Religion and Politics

At Bloomberg, Noah Feldman writes on the death of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and analyzes how he transformed Israeli politics. “[T]he real political legacy of Yosef’s career is that, by making a religious party into a mainstream, non-rejectionist national actor, he helped move Israeli political culture from secular nationalism to a more religiously-informed model. In a rough parallel to the rise of Islamic politics in Arabic-speaking countries, the politics of Jewish religion, not just Jewish nationalism, is now an enduring part of the Israeli landscape.”