55 Fall 2021 he question of the relationship between religion and state is usually broken down into two subsidiary issues: one concerning freedom of religion; the other about the separation between religion and state. The idea of a separation is rooted in two main versions: separation in the sense of the state completely refraining from supporting religion (the “non-support version”), and separation in the sense of the state refraining from giving preference to any particular religion (the “nonpreference version”). According to the non-support version, the state must not support religion at all. This includes refraining from both funding religious activities, as well as granting formal status to religious figures and acts that imply symbolic support for religion. According to the non-preference version, the state is allowed to support religion in principle, but must not prioritize a religious option over non-religious ones. The nonpreference version has implications not just for relations between religion and other conceptions of the good, but also for relations between different religions and between different denominations of the same religion. If the state supports a particular religion or denomination, it must also support other religions and denominations. For example, if the state supports Judaism, it must also support Christianity and Islam, and if it supports Orthodox Judaism, then it must also support other denominations of Judaism. The non-support version is more extreme than the non-preference version. It prohibits the state from supporting religion in any form, even if this support is relatively minor. Advocates of the non-support version are logically committed to the nonpreference version, but the same is not true vice versa. Since 1988, a multi-denominational group of Jewish women in Israel, who later became known as the“Women of the Wall” (WoW), have been battling for the right to hold a public prayer service, including wearing prayer shawls and phylacteries, and reading from a Torah scroll, in the women’s section of the Western Wall Plaza on the first day of each Jewish month. Some Orthodox persons and Orthodox political parties in Israel are fiercely opposed to the WoW and its project. Yuval Jobani and Nahshon Perez’s book Women of the Wall: Navigating Religion in Sacred Sites explores the dispute over the Western Wall Plaza from the perspective of the abovementioned models for regulating the relationship between religion and state: preference, support, and the privatization of religion (a model that follows from the negation of the first two options). The application of these models to the Western Wall Plaza gives rise to three options: preference or exclusivity for Orthodox Judaism in determining the code of conduct at the Western Wall Plaza (the preference model); giving all denominations of Judaism, and maybe even Jews who do not affiliate with any stream, a foothold at the Western Wall Plaza (the support model); and no state intervention in regulating activities at the plaza (the privatization model). In Chapter 3, Jobani and Perez reject the preference model; the discussion in Chapter 4 leads to a similar conclusion about the support model; and in Chapter 5, they advocate for the privatization model and sketch out the contours of the new reality at the Western Wall Plaza, if that model were to be implemented. I shall address mainly Chapter 3 and argue that the authors fail to sufficiently establish a case for the rejection of the preference model. Despite the prevalence of the idea of a separation of religion and state in liberal discourse, few countries have adopted it. In Europe, for example, this concept, certainly in the sense of non-support, is the outlier. The European Union has explicitly recognized its member states’ right to an established religion, and indeed several EU countries officially affiliate themselves with a specific religion or religious denomination. Even in European countries that do not have an official state religion, religious communities are institutionalized by the state and granted special status. In almost no constitutional document in the world is there an explicit demand for a separation between religion and state. The fact that most western countries permit some connection between religion and state, and that some even give priority to a particular religion or religious T Reviewed byGideon Sapir Women of the Wall: Navigating Religion in Sacred Sites By Yuval Jobani & Nahshon Perez Oxford Univ. Press (2017, 273pp.)
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