Who is a Jew? Categories, Boundaries, Communities and Citizenship Law in Israel

Boundaries of Jewish Identity Edited by S US AN A . G L ENN and NAO MI B. S O KO L O F F A Samuel and Althea Stroum Book U nive r sity o f Wa sh ingto n P r e ss Seattle & London This book is published with the assistance of a grant from the Samuel & Althea Stroum Endowed Book Fund. Additional support is provided by the Samuel & Althea Stroum Jewish Studies Program, The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. © 2010 by the University of Washington Press Printed in the United States of America Designed by Veronica Seyd Typeset in Joanna and Gill 15 14 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. University of Washington Press P.O. Box 50096, Seattle, WA 98145 U.S.A. www.washington.edu/uwpress Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at the end of the book. The paper used in this publication is acid-free and recycled from at least 30 percent post-consumer waste. It meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Chapter 1, by Susan Martha Kahn, originated as the Fifteenth Annual David W. Belin Endowed Lecture in American Jewish Affairs at the University of Michigan, March 2005. Distributed by the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, University of Michigan, it is reprinted here with permission of the Center. An earlier version of chapter 8, by Erica Lehrer, appeared in Imaginary Neighbors: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust, edited by Dorota Glowacka and Joanna Zylinska (University of Nebraska Press, 2007). It is reprinted with permission of the publisher. Chapter 9, by Jonathan Freedman, is drawn from his book Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2008), chap. 5. It is reprinted with permission of the publisher. Contents acknowledgments vii Introduction: Who and What Is Jewish? 3 Controversies and Comparative Perspectives on the Boundaries of Jewish identity s Us a n a. gLe nn and n aoM i B. s oKoLof f 1. Are Genes Jewish? 12 Conceptual ambiguities in the new genetic age s Us a n M a rth a Ka h n 2. Who Is a Jew? 27 Categories, Boundaries, Communities, and Citizenship Law in israel g a D Ba rZiLa i 3. Jewish Character? 43 stereotype and identity in fiction from israel by aharon appelfeld and sayed Kashua naoM i B. soKoLof f 4. “Funny, You Don’t Look Jewish” 64 visual stereotypes and the Making of Modern Jewish identity s Us a n a . g Le nn 5. Blame, Boundaries, and Birthrights 91 Jewish intermarriage in Midcentury america LiLa CorWin B e rM a n v vi Contents 6. Boundary Maintenance and Jewish Identity 110 Comparative and historical Perspectives Ca Lvin goLDs C h e iDe r 7. Good Bad Jews 132 Converts, Conversion, and Boundary redrawing in Modern russian Jewry, notes toward a new Category sh ULa M it s . M agn Us 8. “Jewish Like an Adjective” 161 Confronting Jewish identities in Contemporary Poland e riCa Le h re r 9. Conversos, Marranos, and Crypto-Latinos 188 the Jewish Question in the american southwest (and What it Can tell Us about race and ethnicity) Jonath a n f re e DM a n 10. The Contested Logics of Jewish Identity 203 La a Da B iLa niUK Bibliography 216 Contributors 233 index 237 2 Who Is a Jew? Categories, Boundaries, Communities, and Citizenship Law in israel g a D Ba r Z i La i Sociopolitical categories construct, shape, and reproduce identities in compound ways. In deining who is in and who is outside a group, different communities may use various categories contingent on speciic needs, expectations, interests, and visions of the “good” society and the desirable state. Similarly, any attempt to comprehend citizenship as an exclusively legalistic issue resulting in rights and duties may miss opportunities to look further into state-society relationships and various sociopolitical aspects of citizenship. Citizenship itself, what it grants and what it entails, may be constructed through sociopolitical categories that differently conceptualize the meaning of state-society relations for individuals and communities. The case of Israel represents an example of the gap between oficial legal entitlements and social arrangements that transgress the boundaries of identity laid out by the state. In this essay I explore several dimensions of citizenship law that tend to contradict the compound structure of Jewish identities. I examine this conlict in the context of struggles among and between various social groups that are wrestling with the deinitions and practices of citizenship while also marking the boundaries with one another, among their own members, and between themselves and the state. Concretely and empirically, I base my analysis here on research I have conducted among Jewish and Palestinian communities in Israel. The main purpose of these studies has been to analyze the convergence and divergence of the lived experience of identities, legal consciousness, social being, and state policies and ideologies. In other words, I am 27 28 ga D Ba rZiLa i interested in the ways that debates over seemingly legalistic issues are in essence conlicts over sociopolitical boundaries and power. This is a project aimed at unveiling, deconstructing, and in turn theorizing the