The leaks from the police investigation, if corroborated, point to the sabotage of a critical national institution. If the judicial selection process proves to be infected by corrupt deals, and especially if the phenomenon turns out to be widespread, the possibility to rely on clear rules of the game and decision-making process in the conduct of our national debates will…

Israel is almost the only Western country that formally and institutionally provides its citizens with a long series of religious services, including kashrut supervision, ritual baths, burial, subsidies for Torah-based culture, spiritual counseling by local rabbis, religious marriage and divorce, conversion, and more. In all these domains, the State provides the funding and at the same time sets the standards…

If in the past, we tended to speak about tensions in Israeli society in terms of Arabs and Jews, religious and secular, or Right and Left, the findings of the Israel Democracy Institute’s 2018 Israeli Democracy Index, released last week reveal a major new split: the split over Israeli democracy. In today’s Israel, the fundamental question that defines the state—what…

Is American Jewry estranged from Israel? Recent novels by Krauss, Safran Foer, and Englander prove just the opposite Nathan Englander’s latest novel, Dinner at the Center of the Earth (2017) culminated in a romantic union. The lovers in the novel, an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Muslim, are forced to hold their assignation in an underground tunnel beneath the Gaza…

Beit Shemesh is a highly unlikely choice from the outset. It has been the scene of an intensive struggle for control of the public space, pitting the ultra-Orthodox against the town’s secular and religious Zionist residents. The conflict is not just a matter of ideology, but also of practice. Ugly and aggressive exclusion of women is common. Especially notorious are…

What complicates the relationship even more is that some of the religion-state arrangements and “deals” are not made on the national level, but rather–locally. And so, every mayor in the country can have a real impact not only on the public space in his or her own town but also on politics and this relationship at the national level. This…

Conference on Genomics – From Disease Prevention to Treatment, Population, Medicine and Society, Haifa, Technion and Clalit Health Fund, 2-5 Oct. 2018 During the first international conference on this subject, which took place in Haifa in 2016, I deplored the gap between the fast advancing genetic sciences and Jewish historiography. Historians should have discovered the human genome as a new…

Israel’s national clock is about to strike on the ‘Days of Awe’, a time of soul searching and reckoning. This is most clearly expressed in the classic confession – “We have been guilty, we have betrayed, we have robbed, we have slandered” – the main theme of the Yom Kippur service. The confession, a deliberate self-criticism, is based on two…