A Democratic Jewish State: On the Place of Judaism in Israel

At the end of the nineteenth century, the leaders of the incipient Zionist movement realized that one of their urgent tasks was to find a way to induce millions of Jews of different religious views and lifestyles to see themselves as members of a single Jewish nation and, no less importantly, to see themselves as belonging to and responsible for a common national movement and civil society in which all could fulfill their different Jewish identities. It was the central reason for the Zionist movement’s adherence to popular and open democracy, based on a general proportional electoral system rather than