political interests that propel legal categorizations in identity politics. Debates about identities, including the contentious question of “who is a Jew” revolve around more than religious and cultural practices; they are constructions that emerge from complex, in-depth realities, especially where communities have tended to impose sociopolitical boundaries. Accordingly, while most studies have related to the issue of “who is a Jew” as a given dilemma, an autonomous ontology with legalistic and political ramiications, my research attempts to move in another direction. It argues that “who is a Jew” is not a static question or a ixed dilemma but rather a dynamic construction of political interests amid struggles of communities over political power. Thus the issue of “who is a Jew” is not an autonomous problem waiting to be politically and legally resolved but rather a social language that serves the political purposes of social engineering. This essay explains how the tendency to assign categories of identity has shaped and reproduced, and also challenged and reformed, sociopolitical boundaries between communities. My argument is not intended to suggest that Judaism does not have an authentic history. Nor am I implying that Jews are not distinct from other religious peoples. My point is that in Israel, the question of “who is a Jew” is as much about power as it is about religion. The communities in question are nomos groups, meaning groups that are in conlict regarding the desirable vision and practices of the “good” society.1 Accordingly, various communities in Israel have never approached the issue of “who is a Jew” in an attempt to ind an intersubjective solution to this dilemma in ways that may engender public consensus. Rather, those communities have sought to monopolize the public debate on who is a Jew to colonize it, even to manipulate it, for purposes of social engineering and political control. In the following section I consider state law in the context of public discourse on “who is a Jew.” Then, the essay moves to examine intercommunal interactions before reaching some general conclusions. Who Is a Jew? 29 the republican/state Dimension Zionism, as an aggregate of various Jewish national aspirations, has not clearly differentiated Jewish ethnicity from religion or from nationality. Consequently, public contentions over the issue “who is a Jew” have been paramount for allocations of citizenship rights in Israel since the formal inception of the state in 1948. One of the major national projects was to entrench Jewish domination in the state, preventing the possibility of its territory being settled by an Arab Palestinian majority. Based on the Law of Return (1950) and the Citizenship Law (1952), deining someone as a Jew would automatically grant him or her Israeli citizenship. Conversely, non-Jewish immigrants to Israel would be subjected to separate criteria for being admitted to or denied Israeli citizenship. These two laws were more important in Israel than any other piece of legislation, including the Basic Laws, since they were supposed to entrench Jewishness as the main political force in state ideology, legal ideology, and public policy. However, various communities have long been in conlict with one another over the “objective” criteria deining who is a Jew. Thus categorization of Jewishness has become a political means to construct formal afiliations with nationality in Israel. Control over decisions regarding the applicability of the category “Jew” has relected and entailed the shifting dynamics of political power. This explains why partisan conlicts over the political power to categorize Jewish afiliations have even caused severe coalition crises such that Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox political parties have threatened to bring down governments if their demands are not accepted. Commitments to maintain the secular-religious status quo have often been entrenched in coalition agreements between the secular ruling elite and the religious parties. Until the 1990s and under the inluence of religious political parties—mainly the National [Zionist] Religious Party (NRP) and the ultra-Orthodox parties Agudath Yisrael and, later, Shas—the Israeli governments had imposed an objective criterion to deine who is a Jew. The state required oficial authorities (namely, the Ministry of the Interior) to check that the Jewishness of any particular individual, both as nationality and as a religion, could be proved through genetic afiliation (namely, a Jewish mother) and appropriate docu- 30 ga D Ba rZiLa i mentation from Orthodox authorities. This issue was debated in two salient court rulings in the 1960s. In the Rufeisen case, the High Court of Justice (HCJ) ruled that one’s Jewishness for purposes of nationality and citizenship in the Law of Return should be decided based on objective criteria, in particular, on the ability to provide external evidence to support one’s subjective declarations about one’s religiosity and nationality. Later, in the Shalit case, the HCJ decided that one’s declaration about one’s subjective feelings regarding one’s religious and national afiliation is suficient for determining