Solidarity, Public Sphere, and Constitutional Identity

Name: Solidarity, Public Sphere, and Constitutional Identity
Start: 2022-07-05T11:30:00+02:00
End: 2022-07-05T13:00:00+02:00
Location: Building D

This panel examines the various ways in which the organization of the public sphere contributes to the shaping of constitutional identity. Focusing on Israel, the panelists investigate how the regulation of theatre and film helped shape Jewish Israeli identity, how the selection of street names reflects power relations between Jews and Arabs, how ultra-orthodox Jews operate in the public sphere, and how the courts reinforce solidarity among Israel’s constitutive social groups.

Adam ShinarTaking art seriously: censorship and the making of the Jewish nation state

Censorship is often marshaled in the service of conservative values, such as eliminating obscenity. Yet censorship can also be motivated by a particular political goal. In authoritarian or illiberal regimes, censorship seeks to replicate and instill the government‘s values in the service of a particular political agenda. Drawing on Israel as a case study, this article argues that censorship can also be an important part of “identity-building“. Israeli censorship was first and foremost an instrument deployed in the service of creating the new Israeli, and in particular, the new Jewish Israeli. In its quest to harness the power of censorship for identity-building, questions of free speech did not take center stage. Similarly, the Supreme Court was also quite ambivalent about free speech claims. It was only in the late 1970s that the Court embraced a more liberal position that privileged free speech over national interests, understood as Jewish national interests

Ilan SabanThe Normative Limits to Acts of Appreciation: Street Names in Arab-Palestinian Local Authorities in Israel

This is an attempt to point at parameters by which we may draw assessments of right and wrong and especially of permission or prohibition upon choices of tribute made by minority local authorities. I.e., their formal expression of appreciation for personalities, symbols, dates which are resented by substantial parts of the majority community in Israel. This effort at demarcation of the normative limits for minority tribute is more challenging where the controversial symbols are related to a conflict which is not of a distant past but of a raging present

Tamar Hostovsky BrandesSolidarity and Judicial Review

The concept of solidarity conveys the notion of a community of commitments, a group composed by units who are mutually committed towards each other. The boundaries of the group, the nature of the mutual commitments and the specific duties that may derive from them vary. This article draws on the case study of Israel to examine the role of courts in entrenching, facilitating and reinforcing solidarity. How do courts perceive their position and role with respect to solidarity? To what extent does solidarity play a role in court rulings? And what notions and types of solidarity do court rulings strengthen?

Iddo PoratUltra-orthodox Jews and the public sphere

Chair(s): Adam Shinar

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