Interview: Ori Aronson on Religion and the Constitutional Crisis in Israel

Ori Aronson is an associate professor of law at the Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law, where he also serves as the deputy director of the Menomadin Center for Jewish and Democratic Law. He is a scholar of constitutional law and theory, courts and judicial decisionmaking. Much of his research concerns the institutional conditions of adjudication and the organization of legal power more broadly, with a focus on the ways legal systems accommodate, reflect, and challenge cultural and ideological difference. During the 2023–24 academic year Ori is a visiting scholar with the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies. Ori Aronson was interviewed by Dmytro Vovk.

This interview was recorded before the first law to limit the Israeli Supreme Court was adopted by the Knesset on 24 July 2023. The text has been lightly edited.

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The Radical Regime Transformation in Israel Marks the Start of an Intra-Jewish Religious War

Gila Stopler is Dean of the Law School and an associate professor of law at the College of Law & Business in Ramat Gan (Israel).

Introduction

Simcha Rothman, member of the Israeli Parliament (the Knesset) and chairman of the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, is working with Justice Minister Yariv Levin to change the Israeli regime by taking over the judiciary and removing checks on the executive branch and its leader. Rothman was quoted in closed conversations in April 2023 saying that Israel is at the start of a religious war and that he has no intention of withdrawing from passing the reform. Rothman’s statement reveals the deep divide in the Jewish-Israeli public regarding the status of religion in the country and religion’s centrality in the current national crisis as well as in the question of the nation’s continued shared existence. The intensity of the intra-Jewish religious rift and its effect on the state are surprising when considering the starting point, in the days of the establishment of the state, when the religious minority in the largely secular Jewish population was small and its political power so scant that Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion believed it would become extinct within a few years. [1]

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The Chained Wife Problem: Religious and Secular Perspectives

Dmytro Vovk is Director of the Centre for the Rule of Law and Religion Studies, Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and co-editor of Talk About: Law and Religion.

In January 2020, it was reported that a Jewish woman in London launched a private prosecution against her ex-husband who had refused to grant her a religious divorce, called a get. Though they were divorced under civil laws, the absence of a religious divorce chained the wife in her marriage and negatively affected her life in the community, primarily by preventing her from remarrying. The woman and her lawyers claimed that the husband’s behavior should be prosecuted under a 2015 law criminalizing “controlling and coercive behavior” as a form of domestic abuse. The threat of criminal conviction convinced the ex-husband to grant the woman the get, and she later revoked her action as a result. (more…)

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