Joint Straus/Tikvah Fellow
Academic Year 2011-2012
Ruth Gavison
Ruth Gavison is Haim H. Cohn Professor (emerita) of Human Rights at the faculty of law, the Hebrew University. See www.gavison.com.
Gavison is the founder and president of Metzilah: Center for Liberal, Jewish, and Zionist Thought. www.metzilah.org.il.
She is also a long time member of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, where she served as Chairperson and President. www.acri.org.il.
Gavison was a member of a number of public commissions, including the Vinograd Commission examining the war in Lebanon 2006.
In 2003 she published, with R. Yaacov Medan, A New Covenant on State and Religion Issues among Jews in Israel, for which they won the AviHai prize in 2001. www.gavison-medan.org.il.
Research
The Quest for Political Identity between Universalism and Particularism: Nationalism (Ethnic or Civic), Religion, Culture and Humanism
I like the regulating idea of religion and public reason but would rather study aspects of the political relations between states and religions from other perspectives. This is because in contemporary debates I think there is often too much focus on the normative aspects of deliberative democracy and not enough attention to the fact that in many situations what decides issues and votes are not the rules of public reason but the realities of political, social and cultural – including religious - power. I also think that this is something that should be conceded rather than criticized and faulted. Political philosophy should in fact acknowledge this reality and seek to understand it and to integrate it into its analyses and evaluations of relations among religions and states. Especially since it is very hard to treat all religions in the same way since their claims from the political order are often dependent on the identity and content of the religion, on the relative number of its adherents and their power, and on the interpretation of the religion prevalent at the time.
I therefore propose to look at state-religion relationships via the distinction between a shared constitutional framework on the one hand and political struggles between different conceptions of the good on the other. The shared framework includes the shared commitment to human rights, and different conceptions of the good life include various religious outlooks as well as liberalism. This perspective is more procedural and dynamic than the public reason prism, and the relations between the two approaches are themselves interesting and important. Similarly this proposal may invoke the challenged distinction between liberalism and political liberalism (one of whose interpretations is the commitment to public reason).
I hope to work on these general and structural themes, as well as study implications to Israel, and possibly look at one central state-religion issue of contemporary relevance (financing religious education and state involvement in membership in religious communities are possible instances).
