Conference Program

This paper analyzes how Jewish supremacy organizations, such as LEHAVA (Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land), mobilize and instrumentalize marginalized young Jewish men in Jerusalem as agents of nationalist activism. Drawing on the framework of caring literacy, the paper proposes a sociological reading of LEHAVA as an informal educational arena in which gender, nationalism, and demographic anxiety converge.

Operating within Israel’s far-right political landscape, LEHAVA seeks to prevent romantic relationships between Jewish women and Palestinian men, framing such relationships as existential threats to Jewish continuity and sovereignty. While commonly understood as a political extremist organization, this study conceptualizes LEHAVA as a site of gendered socialization that transforms socio-economic marginality into nationalist masculinity.

Through qualitative analysis of public discourse, media representations, organizational materials, and secondary scholarly literature, the paper explores how adolescents and young adults internalize and reproduce ethnonational narratives during critical stages of identity formation. In this process, vulnerability, precarity, and experiences of social exclusion are reframed as moral missions centered on protection, honor, and collective survival.

Within LEHAVA’s ideological framework, Jewish women, particularly from marginalized backgrounds, are symbolically constructed as bearers of demographic and cultural continuity. Simultaneously, Palestinian men are portrayed as demographic and moral threats, thereby reinforcing a binary logic of protection and danger. The regulation of female sexuality becomes central to nationalist masculinity, positioning young men as guardians of communal boundaries.

The paper argues that this mobilization functions as a form of informal pedagogy. Through protests, campaigns, digital media, and public performances, young men are socialized into a model of militant and protective masculinity grounded in notions of “family honor,” demographic anxiety, and religious-national redemption. Masculinity and nationalism thus become mutually reinforcing categories through which belonging, pride, and self-worth are constructed.

Importantly, the paper situates this process within broader tensions surrounding Jewish identity in contemporary Israel, particularly among marginalized youth seeking recognition and collective dignity in contexts marked by socio-economic inequality and cultural dislocation. LEHAVA’s appeal, therefore, cannot be understood solely in ideological terms but must also be examined as a response to unmet needs for affiliation, meaning, and esteem.

The paper concludes by asking how such movements can be critically addressed without reproducing the very dynamics of exclusion they mobilize. Drawing again on caring literacy, it suggests that alternative models of masculinity rooted in relational responsibility, empathy, and inclusive belonging—cultivated from early childhood—may offer a democratic counter-framework to nationalist extremism. By reframing masculine strength within the training of street counselors and youth workers—shifting emphasis from control and patriarchal protectionism toward care-based relational engagement—this approach opens new possibilities for rethinking masculinity, identity formation, and social cohesion in divided societies.