The Haredi Research Group (HRG) took rise in the spring of 2021 in response to two related developments in 2020 within the Haredi community, initially in the United States: first, the crisis of and response to the COVID-19 pandemic; and second, the striking and seemingly sudden political transformation of the Haredi community into a pro-Trump voting bloc in the 2020 presidential election. These two features of the “Haredi moment” called for further attention–and for efforts at understanding the deeper roots of the responses.
We began by bringing together a group of U.S. based-historians, sociologists, and literature scholars but soon realized that the phenomena of interest to us were larger–and certainly required an Israeli perspective. Our team has now expanded to some 30 scholars (and a number of journalists) who are roughly divided between the US and Israel. Our research to date has been conducted in three pods–History-Culture, Qualitative Social Science, and Quantitative Sociology. We have produced our first research products in the form of long and short reports on the “Haredi Moment” of 2020. We imagine a number of offshoots of that report in the short-term (videos, podcasts, etc.), as well as many other long-term collaborative undertakings (including securing a significant multi-year grant). The HRG has attracted a number of institutional partners to support our work and is interested in adding more. If interested, please contact David Myers at myers@history.ucla.edu.