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Notes -
Do you consider Israel culturally part of the West? Partially part of the West?
I've been thinking about this, and I think it's an interesting and not necessarily straight forwards question. I think secular Jews and those in the Reform tradition are undeniably Western; one of the core points of the Reform tradition was to integrate Judaism into Western Traditions and vice versa. The Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox I think are their own distinct, more ancient civilization. My answer to the above question is I think Israel is mostly Western, given the cultural roots of the Reform/Seculars, but not entirely.
Israel has a mix of cultures, but the overall direction is generally Western, yes. There's of course Judaic part of the culture, which predates what we call modern Western culture by a couple of millennia (of course, it did not stay static for all that time too), so there's that. Even secular Jews are influenced by it. Paradoxically, Reform Jews may be the least influenced here. A comparison I liked about this - it's like being a non-religious person in a Catholic country (say, Italy or Poland) vs being a Protestant. If the former case, you may not be an actively religious person but still you play by the Catholic culture rules, in the latter, it's a different (though related) culture. The culture that Reform trends towards the most is the liberal woke culture. I guess that's part of Western culture too, it can be argued?
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