Preface

Abstract

Preface Arieh Saposnik and Natan Aridan, Co-Editors Over the past quarter-century, Israel Studies has established itself as a journal that reflects and stimulates innovative and multi-disciplinary research on Israel. This issue, we believe, continues that tradition of innovative approaches to the study of Israel and dynamic, incisive discussions regarding complex and controversial issues in Israeli society, culture, and history. It features a special section, part of our ongoing “Israel Dialectics” series, which brings together a range of viewpoints on a central topic that concerns the diverse community of scholars who work in Israel Studies. We are grateful to Professor Ilan Peleg for guest-editing the section, which addresses questions related to religion, politics, culture, and society in Israel. While the issue of religion and state in Israel tends to focus specifically on Jewish religious practices in the public sphere and their attendant political and legal dilemmas, the contributors to the special section expand the scope of the discussion to include dilemmas and tensions faced by Palestinian citizens of the state and their encounter with Israel’s religion-state quandary; implications of the religion-state-society intersection for Israel-Diaspora relations; questions of conversion; and the impact of religious tropes on contemporary cultural discourse in Israel. Although reminders of the centrality of religion-state questions in Israel are multiple, and new ones appear virtually daily, the two articles in this issue that accompany the “Israel Dialectics” serve in this capacity as well. The focus of each is entirely different from that of the Dialectics section, of course (and from one another): Daniel Mahla’s innovative article examines Israel’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest as a window into shifting cultural and diplomatic relations between Israel and Europe, and Orit Oved provides a compelling look at education and the construction of Israeli identity during the early decades of the state. Yet, in addition to the novel contributions that each of these represent to their particular subject matters, they also testify to the role of religious considerations and religious parties in Israel’s cultural, social and political discourse—as in the opposition of some Orthodox figures to the transgender singer Dana International’s representation of Israel in the Eurovision contest, or in the challenges faced by a “secular” educational system in seeking to inculcate Jewish identity in its pupils. It is precisely the fact that these are not the [End Page 1] central themes of these pieces that highlights the penetration of these issues into so many facets of Israeli life. This issue, then, offers a range of perspectives on questions of religion, state, and society in Israel, even beyond the Dialectics section devoted to that question. It is not, however, limited to that. The contributions by Mahla and Oved offer important new insights into a range of other questions, including Israel-Europe relations, connections between diplomacy and cultural activity, the development of Israel’s educational system, and the evolution of Jewish identity in Israel. Copyright © 2022 Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism