After seventy years of statehood Israel is a diverse society, divided by ethnicity, religion and class, engaged with a multicultural reality that calls into question understandings of sovereignty, identity, citizenship, rights and democracy. The description of Israel as an “overburdened polity” by two of its leading sociologists, almost forty years ago, has not lost any of its relevance. The seemingly endless battle over the meaning of a “Jewish and democratic state” is a daily reminder that the meaning of democracy, the meaning of a Jewish state and the ability or need to compromise between them remains contested.