Religion and Patriarchal Politics: The Israeli Experience

Abstract

Religion, subcultures, and the family share a common attribute in legal systems—they have all been regarded, at various times and in various contexts, as being outside the reach of political and legal regulation. These spheres of life are regarded, in constitutional democracies, as either private or autonomous. The members of these groups are given the right to determine their own ethical ideology and practice. This right to autonomy within a subgroup has gone variously under the rubrics of freedom of religion, multiculturalism, or the right to privacy. Religious freedom, cultural autonomy, and family privacy are usu- ally treated as wholly separate topics.Yet there is a common thread that ties them all together from a feminist standpoint, and it is this commonality that I want to emphasize here. The patriarchal norms of family life are in no small part the result of patriarchal religious heritage and the object of ongoing religious politics. The customs of family life vary according to the patriarchal traditions of subcultures. Hence the sources of the patriarchal norms of all three institutions are inextricably interwoven.