Can the law unite us, inspire us, and keep us safe? As American institutions become politicized – from the NFL to the CDC – so too the law: the politics around policing, cash bail, and both recent and impending Supreme Court nomination hearings (to name but a few instances) have diminished the law’s ability to…
On a county road south of the Haredi hub of Lakewood, N.J., sits an old egg farm that is at the heart of a lawsuit over anti-Semitism that could seriously impact a suburban town’s bottom line. The farm, dormant since about 2005, is one of a dwindling number of undeveloped lots in an area that…
On November 26, 2018, a New York-based lawyer named David Abrams announced that he had filed a lawsuit against Airbnb over its decision to stop providing services in West Bank settlements. Abrams filed the lawsuit on behalf of a “Jewish-owned” Israeli corporation based in “Judea and Samaria” — more commonly known as the West Bank…
Of the rulings that the Supreme Court handed down in its end-of-the-term rush, Carpenter v. United States (June 22, 2018) will prove to have the most far-reaching impact. The justices, by a 5-4 vote, held that the Constitution requires police to obtain a search warrant before gaining access to personal data that carriers collect from…
Troubled greatly these days by the injustices all around us, I sat in synagogue some weeks back and came once again upon the ritual of the Sotah: the bizarre, seemingly barbaric procedure employed in Biblical times to placate a man consumed by suspicion over his wife’s unfaithfulness. Is it curious why he is so jealous?…
In the early days of the Trump administration, I wrote an essay expressing serious reservations about the modest but growing movement by churches and synagogues to offer aid and housing to undocumented immigrants. Since then, America has changed, and so have I. My initial unease was not because of what “sanctuary” tries to do, I…
What is the Nation-State Bill? The Nation-State Bill is a proposed Basic Law that would anchor Israel’s status as the national homeland of the Jewish people. The bill clauses contain, for example, the “Law of Return,” state symbols, Jewish festivals and the Hebrew language. It is Israel’s first attempt to constitutionally anchor its identity in…
I first heard of the Nation-State Bill about eight years ago, when I was a Member of the Knesset. I was stopped in the hallway by a fellow M.K. from my party who asked me to support a bill affirming that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people. My initial reaction was that this…
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