Israel is one of the few countries in the world where a person’s religious, communal, or political affiliation can often be identified in the public sphere at a glance, solely from clothing and other outward markers. Among the Jewish population, this phenomenon is particularly conspicuous within the ultra-Orthodox community, where each faction adheres meticulously to its own distinctive dress code. Yet the phenomenon extends far beyond the Haredi world. When Israel’s Arab citizens are also taken into account, the scale of the phenomenon becomes even more striking: large segments of Israeli society live side by side, but rarely together. One might even speak of a distinctive form of social segmentation, unlike that found elsewhere in the developed world, in which communal, religious, political, and national identities are publicly and conspicuously displayed.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews, religious Zionists, settlers, and Arab citizens of Israel do not generally live together, as is common in most developed democracies regardless of socio-economic status. They reside in separate neighborhoods, attend different educational institutions, fulfill different forms of service—or no service at all—to the state, rarely share meals, seldom work in the same environments, and only exceptionally enter into intermarriage. It is difficult to identify another developed country in which social fragmentation has become so deeply institutionalized. It would, of course, be easy to assign responsibility for this situation to one particular group. In reality, however, many of these mechanisms of separation are the result of government policies implemented over decades in response to the electoral imperatives of parliamentary coalition politics.

Among these identity markers, religious symbols now occupy an increasingly prominent place in the public sphere. This raises a fundamental question: are these symbols still connected to their original meaning, or have they become primarily markers of religious, communal, political, or cultural affiliation? Do they still express faith, values, or a worldview, or have they been reduced to........

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