Reform or Coup: Understanding Israel's Current Crisis Advocates of the controversial legislation insist it would simply enact a much-needed "reform" in the relationship between the legislative and judicial branches of the Israeli government. Opponents insist that the proposed legislation represents nothing less than a "coup" by the governing coalition that aims to seize and wield unchecked power over Israeli society. In this lecture, Professor Gribetz will offer an introduction to the history and evolution of the Israeli legal system in order to contextualize and understand the current crisis in Israel.

Jonathan Marc Gribetz is an associate professor in Princeton University's Near Eastern Studies department and its Program in Judaic Studies and he serves as director of the Near Eastern Studies Program. Gribetz is the author of Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter and the forthcoming Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO's Research on Judaism, Zionism, and Israel. He holds degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and Columbia.