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When the State Winks carefully traces the performance of state-endorsed Orthodox conversion in Israel. Michal Kravel-Tovi follows conversion candidates—mostly secular young women from a former Soviet background—and state conversion agents. She complicates the popular perception that conversion is a "wink-wink" relationship in which both sides agree to treat the converts' pretenses of faith as real, developing new ways to think about the complex connection between religious conversion and the nation-state.
When the State Winks traces the performance of state-endorsed Orthodox conversion in Israel. Michal Kravel-Tovi complicates the popular perception that it is a "wink-wink" relationship in which both sides agree to treat pretenses of faith as real, developing new ways to think about the connection between religious conversion and the nation-state.
Don Seeman, Emory University:The best recent ethnography of state bureaucratic practice in Israel and the best ethnography of state-assisted conversion more broadly. With clarity of prose, pathbreaking ethnography, and a humanizing argument, Kravel-Tovi’s work moves beyond accounts that treat ‘the state’ as a monolithic and inimical entity. Real people—rabbis, converts, and state workers—emerge from these pages, not stick figures of the sociological imagination.
Leora Batnitzky, Princeton University:When the State Winks is an excellent, original work that uniquely situates its analysis not just within an anthropological framework but also within a broad, humanistic one. Kravel-Tovi tells a compelling story about the political and personal complexities of conversion in Israel that will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, and historians as well as scholars of Judaism and religion more generally.
Tanya Luhrmann, Stanford University:The question of who is allowed to convert to Judaism in Israel, and how and when, is deeply charged with both spiritual and political commitments. Kravel-Tovi's insightful, thoughtful book helps us to understand the nature of these contradictions and their consequences and the way that converts themselves come to experience their conversion.
Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University:In this probe of state-religion relations in Israel, Michal Kravel-Tovi brings the critical but sympathetic curiosity of a skilled ethnographer to explore the use of religious conversion for the purpose of creating national belonging. Addressing the substantial divergence between rabbinical practice and theological ideals and portraying converts whose reasons for choosing Judaism are often practical rather than spiritual, she shows how officials of state as well as rabbinical judges wink collusively at the short shrift given to doctrinal requirements in favor of well-trained performances of sincerity.
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