who is a Jew for purposes of the Law of Return and granting Israeli nationality and citizenship.2 However, that ruling has not been adopted as part of Israeli legislation. That is because in 1970 the Law of Return was amended as a result of severe pressures by the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox political parties that enabled Orthodox objective criteria to be used to decide Israeli nationality and citizenship. Because of the lack of institutional separation of religion, state, and nationality, this narrow categorization of nationality and religion has monopolized the Israeli political setting.3 Thus religious conversions were not recognized unless Orthodox procedures were followed, as proved through formal Orthodox certiicates. Conservative and Reform conversions, whether in Israel or overseas, were not recognized by state law as valid for purposes of registration in Israel. The reliance of governmental coalitions on the political power of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox political parties had made the objective criterion into the practical reality. The “status quo” in state-religious relationships in Israel was embedded in coalition agreements, and it prevented any alterations or reforms. Thus the scope of citizenship was established in the context of struggles over political power, and in turn it affected the meaning of various afiliations to Judaism. The Orthodox political monopoly on deinitions and constructions of citizenship has recently been challenged by non-Orthodox Jews, empowered through a signiicant wave of Soviet immigrants arriving in Israel in the 1990s. Relatively few among these immigrants had established ties to Jewish institutions. Furthermore, estimates are that about 120,000 among the 800,000 Soviet immigrants to Israel in the early 1990s were not considered “Jewish” by Orthodox and ultraOrthodox authorities and had no formal ties to the Jewish community.4 Who Is a Jew? 31 Nevertheless, Soviet immigrants became active in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that have challenged the Israeli establishment, calling for more inclusiveness in the Israeli deinitions of citizenship and asking for privatization of religion. In 1995 the Orthodox establishment received another challenge when the Israeli Supreme Court, led by a secular elite of justices, adopted the “subjective” criterion, which obliges the government to recognize non-Orthodox religious conversions, including Reform conversions overseas, and, accordingly, to register anyone who declares himself or herself to be “Jewish” as a Jewish resident. In 2002 the Supreme Court broadened its policy also to include recognition of Reform conversions that were conducted in Israel.5 The Supreme Court insisted that the objective criterion was no longer considered at this stage to be the only necessary condition for recognizing Jewishness for purposes of registration of residency in Israel. Once the boundaries of the political setting were reformed and enlarged, new and more inclusive categorizations of religion and nationality were adopted. Consequently, state bureaucracy has had control over who can claim to be a Jew for the purpose of residency in Israel. In this context, afiliation to Judaism is based on the declaration of the immigrant about his or her religion. However, Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox religious communities, and their establishment, have political control over objective criteria that deine one’s religion for purposes of deining nationality based on the Law of Return. This division of political power between registration for the purpose of residence and construction of nationality has produced a hybrid of practical deinitions of who is a Jew, a problem that was not predicted by Zionism. One has to be an “objective” Jew to gain Israeli nationality and a “subjective” Jew to be registered as a resident. Paradoxically, those who feel Jewish may not gain Israeli nationality, if they are lacking objective genetic or Orthodox proofs of being Jewish. Consequently, the Zionist state has excluded some Jews from becoming Israelis (e.g., Jews who were converted to Christianity but want to live in Israel) and excluded some Israelis from being recognized as Jews (e.g., non-Jews who were converted to Judaism in non-Orthodox procedures or those who cannot prove afiliation with Judaism). In the next section, I analyze struggles between nonruling com- 32 ga D Ba rZiLa i munities over state law. I designate this dimension of my analysis as the “horizontal dimension,” since it enables us to comprehend how debates and conlicts over Jewish identities have marked and molded boundaries between various nonruling communities. the horizontal Dimension—Conversions and Who is not Jewish Constructing who is Jewish has been a sociopolitical legal means to mark boundaries between various communities in ways that discipline community members. Hence the debates on the issue have had intracommunal as well as intercommunal signiicance. Quite obviously, the narrower the deinition of “who is a Jew,” the more gated the community becomes. Conversely, the more inclusive the deinition gets, the larger, and less