{"id":6642,"date":"2011-12-18T22:42:21","date_gmt":"2011-12-18T22:42:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=6642"},"modified":"2011-12-18T22:42:21","modified_gmt":"2011-12-18T22:42:21","slug":"choosing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/choosing\/","title":{"rendered":"Choosing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/israel_flag.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/israel_flag-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"israel_flag\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" class=\"alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-6663\" \/><\/a>Via <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/news-and-politics\/85953\/choosing\/\">The Tablet<\/a><\/em>, an interesting story from Israel:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>According to the Israeli government, there are roughly 5,800,000 religious Jews in Israel, 1,320,000 Muslims, 150,000 Christians, 130,000 Druze, and exactly one secular Jew. His name is Yoram Kaniuk\u2014and if a new movement that he has inspired continues to grow, he won\u2019t be alone for long.<\/p>\n<p>In Israel, every citizen has a religious classification and an ethnic classification. For the majority of Israeli citizens, \u201cJewish\u201d is listed as both. It\u2019s not a simple formality: One\u2019s religious classification has profound effects, determining whom and how one can marry, the process of divorce, whether one can get buried in a Jewish cemetery, and whether one must serve in the army. The \u201cstate\u201d in this case is embodied in the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate of Israel, a quirk of the Israeli democratic system that stretches back to the country\u2019s founding in 1948. At the time, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion gave representatives of the Orthodox religious community, numbering only in the hundreds, a host of powers dramatically out of proportion to their size on the assumption that these Jews would soon turn away from the religion of the shtetl.<\/p>\n<p>Ben-Gurion, needless to say, got it wrong. The ranks of the Orthodox have swelled to well over a million, yet the rabbinate still retains the sole power over deciding who is a Jew. Because of the strength of their voting bloc and the keystone role that Orthodox parties hold in Israeli coalition governments, there has never been a successful bid to challenge the rabbinate\u2019s control.<\/p>\n<p>But Kaniuk, one of the country\u2019s most celebrated novelists, may have accidentally found a loophole. And if it gets widened by the Supreme Court in an important case now pending, it could grow big enough for a large section of the country to step through.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Read the whole thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Via The Tablet, an interesting story from Israel: According to the Israeli government, there are roughly 5,800,000 religious Jews in Israel, 1,320,000 Muslims, 150,000 Christians, 130,000 Druze, and exactly one secular Jew. His name is Yoram Kaniuk\u2014and if a new &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/choosing\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[15,711],"tags":[221],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6642"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6642"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6665,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6642\/revisions\/6665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}