Israeli" halakha: The Chief Rabbinate's conversion-to-Judaism policy 1948-2018 (original) (raw)
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A Jewish State? Controversial Conversions and the Dispute Over Israel’s Jewish Character
The purpose of this article is to outline the ideological and theological controversy over the issue of conversion to Judaism in Israel that has remained on the agenda of the Israeli public discourse since its founding (1948). Through an analysis of the viewpoints of three central political and religious leaders on this issue, this article aims to demonstrate that beyond fierce political debate, the disagreement lies within what each leader views as adequate interpretations of Jewish history and religion in the modern State of Israel. This comprehensive dispute illustrates that the three sides cast the meaning of Israel’s basic character differently —as either a Jewish secular nation-state, a Jewish religious state, or rather a combination of the two. Thus, the controversy over conversion highlights the fact that Israel has not yet succeeded in forming a consensual conception of its definition as a “Jewish state.”
Who needs conversion Jewish conversion in a time of shattered boundaries
The Immanent Frame, 2018
The idea that Jewish conversion might be unessential seems both provocative and counterintuitive. After all, within the dictates of Jewish law (halakha), conversion is the single path to Jewish belonging and recognition. And from Jewish perspectives (those of the Jewish state, Jewish communities, authorities, institutions, and families), conversion is often construed as an indispensable policy route. Yet, in this short essay I suggest that in contemporary Jewish life, formal conversion is in the process of losing its role as an exclusive or even dominant ticket to Jewish identity and inclusion. By juxtaposing two prime settings in which Jewish conversion is intensely debated and enacted, the Israeli and the American-Jewish, I hope to show how, under fading boundaries and shifting realities of Jewish belonging, formal conversion begins to lose its criticality. I choose to focus on these particular settings because of their centrality in Jewish politics, religion, and demography, as well as because of their remarkably different circumstances: The Israeli context of the nation-state, where religious conversion is embedded within state bureaucracy, and the American-Jewish context, the largest diasporic Jewish community, where Jewish conversion is linked with voluntarism. To begin with, why does conversion matter or why is it considered essential? From the point of view of non-Jews or aspiring converts, the stakes attached to conversion are considerable. In Israel, the stakes are particularly high, as conversion involves state-endorsed bureaucratic and
Joining the Jewish State: Israel's Conversion Policies
Netanel Fisher, (2016), "Joining the Jewish State: Israel's Conversion Policies", in Netanel Fisher & Tudor Parfitt (eds), Becoming Jewish: New Jews and Emerging Jewish Communities in a globalized world, Cambridge Scholars Press, 224-242.
Ethnic and Racial Studies
A large number of non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union have arrived in Israel since the late 1980s. This article explores how the Israeli State has responded to this perceived demographic threat by endorsing a pro-Jewish conversion policy targeted at this population of new citizens. By analysing a variety of ethnographic and textual materials, I trace the organizational processes and discursive practices through which conversion has been crafted into a ‘national mission’: an all encompassing state endeavour whose impetus is a national-Zionist biopolitics. The Foucauldian concept of biopolitics offers a novel way to understand the interface between religious conversion and the nation state. Specifically, it positions the concept of population as a primary analytical category, thereby enabling us to understand religious conversion as a mechanism of national population policy.
Corrective conversion: unsettling citizens and the politics of inclusion in Israel
JRAI
Gauri Viswanathan’s notion of religious conversion as an ‘unsettling’ political event has recently figured prominently in the scholarship on conversion. However, although numerous scholars have productively applied Viswanathan’s understanding in their work, primarily in the context of conversion to religious minorities within the nation-state, to focus too heavily on conversion’s unsettling effects risks overlooking political constellations in which it might have rather settling effects. In contrast to the scholarly focus on conversion’s disruptive qualities, this article offers an ethnographic account of the ‘settling’ ambitions and logics that underwrite the state politics of Jewish conversion (giur) in contemporary Israel. By looking ethnographically into the mundane discursive, pedagogic, and bureaucratic processes through which the Jewish state converts non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, I demonstrate how religious conversion works to restore the bureaucratic logic of Israeli nationalism, thereby reinstating unambiguous forms of Jewish belonging. Religious conversion can also be an act of taxonomic repair.