gated, the community becomes. The example of the Canaanites provides one extreme of the secular spectrum and shows how far some deinitions of Israeliness stray from those held by the Orthodox. For the Canaanite movement, the single criterion for granting Israeli citizenship was understood as territorial.6 Namely, since there is no “Jewish nation,” only “a Hebrew/Canaanite nation” based on the histories of ancient Canaan (about 2000 BC), anyone who lives in the “Canaanite” territory is an Israeli, regardless of his or her religion and degree of religiosity. Furthermore, according to the Canaanites any national symbols should be stripped of religious signiicance, since the distinction between religion and (territorial) nationality is an imperative.7 However, the dilemma about what constitutes Jewish identity has not only divided national secularists from religious communities but has also constructed boundaries between religious communities. According to the Reform movement in Israel (known as the Movement for Progressive Judaism in Israel), the dilemma should be solved based on the subjective criterion, while according to the Orthodox, the objective criteria should apply. The former emphasizes the individual’s desires to deine his or her religion and communal afiliations, while the latter underscores stricter criteria of genetic afiliations and highly demanding criteria of religious conversions. Thus the platform of the Reform movement in Israel states: “Progressive Judaism accepts with greetings those who would like to join the collective of Israel Who Is a Jew? 33 and its religion in a genuine and sincere manner. The conversion that is done by our rabbis is a compound process, with religious, cultural, and educational meanings, which combines the demands of the halakha and the reality of life of the Jewish people nowadays.”8 Furthermore, ultra-Orthodox communities have demanded communal afiliations of membership as the ultimate guideline for being considered Jewish. Accordingly, various ultra-Orthodox congregations are willing to admit the halakhic validity of conversions only if very strict ultra-Orthodox religious procedures are applied—much stricter procedures than those required by the Orthodox political establishment. These communities are not interested in nationality; rather, they wish to maintain Judaism as a highly gated collectivity, based on a very restrictive set of criteria for who is a Jew. Such restrictive, objective criteria limit access for potential members from other communities, thus reinforcing the homogeneity of Israeli Judaism. Using the problem of identity as a sociopolitical tool of control has resulted in an additional ironic paradox: non-Zionist religious communities have demanded stricter criteria for granting Israeli nationality than have Zionist communities. Paradoxically, while Zionism has aspired to construct national sovereignty and a uniied national citizenship across a deined territory, it has inadvertently generated in practice a multiplicity of citizenships. This multiplicity has constituted seemingly incompatible deinitions of rights and obligations in the context of state-society relationships and may be summed up as follows. First, ultra-Orthodox Jews deine citizenship based on communally speciied criteria for framing what it means to be Jewish. These criteria include blood origins and a very restrictive set of religious procedures. Second, Jewish Orthodox authorities legitimate claims for citizenship that are based on state law, but they deine legitimacy under very demanding religious hermeneutics, which do not include personal, subjective, deinitions of Judaism. Third, deinitions of Jewish non-Orthodox citizenship are based on social resistance to statutory state law, and some Supreme Court judicial rulings advocate for privatization of religion, including Orthodoxy. Accordingly, being a Jew is a matter to be decided by the individual and his or her non-Orthodox community and its nonOrthodox conversion procedures. Fourth, deinitions of Jewish territo- 34 ga D Ba rZiLa i rial citizenship are based on residency and identiication with a secular national concept of political membership. Fifth, a source of extreme tension, arguments for non-Jewish citizenship such as those that have prevailed among Israeli Arab Palestinians are based on place of birth. The argument assumes that constructions of Jewish identity have been used to suppress the possibility of Arab Palestinians returning to Palestine/Israel. Quite clearly, once the criteria of afiliations with Judaism became embedded in the deinition of nationality and the granting of citizenship, Arab Palestinians in Israel were discriminated against while Arab Palestinians outside Israel were excluded from the possibility of enjoying the right of return to Israel in its pre-1967 borders.9 Yet the struggle over deinitions has also produced some unlikely coalitions among groups with seemingly irreconcilable perspectives. Because political categorizations of ethnoreligious identities are aimed at engineering boundaries and maintaining control, the most powerful political coalition to support a strict deinition of who is a Jew has implicitly been the informal