What Place for Jewish Law in Israeli Law?

Co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies and UCLA Center for the Study of Religion

This talk will explore the way Judaism, as a religion and culture, and its legal tradition — the halakhah — is incorporated into the secular legal system of the state of Israel and, more broadly, the role of Judaism and Jewish values in Israel.



The origins of Jewish law are thousands of years in the past, but whereas most other ancient legal systems are no longer relevant today, Jewish law continues to have great vitality and ability to adapt to the given time and place, and as such it is highly relevant even in the solution of contemporary legal problems. This is manifest in the application of Jewish law in the legal system of the modern State of Israel. 



Israels constitutional system is based on two tenets: (1) that the state is Jewish and (2) that the state is democratic. It is this commitment to the creation of a synthesis between particularistic (Jewish) and universalistic (democratic) values that has proved to be the major constitutional challenge faced by Israel since its foundation. Reaching such a synthesis is especially problematic given that approximately 20% of Israels citizenry consists of non-Jews, primarily Muslims, Christians, and Druzes. Even within the Jewish population itself, the exact meaning of Israel as a Jewish state has been highly contested. Not only do opinions differ as to whether Jews are citizens of a nation, members of a people, participants in a culture, or co-religionists, but even within the latter there are widely divergent beliefs and degrees of practice.



Dr. Sinai will present the challenges facing the application of Jewish law in the modern state of Israel while attempting to illuminate deserving legal models that incorporate the Jewish tradition and multicultural society of Israel today.



A Senior Research Scholar in Law at Yale Law School and a Schusterman Visiting Professor of Jewish Law at Yale University, Dr. Sinai has focused his research on Jewish law, torts, evidence, civil procedure, comparative law, and law and religion.

 

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