Border Disputes: Religious Adjudication Along the Private-Public Nexus

Ori Aronson is an associate professor of law and the deputy director of the Menomadin Center for Jewish and Democratic Law at the Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law.

In 2017, Israel’s Supreme Court was asked to decide a peculiar question: could a state court tell a religious community to shun one of its members? The case involved a husband who refused to grant his wife a Jewish religious divorce, a gett. Under Orthodox Jewish law, without her husband’s consent the woman could not remarry or have children who would be recognized as legitimate. Israeli law, by giving exclusive jurisdiction over Jewish marriage and divorce to rabbinical courts, effectively entrenches this discriminatory rule. To mitigate its harshest consequences, state rabbinical courts have long been empowered to impose coercive civil sanctions, executed by the state’s enforcement apparatus: freezing assets, revoking drivers’ licenses, even jailing recalcitrant husbands. But these powers do not always work. In some ultra-Orthodox communities, social shame matters more than loss of liberty. So rabbinical judges began invoking traditional sanctions from medieval Jewish law—calling on neighbors to ostracize the stubborn husband until he relented.

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Muslim Law in Israel

Pablo Lerner is a professor of law at the Zefat Academic College and the College of Law and Business in Ramat-Gan (Israel).

Muslim law in Israel is only part of a broader issue: the status of Muslims as a minority in the Jewish state. In contrast to other non-Muslim-majority countries, in Israel, Muslims are a minority not as a consequence of immigration but as a result of the 1948 war. Since then, Muslims have struggled for recognition and to strengthen their collective identity in Israel. Accordingly, Muslim law (Sharia) has played an important role as a cultural and sociological aspect of their Muslim and Palestinian-Israeli identity. While this brief post cannot fully explore the complexity of the Muslim-minority issue, it does discuss the legal aspect and addresses several questions about the relationship between the Israeli legal system and Muslim law.

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Torah, War, Politics, and the Supreme Court: The 2024 Military Service of Ultra-Orthodox Yeshiva Students Bill

Moshe Jaffe is a constitutional law adjunct professor at the Academic Center of Law and Science in Israel and an adjunct professor at Cardozo School of Law.

Introduction

The tragic events of 7 October and the subsequent war in Gaza have reignited longstanding tension in Israel regarding the drafting of Ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students. This issue has been impacted as well by recent rulings of the Israeli Supreme Court, which have brought the matter back into public debate. This post aims to simplify this extremely complex issue and guide the reader through developments leading to the recent bill currently being considered by the Knesset. Given the brevity of this post, its focus is on recent developments and specifically on the 2024 bill rather than a comprehensive historical review.

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