sociopolitical coalition between ultraOrthodox Jews and the Arab Sharia establishment among Israeli Arab Palestinians. These two groups have infrequently and informally aired support of restricting the deinition of who is a Jew, for fear that making it more inclusive would actually erode the status of Jews and Arabs already residing within the geographical boundaries of the state. Both ultra-Orthodox Jews and orthodox Muslims have aspired to monitor Jewish immigration to Israel by generating a broad deinition of who is not Jewish.10 However, in the context of ighting over state resources, ultra-Orthodox Jews have been interested in a narrow category of ethnic Jewish nationality, while Muslims have aspired to enlarge the deinition of Israeli territorial citizenship. Hence the question “who is not Jewish” has been answered through multiple constructions of “who is a Jew.” Ultra-Orthodox Jews—the majority of whom have taken part in the Israeli political setting— have aspired to preserve their monopoly in the political establishment through insisting on very formalistic criteria to prove Jewishness, while any more inclusive criteria have been conceived as inviting non-Orthodox forces to be involved in sharing state resources. On the one hand, these strict criteria have formed internal boundaries of communal discipline and authority within the ultra-Orthodox com- Who Is a Jew? 35 munity. On the other hand, those criteria spurred the desire of the ultra-Orthodox groups to enforce the “objective criteria” on the overall Jewish public.11 Israeli Arab Palestinians have been fearful that any more inclusive state deinition of who is a Jew may engender more massive Jewish immigration, even as the return of Palestinians is deined by state law as unlawful. Ironically, while ultra-Orthodox Jews have aspired to incite a more traditional halakhic discourse (based on notions of biological Jewish identity) and Arab Palestinians have encouraged a more secular territorial discourse, their self-interests coincide and result in shared goals of placing limits on who can properly claim to be a Jew in Israel. The politics of identity has also been the politics of nationality. It is important to note that the objective, stricter criterion of who is a Jew is transnational and not territorial. Thus for ultra-Orthodox Jews, Jewishness as an objective phenomenon based on genetic afiliations does not take into account residency and place of birth. For the adherents of stricter criteria for deining a Jew, Jewish ethnicity becomes a source of domination and it constitutes the essence of Israeli nationality, in both its Zionist and anti-Zionist versions. Conversely, for adherents of broader and more inclusive deinitions of who is a Jew, Israeli nationality exceeds Jewish ethnicity and has historically constructed a different vision of Jewish territoriality, which may even completely separate the state from the claims of religion. Paradoxically, the conservative, or objective, criterion for Jewishness is more transnational, while the liberal, or subjective, criterion is more local. From this perspective, the dilemma of how nationality or “Israeliness” should be deined will affect how Jewishness is construed when it comes to the question of who is a Jew. All these aspects of identity should be conceived and analyzed in the context of dynamic historical trends. Demographic changes in Israel are challenging identity categories and deinitions. About three hundred thousand non-Jewish immigrants to Israel since the early 1990s, partly immigrants from the Soviet republics and partly foreign workers, are challenging state authorities and shaping legal categories of citizenship.12 After the 1970s, the political culture in Israel became more litigious than ever before. Through litigation of NGOs, these immigrants have unsettled the status quo and have demanded more 36 ga D Ba rZiLa i inclusiveness. One of the most important areas of contention has been the degree of Orthodox supervision over religious conversions. Thus, in the 1990s, the Supreme Court ruled that religious conversions abroad would be recognized in Israel as valid for purposes of registration. Consequently, new modes of religious conversions were adapted with some implicit consent of ultra-Orthodox communities. The result is that the Supreme Court is imposing secular liberal values on established rabbinical authorities. This spirit—of partial privatization of religion and some limited inclusiveness—has radiated to other issues of state and religion as well, in particular, family law (covering marriage, divorce, custody cases, and more). The numbers of civil ceremonies of marriages and contracted civil unions have increased, as have the numbers of non-Orthodox marriages. Furthermore, the Court has ruled that in matters of inheritance and inancial beneits, as well as child adoption, a complete equality between homosexuals and heterosexuals should prevail. The Court has evaded the issue of the formal legality of same-sex marriage, due to possible severe opposition from Orthodox religious groups. Yet as a predominately secular elite, the justices have propelled practical privatization of Orthodoxy, using, in this