Tal Becker

speaker

470 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 8 Aug

Tal Becker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Call Me Back - with Dan Senor · Sneak Peek: Tal Becker on the challenge of forming a coalition with Arabs parties · 8 Aug 2026 podcast

But we also have to acknowledge these fundamental tensions.

And as long as there are these tensions and contradictions, it's going to be a real challenge to persuade Israeli Jews that this is an easy thing to do.

I don't know it why it has to be this way, Dan, but I don't think there's an area of Israel that isn't complicated and hard to explain, but this certainly fits in that category.

We'll leave Michigan to you and I'll do the the Israel stuff.

So, first of all, just some basics.

Israel has no formal constitution.

So there isn't like the establishment clause like you have in the US Constitution.

And there isn't like a single legal document that regulates this issue.

I would say, if I had to give it a sentence, it's a kind of hybrid situation where Israel is kind of stronger on freedom of religion than it is on freedom from religion, in the sense that there's a real role for religious authority.

In Israeli society, in particular on personal status issues.

So I would say the core things to know are number one, that issues related to personal status, by which I mean like a marriage, divorce, conversion, to some extent burial, they are basically governed by the religious authorities of different denominations.

So there'll be Sharia courts, there'll be Christian denominations and courts, Druze courts.

And Orthodox courts.

And I think that's a big issue within the Jewish world in general: that the monopoly over personal status issues, religious issues for Jews is the rabbinate and the orthodox denomination.

And that I think has raised a whole host of issues.

So that triggers, first of all, the issue of having a civil or non-religious marriage domestically is not a recognized thing.

And it also makes

Reform and conservative Jews, for example, kind of feel like they are second class in the way that religious authorities treat them, and that Israel, because of the monopoly of the Orthodox, doesn't feel as much as a home for reform and conservative and other denominations of Jews.

There's a second aspect of this, which is what's called the status quo, which is a kind of de facto de Ure agreement reached initially in 47 between Big

Interestingly, I think most Israelis probably support more equal status, for

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