Michal Kravel-Tovi, When the State Winks: The Performance of Jewish Conversion in Israel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. xiii + 310 pp.

“The personal is political” is a slogan associated with mid-20th-century American feminism. This slogan was a challenge to conventional thinking regarding what was domestic and what was public, and what were the “proper” spheres of women and men. In somewhat analogous fashion, whereas American law and ideology assume that religion is a private matter, in Israel, Judaism has a formal public standing. At the same time, its scope and legitimate hold on individuals is continually contested. Conversion—whereby state-empowered religious authorities accept someone as Jewish—yields a dense intertwining of individual behavior and engagement with “the political.”...