Princeton, the kosher dining hall, the academic year 1979-80. Moshe Koppel (b. 1956) had finished a doctorate in mathematics at NYU's Courant Institute a few months earlier, under Martin Davis (1928-2023), and had come down to the Institute for Advanced Study for a postdoctoral year. He was in his early twenties. He had grown up in New York, in yeshiva, and had spent a year at Yeshivat Har Etzion in the Judean hills. He knew Hebrew, Aramaic, Talmud, and recursion theory. He did not know what to say to the woman across the table.
She was Jewish, secular, a graduate student. In the book he wrote forty years later he called her Heidi and acknowledged that the character was partly composite. Her parents kept a kosher home on Long Island and belonged to a Conservative synagogue. At Princeton she had made friends from everywhere. She asked Koppel how he justified his tribal loyalty to the Jews. The lesson of the Holocaust, she said, was that Jews above all should never put their own interests ahead of anyone else's.
Koppel later described his own reaction in three words: “slack-jawed, staring at her uncomprehendingly.”
He had no argument ready. He had grown up around people for whom the question could not arise. His grandfather prayed in a Gerrer shtiebel in Manhattan with a small band of Polish Hasidim who had survived the camps. One of them, a merchant Koppel calls Shimen in the book, had lost his wife and two children in the Holocaust; he came out of Lodz and Auschwitz, and after the war he picked up a handgun and went looking for Jewish children who had been hidden with gentile families. Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) davened in that shtiebel from time to time. Koppel wrote of those men that “one thing they had no patience for was high-minded pieties.” They were funny in a hard way. They took liberties with God because they were on close terms with Him. They would not pour boiling water over a tea bag on Shabbat. The Jewish Press
Shimen could not have answered Heidi either. He would not have understood why she thought an answer was owed.
The rest of Koppel's career is, among other things, a forty-year project to supply the answer, using tools Shimen would have found unrecognizable and Heidi would have found congenial.
The dissertation work was in decidability. In 1979 he published a solution to a problem posed by Davis, Yuri Matiyasevich (b. 1947), and Julia Robinson (1919-1985) about which Diophantine problems can be settled by mechanical procedure. A later paper asked how an investigator chooses among an ordered hierarchy of hypotheses that all fit the observed facts. The recurring question in both: what can be decided from the evidence available, and what remains open no matter how long you compute.
He moved to Israel in 1980 and joined the computer science department at Bar-Ilan University, where he spent his academic career.
The problem he became known for has the same structure as the ones he trained on. A text is visible. Its author is hidden. What in the visible thing survives the author's control?
Not vocabulary, mostly. A historian writing about Napoleon and a physicist writing about superconductivity use different nouns for reasons that have nothing to do with either man. Koppel and his collaborators, chiefly Shlomo Argamon and Jonathan Schler, worked instead on the parts of language a writer does not choose: pronouns, articles, prepositions, conjunctions, suffixes, punctuation, the rate at which a given grammatical form appears. A man can decide to stop using a favorite adjective. He cannot hold three hundred small grammatical habits under conscious guard across ten thousand words.
In 2003 the group reported that the same statistical signals could predict a writer's sex, and later age and native language. The Boston Globe and The New York Times both ran pieces on it that summer. The findings did not say that all women write one way and all men another, and they did not speak to whether the differences were innate. They said that social experience deposits measurable residue in prose the writer is not aware of supplying. That was enough to generate a news cycle.
Koppel and Schler then built the method that carries his name furthest. Train a classifier to separate two bodies of writing. Find the features doing the most separating. Delete them. Retrain. Repeat. If the two bodies come from the same hand, accuracy collapses fast once the surface differences are stripped; the classifier runs out of things to grab. If they come from different hands, deeper differences remain and accuracy degrades slowly. They called it unmasking. It measures not whether two texts differ but how far down the difference goes.
The first serious application was a rabbi who had hidden his own authorship.
Yosef Hayim of Baghdad (1835-1909), known by the title of his best-known work as the Ben Ish Chai, was the leading halakhic authority of Iraqi Jewry. In 1878 he published a collection of 524 responsa called Torah Lishmah, presenting it as an old manuscript he had come across rather than as his own composition. Historians had long suspected he wrote it himself, for reasons ranging from modesty to a wish to have the rulings judged on their merits rather than on his signature.
Koppel and Schler compared Torah Lishmah against 509 responsa Yosef Hayim acknowledged, in Rav Pe'alim, and against collections by four other rabbis of the period. The comparison authors fell away. The distance between the disputed collection and the acknowledged one behaved the way same-author distances behave. This did not prove authorship in any deductive sense, and Koppel has never claimed it did. It supplied a new kind of evidence for a conclusion scholars had reached by other means, and it did so on an unusually hard case, since a man writing under a pseudonym has every incentive to change his habits on purpose.
He later turned the methods on the Kherson Genizah, a trove of letters presented as copies of correspondence among the Baal Shem Tov, Shneur Zalman of Liadi, and other early Hasidic masters, which surfaced in Ukraine around 1917 and which most scholars had already judged fraudulent. Koppel's analysis found that the supposed differences among the various attributed authors did not behave like differences between real independent writers. He published it in Hebrew, in a rabbinic journal, in 2010.
Then came the Bible.