context, inclusive criteria of gender equality.13 This context—of some pluralization of religious practices and some secularization in culture—has exerted more sociopolitical and cultural pressures on conventional categories of Jewish identity. Human categories do not constitute epistemological islands; rather, they are constituted and reconstituted through the dynamic contexts of social practices. The social practices of Israelis in daily life have also constituted new identities through which non-Jews, including foreign immigrants from African and Asian countries, may perceive themselves as Israelis and identify with some basic Jewish-Israeli narratives. Indeed, about 40 percent of the Jewish Israeli public has carved out a secular, antitheological deinition of a new Israeli nationality in which pluralism of legalities and jurisdictions prevails and in which religious practices are more plural while remaining within the framework of a Jewish state.14 This means, in practical terms, a signiicant reduction in the political power of the chief rabbinate, the legality of civil marriage performed abroad and non-Orthodox conversions, and restrictions on Who Is a Jew? 37 the jurisdiction of the rabbinical courts and expansions of the civil jurisdiction of the secular district courts in matters of family law. It has also contributed to the secularization of Jewish holidays in ways that allow them to be redeined as civic festivals. All these issues were debated as a result of controversies over how to deine Jewishness, the degree to which the deinitions should be restrictive or inclusive, and, more important, which institution and what elite should have the monopoly to impose the criteria for constructing citizenship and membership in the Jewish political body. Embittered controversies over the scope of military conscription are also part of the dilemma of what it means to be a Jew in Israel. The State of Israel was established based on a system of compulsory military conscription—of about three years of service for all adult men and about two years for all adult women. After the regular military service ends, all citizens are expected to be on reserve military duty for about two weeks every year, with the exception of married women, women with children, and individuals, both male and female, who have special medical or economic reasons to claim exemption. Hence the military has been a very important social-political institution in Israel and the most inluential in Israeli culture.15 The military has also been the main sociopolitical marker between Israeli Arab Palestinians, who with the exception of the Bedouin and the Druze do not serve in the military, and Jews, the majority of whom do serve. Similarly, it has been a major sociopolitical marker of national patriotism. Zionist Orthodox religious females are exempt from military service but usually substitute “national service” for it. The most meaningful exceptions to the rule of obligatory military conscription have been ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students.16 For the majority of Orthodox, observant, and secular Jews, military service is the crucial expression of Jewish national identity and patriotism. However, for ultra-Orthodox Jews (with some exceptions), serving in the Zionist military is in severe contradiction to their Jewish faith. Ultra-Orthodoxy considers Jewish nationalism an antinomy to the Jewish fundamental of awaiting the Messiah. The nationalism of the ultra-Orthodox hinges not on the concept of territorial sovereignty but on the religious faith of awaiting an eschatological redemption. 38 ga D Ba rZiLa i Hence these Jews emphasize more the genetic part of membership in Jewish civilization, while opposing Zionism and its requirements of military service as main criteria for communal afiliation.17 In practice, ultra-Orthodox religious political parties have been willing to make political compromises as long as recognition of the Jewish nation-state is only utilitarian—for example, for purposes of taxation—and does not require altering the fundamentals of religious beliefs in eschatological redemption. Yet the issue of mandatory military service has produced a great deal of ferment among contending groups. Secular groups express anger over the issue of exemptions, while the number of ultra-Orthodox Jews asking for those exemptions has been steadily growing. The seeds for this controversy were planted in 1947 when the interim prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was looking for legitimacy. Early on he agreed to the demands made by ultra-Orthodox political parties and major halakhic igures to exempt yeshiva students from military conscription. Recently, this arrangement has been constitutionally challenged in the Supreme Court. Following several court debates and appeals (by secular groups) that were dismissed, the Court ruled in 1998 to declare the arrangement illegal.18 Yet fearful of political sanctions against the judiciary, the justices did not declare the arrangement null and void. Rather, they asked the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, to alter the constitutional arrangement. However, because of pressures from the