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126 SHOFAR Winter 1995 Vol. 13, No.2 Apple of Gold: Constitutionalism in Israel and the United States, by Gary Jeffrey Jacobsohn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. 284 pp. $39.50. This book is a closely reasoned comparative treatment of judicial behavior in the United States and Israel, focusing on the interpretation of their fundamental laws by senior jurists. The author believes that comparative analysis can illuminate not only the legal institutions of the two countries, but also the societies these two systems of public law are intended to serve. A professor of government at Williams College, the author is well equipped for this task. A specialist in American constitutional law, he has learned much about constitutional interpretation in Israel by extended interviews with leadi~lg Israeli jurists and legal scholars. He has chosen to focus on a few critical issues: criteria for citizenship, limitations on freedom of expression, the functions of judicial review, and the place of a written constitution and bill of rights in a democratic polity. Despite the fact that the United States has a written constitution and bill of rights and that Israel has neither, comparison, he believes, can be fruitful because both regimes are dedicated to the practice of democracy and the rule of law. Moreover, both have produced declarations of independence that embody their common constitutive principle of liberty, the "apple of gold" (Lincoln's phrase) destined to guide and invigorate their constitutional and legal development. Constitutional interpretation in the United States has greatly influenced Israeli jurists, many of them judicial activists determined to employ the courts to consolidate democracy, the rule of law, and individual liberty in their fledgling democracy. They recognize, however, that as the two societies are differently structured and have different needs, juridical principles must respect these differences. In U.S. constitutional doctrine, rights are derived from universal principles of justice and inhere equally in all persons as individuals. The only concession to collective rights applies to the special situation of American Indians. Thus membership in the U.S. polity is an individual and civic status; equal protection of the laws applies to all individuals. By contrast, in Israel the stark reality of ethnic pluralism must be accommodated by law and public policy. Israel is the Jewish state, inspired by the precepts of the Hebrew prophets, to which Jews everywhere are privileged to return; though its non-Jewish residents are guaranteed full and equal citizenship, their rights cannot be identical with those ofJewish fellow citizens. Their separate group status requires differential treatment such as separate educational facilities-separate and, in fact, quite unequal. Boo,? Reviews 127 Tensions between cohesive, permanentcommunal pluralism and individual equality under the law, along with the secular-religious divide in Jewish society, have prevented the establishment of a constitution and bill of rights in Israel. The legal implications of these and similar differences in the sociopolitical environments of two countries both committed to democratic development are traced by the author using, for the most part, the standard American legal method of case analysis. An example is his skillful analysis of the differential judicial protection available to speech that inflames religious or racial hatred or that offends minorities. The author's presentation is competent, but it is not easy reading. It is a book for specialists that will be most rewarding to readers who are already acquainted with Israel's political system and wish to learn more about its legal institutions and the role of the courts in the Israeli polity. Milton J. Esman Department of Government Cornell University Polin: A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies. Volume 6 (1991). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers for the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies. 342 pp. n.p.!. In the early 1980s, as one of the many byproducts of the tottering of communism in Eastern Europe, a number of Polish historians began to collaborate with their Jewish counterparts in Western Europe, Israel, and the United States to examine the history of the Jews of Poland, particularly prior to the Holocaust. At the center of this renaissance of scholarly (and, especially in Poland, also popular) interest in the Jewish civilization of Eastern Europe, the annual Polin, founded in 1986, has played a...

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