Daphna Hacker

MOTHERHOOD, FATHERHOOD AND LAW: CHILD CUSTODY AND VISITATION IN ISRAEL

This article analyses the ways notions of fatherhood and motherhood are constructed, negotiated and articulated during divorce proceedings in Israel. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with divorced parents, lawyers, judges and therapeutic professionals, and on a wide sample of divorce court files involving child custody arrangements. The main finding of the study is that while motherhood is ordinarily perceived as a taken-for-granted caring essence, fatherhood is a vague concept that has yet to acquire concrete meaning. Treating the law as an overwhelming arena of conceptual negotiations and practical applications, the study also finds that legal professionals have a significant role in shaping how both women and men grasp and act upon their parental rights and duties. By and large, I find that the impact of legal professionals to that effect, combined with a rather conservative family law system in the shadow of which the parties operate, impedes innovation and discourages men from assuming expansive parental roles after divorce. Hence this study provides a rich example of the contribution of law to the gendered social expectations and coercions determining women and men’s ability to shape their parental roles and identities.

The Gendered Dimensions of Inheritance: Empirical Food for Legal Thought

Inheritance is an extremely significant personal, familial, social, and legal phenomenon. Due to the significance of inheritance in wealth distribution and family relations, it is essential to uncover and discuss its gendered dimensions, which have benefited from surprisingly little empirical or legal attention. This article provides an updated state-of-the-art review of the limited available empirical data on women as legators and on women as heirs in different parts of the world. The review is based on 23 studies, including the original results from a study the author conducted on inheritance in Israel, which illuminates the reach of insights that can be drawn from an inheritance study that focuses on gender. The review shows a sharp dichotomy between the ongoing discrimination women experience in non-Western societies in relation to inheritance and the social reality in the West, in which inheritance is a rare economic space in which women enjoy privilege, power, and control. Although egalitarian inheritance laws have had a dramatic impact on women’s representation in intestacy and their participation in will writing in the West, the data demonstrate that even in this part of the world, cultural patriarchal practices persist and limit women’s inheritance rights and, accordingly, point to the importance of creating legal mechanisms that can counterbalance these practices. Moreover, the available data indicate the value of freedom of testation for women and the importance of ceasing to regard care as cause for suspicion in inheritance law, and instead viewing it as a practice deserving of reward. Finally, the article identifies the areas in which further research on gender and inheritance is warranted, hopefully spurring greater interest and developments in the field.

A Legal Field in Action: The Case of Divorce Arrangements in Israel

This paper suggests a theoretical and methodological framework that integrates Bourdieu’s conception of the juridical field with Mnookin and Kornhauser’s claim of the centrality of the action occurring in the shadow of the law. This framework is constructed based on a study of the Israeli legal field governing divorce that included the analysis of 360 divorce files and in-depth interviews with more than 40 divorcees and legal and therapeutic professionals. The study allows a rare exploration of a legal field in action, including the main positions within the field and the power relations between them, as well as the field’s boundaries and game rules. The findings illustrade the importance of Bourdieu’s fields theory if and when opened up to the informal dimensions of law and demonstrate the potential of the suggested framework to the sociological understanding of law in action.

Intergenerational Wealth Transfer and the Need to Revive and Metamorphose the Israeli Estate Tax

Abstract This article suggests enacting an accession tax instead of the estate duty – which was repealed in Israel in 1981. This suggestion evolves from historical and normative explorations of the tension between perceptions of familial intergenerational property rights and justifications for the “death tax,” as termed by its opponents, i.e., estate and inheritance tax. First, the Article explores this tension as expressed in the history of the Israeli Estate Duty Law. This chronological survey reveals a move from the State’s taken-for-granted interest in revenue justifying the Law’s enactment in 1949; moving on to the “needy widow” and “poor orphan” in whose name the tax was attacked during the years 1959–1964, continuing to the abolition of the tax in 1981 in the name of efficiency and the right of the testator to transfer his wealth to his family, and finally cumulating with the targeting of tycoon dynasties that characterizes the recent calls for reintroducing the tax. Next, based on the rich literature on the subject, the Article maps the arguments for and against intergenerational wealth transfer taxation, placing the Israeli case in larger philosophical, political, and pragmatic contexts. Lastly, it associates the ideas of accession tax and “social inheritance” with inspirational sources for rethinking a realistic wealth transfer taxation to bridge the gap between notions of intergenerational familial rights and intergenerational social justice.

Crying on Campus

Crying is one of the most gendered emotional expressions. It acts as a gendering border that reinforces common patriarchal perceptions of hierarchal essentialist differences between the sexes. Notwithstanding, this gendering border acts differently in different spheres. In the academic sphere, on which this essay centers, there is very little room for crying. Here, men and women alike must perform according to masculine standards if they are to fulfill the role of scholars employed by a university. These standards are based on a hierarchal mind–body dichotomy that places pure rationality as the ideal, and demands self-control and emotional distance – which do not correlate well with the messy business of unrepressed tears. In this essay, I will explore four occasions on which I breached the masculine anti-crying norm on campus. Through reflective autoethnography of these brief crying episodes, enriched by conversations I later conducted with those who witnessed my tears, and several ‘crying on campus’ stories I received from others, I strive to demonstrate the effectiveness of using crying as a litmus test for a humane and feminist academia. In particular, I will use these crying episodes to explore: (1) the costs of the tension between the perception of academia as a sphere of pure scholarship that is superior to economic calculations and bureaucracy, and the actual lived university, which is a neoliberal employer like many others; (2) the question of feminist pedagogy and the scope for feelings in professor–student relations; and (3) the importance to female researchers of mutual feminist bonding.

The Rights of the Dead Through the Prism of Israeli: Succession Disputes

This paper aims at contributing to the evolving debate over the rights of the dead by providing it with concrete empirical socio-legal context. A pioneering study of succession disputes, conducted in Israel, exposes a gap between a prominent judicial promise to respect the wishes and guard the dignity of the deceased testator, and the actual action taking place behind this rhetoric. The findings reveal that the testator’s dignity and wishes are trampled during testamentary procedures, when demeaning allegations about his or her mental and physical competence are allowed, and personal and medical information is exposed, and when the judge approves settlements that diverge from the testator’s last will in the name of familial reconciliation, even though in most cases there are no nuclear family ties between the rival parties. These findings are discussed in the light of an original typology mapping the theoretical controversies over posthumous rights, to highlight some of the possible normative implications of the project for the law on the books and law in action related to property division after death.

From the Moabite Ruth to Norly the Filipino: Intermarriage and Conversion in the Jewish Nation State

In Israel, unlike in other countries, the vast majority of Jews marry other Jews. Interreligious marriages are not common, comprising about 5 percent of all marriages (The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute 2006: 11). Most interreligious families in Israel are those in which both spouses are immigrants from the former Soviet Union.’ However, some of them are comprised of a native Jewish-Israeli and a non-Jewish immigrant, and thus are international, intercultural, and sometimes interracial, as well as interreligious families.2 This article focuses on the latter. Through these families’ experiences, and the sociolegal regime in which they are shaped, I shall discuss the relations between gender, religion, and citizenship in the country that defines itself as the Jewish nation state.3