ultra-Orthodox political parties and despite the evident majoritarian opinion of the Court, the exemption arrangement has not been signiicantly altered as of now. On the one hand, various segments of Israeli society are negotiating with the state, often challenging its agents and public policy, by articulating and practicing unconventional identities. These groups are a good example of how, despite legal and nationalist frameworks, everyday society constitutes its own informal laws and deinitions of group membership. The global economy and technology are part of the picture. In an age when rabbinical yeshiva students are using the Internet to challenge their rabbinical authorities, protesting their sermons, questioning their decisions, and opposing them politically or going to Internet cafés and suring the Web freely with almost no iltering applied, ramiications for the previously established boundaries of communities and deinitions of identities are unavoidable. Who Is a Jew? 39 Thus the traditional authority of the religious communal leadership has been in some decline.19 In a very basic sense the communities are becoming more exposed to pressures of various social forces: modernity, secularization, and globalization. In the short run, the ultrareligious authorities are concerned and have been issuing halakhic rulings either prohibiting or warning against private usage of the Internet. But in the long run, Jewish Orthodoxy may acknowledge that a multiplicity of cultural perspectives is part of Judaism. “Who is a Jew” will remain a signiicant issue, a debatable dilemma, both for internal mobilization purposes and as part of daily national politics in Israel. But with the construction of new practices of identity, new questions may be asked about what constitutes Jewishness. It is not my intention to predict behavior. The challenge I address is different. My research aims instead to explore and explain some unanticipated consequences of the social, political, and legal categories that have attempted to create a framework for deciding who is a Jew. Rather than see this dilemma, with its historical contingencies, as an independent variable, a cause that requires deinite constructions as answers, my essay argues that the politics of categorization has invited public debate around the “who is a Jew” question in ways that relect and determine political expectations of what the answers should be. However, since identities—inter alia, Jewish identities—are constructed through practices at levels of both elite and grassroots activities, which then are also interacting with the state, predetermined categories are always confronting social criticism. This dynamic paves the way for new types of ambiguities and contestations. The dilemma of deining who is a Jew has not only affected the Jews but has also shaped the broader political, economic, and social landscape of Israel, since communities have used various criteria to maintain their sociopolitical boundaries. Conclusion This essay has analyzed various dimensions of legal and practical categories that have constructed the scope and essence of debates on who is a Jew to show how the criteria of constructing and deconstructing Jewish identities have been aimed at framing, coding, and decoding 40 ga D Ba rZiLa i the sociopolitical boundaries among and between various communities in Israel. In the 1950s, state law underscored the Jewishness of the state through legislation that has made Jewish identity the main foundation of legal and state ideology. The question of “who is a Jew” has received a very clear response in state law. Furthermore, the government has relied on the exclusive monopoly of Orthodoxy and ultraOrthodoxy and its control over deinitions of Jewishness for matters of determining nationality. Gradually, however, the ultra-Orthodox categorizations have been subjected to sociopolitical challenges by various nonruling communities of Reform Jews, secular Jews, non-Jews, and Israeli Arab Palestinians. These communities and their assorted NGOs have incrementally altered some of the categorizations that have constructed Jewish identities and citizenship. In this context, my analysis demonstrates that the dilemma of “who is a Jew” has been used to maintain control and mark the boundaries between various communities. Hence what is important is much less the identity dilemma itself than its political usage, which has wide-reaching ramiications for state and society relations. notes 1. For the meaning of nomos groups, see the following by Robert Cover in Narrative,Violence, and the Law:The Essays of Robert Cover, ed. Martha Minow, Michael Ryan, and Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992): “The Origins of Judicial Activism in the Protection of Minorities,” 13–49; “Nomos and Narrative,” 95–172; and “Violence and the Word,” 203–38. 2. Various court rulings debated this issue. The most prominent and important rulings that also created national political debates were HCJ 72/62 Rufeisen v. Minister of the Interior P.D. 16 (4) 2428, and HCJ 58/68 Shalit v. Minister of the Interior P.D. 23 (2) 477. 