63 Winter 2026 jurisdiction, is accomplished through private ordering in the United States. A more substantive concern with Rabinovitch’s approach surfaces in Chapter 4, where he expressly parallels the legal battles surrounding efforts by Hasidic Jews to secure an eruv3 in Montreal with the attempts of Arab citizens of Israel to gain access to housing in predominantly Jewish municipalities. The comparative ambition is commendable — and Rabinovitch rightly notes that both cases involve claims to religious or national presence in public space — but the analogy risks distorting crucial contextual differences. Constructing an eruv reflects the effort of a diasporic minority to symbolically inscribe religious space within a liberal, pluralistic order. By contrast, the effort by Arab citizens of Israel to live in any municipality implicates foundational debates about the nature of the Zionist project, the Jewish character of the state, the historical legacy of Jewish statelessness, and the wider PalestinianIsraeli conflict. Rabinovitch acknowledges that Jewish spatial claims are central to Zionism, but the chapter avoids serious engagement with the normative and historical framework that motivates them. Zionism does not simply involve asserting Jewish presence in a specific space — it is premised on the belief that the Land of Israel is historically and morally the Jewish homeland, and that sovereignty in that space is essential to the survival of the Jewish people. The comparison also ignores that nearly every interaction between Israel and its Palestinian-Arab citizens is written against the background of kinetic tensions between Arabs and Jews within Gaza, Judea-Samaria (also known as the West Bank), and Israel proper. Nothing requires Rabinovitch to adopt a Zionist position. But the decision to sidestep the normative foundations of Zionism — while placing it in a structural analogy to minority claims of Hasidic Jews in Canada — necessarily suggests that the primary claims of Zionism are not central to the comparison or to understanding the structure of Israeli statehood. If Zionism is indeed a live ideological actor in the legal cases Rabinovitch examines, then it deserves to be addressed directly in a way that does not neatly map onto how a Hassidizing neighborhood might undermine the mainstream desire for secularity amongst the Fanco-Quebécois majority in Montreal. The chapter’s refusal to confront these competing normative visions leaves it somewhat lacking at precisely the moment when deeper engagement is most needed. Still, though the analogy has its limits, the comparison forces readers to confront the uneasy contrast between the Jewish desire for pluralism in the Diaspora and demands for a more totalizing cultural sovereignty in Israel. Following on this theme, while Sovereignty & Religious Freedom excels at historical storytelling and comparative legal analysis, it remains somewhat underdeveloped in its theoretical dimension. Rabinovitch is skilled at documenting cases and framing cross-national comparisons, yet the book stops short of engaging explicitly with broader normative debates in legal and political theory. Central questions — such as how liberal states should navigate the tension between individual rights and collective religious autonomy, or what normative weight should be given to Jewish historical experience and Zionist claims — remain largely implicit or unaddressed. Even without taking sides in these debates, more explicit scaffolding would help the reader trace the deeper commonalities and divergences across regimes. This would be especially helpful in thinking through various configurations of a national majority recognized by law, a de facto cultural majority, a minority that is either tolerated or one that is celebrated, as each context raises distinct legal and political issues. Readers are at times left without clear tools to assess the costs and benefits of different approaches to communal autonomy, or why Israel’s attempts at reconciling democracy with collective identity often seem structurally precarious. Rabinovitch is convincing in showing us that religious group rights are here to stay, and that modern states must inevitably grapple with this challenge. Yet for this very reason, the absence of sustained theoretical reflection leaves unanswered the questions about liberalism’s limits, the legitimacy of collective rights claims, and the meaning of Jewish sovereignty — whether fully vindicated in Israel or problematically tolerated in diaspora.n Chaim Saiman is the Chair in Jewish Law and Professor of Law at the Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law. He is also a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and serves as a dayan (rabbinic judge) of the Beth Din of America. In Spring 2026, he is serving as the Gruss Visting Professor of Talmudic Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey School of Law. 3. An eruv is a halakhic enclosure that allows the carrying of objects from a private domain to a public domain on Shabbat.
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