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Religion and State under the Current Israeli Government:
The Attempted Orthodoxization of the Public Sphere

Religious Orthodox Jews have always been a part of Israeli governments, but the current government is the first in which they hold a majority. What's more, some of them are fundamentalists of a novel strain who aim to radically change the character of the State of Israel. It is in response to that treat, among others, that hundreds of thousands of Jews have taken to the streets in the largest protest movement Israel has seen. We will make sense of the current conflict between religion and state.and the threats and opportunities it holds.

Dr. Tomer Persico
Is a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Rubinstein Fellow at Reichman University and a 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 in 2016, and his second book, In God's Image: Selfhood, Freedom and Equality (Hebrew) was published by Yedioth in 2021. Persico is an activist for freedom of religion in Israel, writes the most popular blog in Hebrew on religion, and has written hundreds of articles on these subjects for popular media, including regular contributions to the Haaretz op-ed section.

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