Religion and State in Israel: The End of the Status Quo (Tomer Persico)

Religion and State relations were never simple in Israel, yet over the last three decades they’ve entered a dramatic overhaul. The famous "Status" agreed between Ben-Gurion and the Ultra-Orthodox in 1947, is today a dead letter, highlighting the growing gap between public opinion in Israel and the formal word of the law. The Chief Rabbinate has lost public legitimacy, and diverse "Judaisms" challenge the traditional divisions in Israeli society. We shall examine the social conditions for these developments, as well as their political ramifications, such as were witnessed in the Israeli October 2019 elections.

Dr. Tomer Persico is a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Rubinstein Fellow at Reichman University and a Senior Research Scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Between 2018 and 2021 he was the Koret Visiting Assistant Professor at the UC Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies. His fields of expertise include contemporary spirituality, Jewish modern identity, Jewish renewal, and forms of secularization and religiosity in Israel. His first book, The Jewish Meditative Tradition (Hebrew) was published by Tel Aviv University Press, and his second book, In God's Image: the Making of the Modern West (Hebrew) was published by Yedioth.

Видео Religion and State in Israel: The End of the Status Quo (Tomer Persico) канала CSP - Community Scholar Program