Israeli legal feminists have largely overlooked the constitutive theoretical developments that introduced the “third wave” to global feminism. Drawing on the critical insights of black and postcolonial feminist discourse, this Article introduces Mizrahi feminism to Israeli jurisprudence. It aims to lay the groundwork for a new theoretical school of critical legal scholarship in Israel and expose the multidimensional oppression endured by Mizrahi women in Israeli law and history. To this end, the Article focuses on a particular slice of the legal history of the Israeli abortion law reform of the 1970s. Analyzing extensive parliamentary protocols and institutional archival records, the Article pioneers the deconstructive toolbox of Mizrahi feminism in order to extract the subversive ethno-class narrative that has been left invisible in the feminist story of Israeli abortion law—a sorely neglected history of a separatist, quality-control regulatory mechanism that restrains the Mizrahi womb and Orientalizes its female carrier as “unqualified” vis-à-vis the “dignified” Ashkenazi womb. This intellectual exercise in legal historical study does more than unveil the complex dynamics behind the regulation of the female body in Israel. It also gives a voice to an intra-Jewish ethnic female minority that otherwise remains a transparent and denied gender category in the sociolegal literature.

The encounter between synagogue and state in Israel’s military context raises a variety of complex questions that defy conventional paradigms. While religious liberty continues to occupy a special place in most liberal democratic thought, the legal and philosophical literature pondering its various dimensions has largely lost analytic sight of the fascinating intersection of military and religion. This article embarks on analyzing the appropriate integration between loyalty to God and to country, and between religious male and secular female soldiers. Evaluating examples of synagogue-state tensions and accommodationist policies, this article explores the manner and extent to which the Israeli military (IDF) responds to the observant soldier’s multiple identities as a religious minority member and a faithful citizen of the larger secular polity. Against this backdrop, the article analyzes the vexed challenges posed to multicultural theory by the equivocal status of the Orthodox community as a numerical minority but “power majority” within the military, and by the IDF’s unique exercise of multiculturalist protection, termed herein “external restrictions,” imposed on majority group members. It concludes that the ongoing “religionization” of the IDF through the 2002 “Appropriate Integration” regulation has served as a powerful counterforce to gender equality, fostering a growing practice of female exclusion through which women are disenfranchised from core, non-negotiable protections of citizenship. The article identifies as the prime casualty of this aggressive multicultural accommodation not only secular women’s hard-won equality of opportunity, but also the very rights and status of minority women within their own religious community.

The paper addresses the perpetual discontent evoked by the concept of legal pluralism, one which, in turn, brings about incessant efforts to “rethink” it. We suggest that one of the sources of this discontent is the erroneous view that legal pluralism is a theory, and the consequent misguided expectations that it should provide scholars of law and society with causal hypotheses and explanations. We argue that legal pluralism is not a theory but a research perspective, and, as such, is not meant to provide us with explanatory propositions, but rather to increase our awareness of the plurality and inter-relationality of socio-legal spheres and of the implications thereof. We further identify—and briefly discuss—the four core principles of a pluri-legal perspective: plurality, relationality, power, and agency. Taken together, these four premises constitute a manifesto of sorts for a pluri-legal perspective.

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The article analyzes Israel's ecclesiastical court system through the prism of Weberian theory to both empirical and theoretical ends. On the empirical level, it aims to illuminate a grossly understudied socio‐legal arena—the communal Christian courts in the Middle‐East. On the theoretical level, it seeks to reclaim the Weberian concept ofkadijustiz, which refers to “formally irrational” legal systems. In recent decades, scholars have engaged in a process of “blaming” that discredited the conceptualization of Islamic law askadijustizand resulted in the concept's erasure from socio‐legal theory. After renaming it to the more neutral and non‐Orientalistrichterjustiz, we employ this new‐old concept to analyze Israel's ecclesiastical courts and demonstrate its theoretical and analytical merits. The article concludes with several theoretical propositions, which draw on the empirical case study and contribute to the refinement of Weberian theory.