Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal
Identities. By Gad Barzilai. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2003. 314p. $65.00.
This recent monograph—at least five years in
preparation—might better be described as a doubleheader. While
professing to be an original tract of communitarian political theory,
it happens to utilize three communities in Israel to illustrate its
multiple theses. This is the twenty-first publication in the
interdisciplinary “Law, Meaning and Violence” series edited
by Martha Minow, Austin Sarat, and Elaine Scarry, which explores how
law's narratives, practices, and institutions embody and give
voice to power and violence. The volume recently won the Yonathan
Shapiro Prize for the best book in Israel Studies from the Association
of Israel Studies. But instead of concentrating on the otherwise
ubiquitous topic of Israel's national security vis-à-vis
the occupied territories, it highlights the social and political rights
and identities of insular, internal minority groups that choose between
legal action and violence when confronted with state power.