim) who have left—or, more conveniently, Datlashim. Their numbers are growing.
Datlashim differ markedly from their counterparts leaving Orthodox Judaism, the ex-Haredim. The experiences of generations of these ex-Haredim have been described in a 2004 book by Sharit Barzilai titled Lifrotz Meah Shearim ("to break through a hundred gates"), a pun on Meah Shearim, the Haredi stronghold in Jerusalem. In the early decades of Israel's statehood, those who left Orthodoxy readily embraced new identities in a secular world that seemed politically and culturally triumphant. But in the 1960s and 1970s, Haredi society grew in numbers and self-confidence. By the 1980s and 1990s, Haredi ideology, institutions, and society became contenders, if not quite for cultural hegemony, then certainly for socio-cultural presence and institutional heft.
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