3. Gad Barzilai, Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 209–78; Alan Dowty, The Jewish State: A Century Later (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 4. For more analysis of the challenges of the migration from the Soviet republics to Israel, see Asher Cohen, Israeli Assimilation: Changes in the Deinition of the Jewish Collective’s Identity and Its Boundaries (Jerusalem: Institute of the World Jewish Congress, 2002). 5. HCJ 1031/93 Passaro and the Movement for Progressive Judaism v. Minister of the Interior P.D. 49 (4) 661. The appeal was submitted to the Supreme Court in Who Is a Jew? 41 1993, and the ruling was granted and published in 1995. HCJ 2901/97, 5070/95 Naamat v. Minister of the Interior (February 20, 2002). 6. The original name of the movement that was established in 1939 was the Committee for the Consolidation of the Young Hebrews. After the 1940s it was known mainly as the Canaanites, a name originally given to the movement as an ironic denotation by the poet Abraham Shlonski. Later, it was adopted by the movement as its main title. See a series of interviews with Uzi Ornan, “Anachnu Ha’Knaanim” [We Are the Canaanites], Svivot 33 (December 1994), http://www.snunit.k12.il/heb journals/svivot/33061.html (accessed May 6, 2009). 7. See Yaacov Shavit, From Hebrew to Canaanite [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Domino, 1987). 8. See the Web site of the Movement for Progressive Judaism in Israel, in which the platform is published, in Hebrew: http://www.reform.org.il/Heb/ IMPJ/Platform.asp#People. 9.Yoav Peled, “Ethnic Democracy and the Legal Construction of Citizenship: Arab Citizens of the Jewish State,” American Political Science Review 86 (1992): 432–43; Yoav Peled and Gershon Shair, Being Israeli:The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 10. Kadi Ahmed Natur (chief justice of Supreme Sharia Court of Appeals, Israel), interview with the author, January 31, 1999, Tel Aviv. Yet, obviously, the irst preference of the Arab Palestinian minority would be to cancel the Law of Return, if possible. 11. While few ultra-Orthodox groups, like the extreme Satmar, have completely rejected the state, the dominant majority among Israeli ultra-Orthodoxy has taken active part in Israeli politics, has almost routinely participated in governmental coalitions, and has become the leading elite group controlling rabbinical courts and religious councils in Israel. Especially after 1984, while polarization among the non-Orthodox Jewish public has increased, the ultra-Orthodox have gained more power than ever before in Israeli history, including increasing national budgets for their communal purposes. The professional literature testifying to the growing power of the ultra-Orthodox is vast; see, e.g., Joseph Fund, Pirud o hishtatfut: AgudatYiśra’el mul ha-Tsiyonut u-Medinat Yiśra’el [Separation or Participation: Agudat Israel Confronting Zionism and the State of Israel] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1999); and Menachem Friedman, HaHevrah ha-Haredit:Mekorot, Megamot ve-Tahalikhim [Haredi Society: Sources, Trends, and Processes] (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Institute for Policy Studies, 1991); Barzilai, Communities and Law, 209–78. 12. According to the Israeli Immigration Police and several NGOs, Israel had about 380,000 foreign workers, of whom 140,000 were deined by state law as “illegal,” at the outset of the twenty-irst century. See Rebeca Raijman and Adriana Kemp, “The New Immigration to Israel: Becoming a De-Facto Immigration State in the 1990s,” in Immigration Worldwide: Policies, Practices and 42 ga D Ba rZiLa i Trends, ed. Uma A. Segal, Doreen Elliott, and Nazneen S. Mayadas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 227–43. 13. See, e.g., HCJ 721/94 El Al v. Danilovich P.D. 48 (5) 749. 14. S. Charles Liebman, Li-heyot be-yahad:Yahase datiyim-hiloniyim ba-hevrah haYiśre’elit [To Live Together: Secular-Religious Relations in Israeli Society] (Jerusalem: Keter, 1990); S. Charles Liebman and Elihu Katz, The Jewishness of Israelis: Responses to the Guttman Report (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). 15. Gad Barzilai, Wars, Internal Conlicts, and Political Order: A Jewish Democracy in the Middle East (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996); Uri BenEliezer, The Making of Israeli Militarism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Yagil Levy, Israel’s Materialist Militarism (New York: Macmillan, 2007). 16. For more details about Israel’s constitutional arrangements of military exemptions, see Menachem Hofnung, Democracy, Law, and National Security (London: Aldershot, 1996). 17. Michael Keren and Gad Barzilai, Hishtalvut kevutsot “periferyah” ba-hevrah uva-politikah be-‘idan shalom [Inclusion of “Peripheral” Groups in Law and Society in Times of Peace] (Jerusalem: Israel Democracy Institute, 1998). 18. HCJ 448/81 Ressler v. Minister of Defense P.D. 36 (1) 81; FA 2/82 Ressler v. Defense Minister P.D. 36 (1) 708; HCJ 910/86 Ressler v. Minister of Defense P.D. 42 (2) 441; HCJ 3267/97, 715/98 Ressler v. Minister of Defense. 19. Karine Barzilai-Nahon and Gad Barzilai, “Cultured Technology: The Internet and Religious Fundamentalism,” Information Society 21, no. 1 (2005): 25–40.