How can the political meaning of the family and its relationship with the state be redefined in the liberal era? This chapter explores three answers that rearticulate the standing of the family within the liberal commonweal and redraw the balance between family and state. The responses differ in their narration of the interest that the liberal state has in the institution of the family, depicting the latter as an agency of the state, an organ of the state, or an apolitical space that marks the state’s limits and dependence on prepolitical conditions. The three approaches are presented as concurrent trends representing discrepant versions of liberalism as a political theory.

Chapter 6 addresses Israeli legislative policy concerning Jewish law and identity. Like the Zionist movement did early on, Israel’s national governing and judicial institutions refused until the 1980s to allow questions of identity and culture to impinge on political and legal deliberations. The Knesset and the Ministry of Justice did not base Israel’s laws on Jewish law. It was not that they were alienated from Jewish heritage and its legal element; rather they realized that these could not really be translated into laws, simply because there was no consensus on what constituted Jewish culture, and what were the proper ways to constitute a Hebrew-Israeli legal system on its basis. Even those who sought with all their might to base Israeli law on Jewish heritage did not know how to do so in practical terms. Once again, it was a meta-cultural decision to circumvent such cultural conflict

Chapter 10 discusses the complex interaction between Israeli law and Jewish heritage. I address the Zionist-Israeli resolve to ensure its political and legal independence—that is, an independent Israeli legal system that is not subordinate to foreign law and which legislates for itself in accordance with Israeli society’s needs, interests, and values. I also consider the attention the Israeli legal system gives to symbols of national independence. This includes both what might be called general symbols, such as the Hebrew language, and also specifically legal symbols, such as the effort to promulgate a constitution and civil code. Finally, I show that the Zionist movement and Israel have adopted “a moderate cultural option” centered on muting cultural debates while adopting common cultural symbols that arouse no dissension—the Hebrew language, devotion to the Land of Israel, evocation of Jewish history, and a long list of consensual symbols, values, and concepts with roots in Jewish law and heritage. I show that Israeli law cannot not be Jewish and Israeli, and that Israeli law and culture are today lieux de mémoire of primary importance in the preservation of Jewish law and heritage and an important guarantee of the future of Jewish culture.