The Challenges of Sovereignty Essays on Israel and Zionism

Key essays by a notable scholar address some of the most pressing questions facing Israel today.

Over the course of his rich career, David Ellenson―one of the most outstanding Jewish scholars, intellectuals, and thinkers of our time―probed the tension between tradition and modernity, especially as reflected in the ceaseless reinterpretation of liturgical and halakhic texts. Alongside that scholarly interest, largely centered on European Jewry, Ellenson produced an impressive body of work on Zionism and Israel.

This volume follows the arc of this body of work from Ellenson’s early articles on the Zionism of American rabbis to his last essay on the struggle between Jewish and democratic impulses in Israeli society. He draws on familiar sources of inquiry―Jewish prayers and legal sources―to chart changes in Israeli religious life and to excavate its theological-political foundation. What emerges is a profound meditation on some of the most important questions that Israel faces today: what does it mean to be Jewish in the state? What role should Halakhah play in a self-defined Jewish state? How should the state treat its non-Jewish minority? How deeply rooted is democracy in the state and its foundational texts? And can the state ever escape seemingly irrepressible internal and external conflict?

David Ellenson (1947–2023) was a distinguished scholar of modern Jewish thought and history. Among his many academic roles, he directed the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies and was a visiting professor in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University from 2015–2018. Most recently, he coedited, with Michael Marmur, American Jewish Thought Since 1934: Writings on Identity, Engagement and Belief. 

David N. Myers is the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Distinguished Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he serves as the director of the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute. He is the author and editor of many books, including, with Nomi Stolzenberg, American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York. 

Michael Marmur is professor of Jewish theology at the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. He is the author of Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Sources of Wonder, and most recently Living the Letters: An Alphabet of Emerging Jewish Thought.