In 2011 Koppel published an ACL paper with his student Navot Akiva and with Nachum Dershowitz (b. 1951) and Idan Dershowitz on splitting a document into stylistic components without any labeled examples. The method builds a list of synonym sets, roughly two hundred of them for biblical Hebrew, generated automatically by finding Hebrew roots that the King James renders with the same English root. For each chunk of text it records which synonym from each set the chunk uses. Chunks that make similar choices cluster together.
To test it, they took two books by two authors, shuffled them, and asked the method to unshuffle them. Jeremiah and Ezekiel. About seventeen percent of the verses could not be classified for lack of any distinguishing word. Of the roughly 2,200 that were classified, 26 landed on the wrong side. A 1.2 percent error rate.
Then they ran it on the Torah. Split into two families, the output matched the standard critical division between Priestly and non-Priestly material for about ninety percent of the verses where the standard authorities agree with each other.
The wire services got hold of it. An algorithm sheds light on the authorship of the Bible. By the time the story returned to Israel, Haaretz readers learned that the head of the project had announced proof of multiple human authorship of the Torah, which was news to the head of the project.
Koppel wrote a correction and published it on the Seforim Blog, a site read by exactly the people who would care. It is the clearest thing he has written about the limits of his own instruments.
The number of families, he explained, is not discovered by the method. It is supplied by the operator. Ask it for two and it gives you two. Ask it to split Moby-Dick into thirteen and it will. That the Torah splits in two therefore says nothing whatsoever about how many authors it had. He also declined to let his readers take too much comfort: with better methods one probably could estimate an optimal number, and the correspondence with the critics' division suggests the split is not an artifact. Ask three families and the correspondence degrades. Ask four or more and the critics' J and E do not appear at all.
On the theological question he was blunter. The work could have no bearing on divine authorship, because inferring multiple authors from multiple styles rests on assumptions about human cognition and human performance, and nobody has a theory of what a divinely written text is supposed to look like. He noted the obvious objection, that this makes the claim unfalsifiable, and said the objection deserved a longer discussion than he was going to give it there.
Of the question that had opened every lecture he ever gave on authorship, “have you analyzed the Bible,” he wrote: “I never really understood the question.” Shomrim
Keep that essay in mind. It is the standard he set for himself in one domain, and it will matter when he moves to another.
His Talmudic work runs on the same problem from the other side. Meta-Halakhah, published in 1996, argues that Jewish law works like a natural language. A grammar can describe a language without generating every judgment a competent speaker makes. Native speakers know a sentence is wrong before they can name the rule it breaks. Accomplished halakhists recognize that an argument does not fit before they can say which principle it violates. The intuition is not sentiment. It is competence built by immersion in cases.
The position sits between two accounts he rejects. One treats halakhah as a closed formal system from which every answer can be derived. The other treats it as an open field where a sufficiently clever reader reaches whatever result he already wanted. A language constrains without being exhaustively codifiable, and it changes through use. So does the law.
He also wrote Seder Kinnim, a mathematical commentary on the Mishnah's tractate about sacrificial birds that get mixed among groups of different legal status, generally reckoned the hardest tractate in the Mishnah. He founded and co-edited Higayon, a journal on rabbinic logic, with Ely Merzbach. He wrote on probability in halakhah and on rules for uncertainty in Talmudic reasoning with the logician Dov Gabbay.
Formalize the tacit; do not claim the formalization replaces it. That is the move, repeated across four decades and five fields.
Dicta, the Israel Center for Text Analysis, is the largest thing he has built that has a test set.
Hebrew is hard for tools designed around English. Prefixes carrying conjunctions, articles and prepositions attach to the front of words. Suffixes carry possession and objects. Ordinary Hebrew drops the vowels, so one written string maps to several pronunciations, several parses, several meanings. Biblical, rabbinic, medieval and modern Hebrew differ in vocabulary, syntax and spelling. Rabbinic texts add Aramaic, dense abbreviation, and orthography that never stabilized.
Dicta's tools do vocalization, abbreviation expansion, morphological analysis, source identification, parallel-text discovery, manuscript reconstruction, authorship analysis. Most are free.
One paper shows the house style. Finding every parallel passage in the Babylonian Talmud by brute force would require something like 1.6 trillion edit-distance calculations, which Koppel and his coauthors Avi Shmidman and Ely Porat estimated at roughly twenty years on one machine. Instead they represented each word by its two rarest letters. This works because the most common Hebrew letters are yod, aleph and vav, which are also the vowel markers and the common prefixes, so throwing them away throws away most of the spelling noise. Then they looked for four- and five-word strings differing by at most one word, and clustered the matches. The run found 4,602 parallel pairs across 1.8 million words in eleven seconds.
That is the pattern: do not try to understand the text; find the smallest signal that survives the corruption you care about.
The models followed. BEREL in 2022, a language model trained on rabbinic Hebrew, on the premise that rabbinic Hebrew is a domain in its own right and not defective modern Hebrew. DictaBERT in 2023, with fine-tuned versions for prefix segmentation, morphological tagging and question answering. DictaLM the same year, DictaLM 2.0 in 2024, adapted from Mistral with a Hebrew evaluation suite. Dicta-LM 3.0 in December 2025, open-weight models at 1.7, 12 and 24 billion parameters, 65,000-token context, trained on roughly 100 billion Hebrew tokens and 30 billion English.
The phrase in the technical report is “sovereign Hebrew.” A society whose inheritance sits in a low-resource language becomes a tenant when the models through which it reads and writes are built abroad. Koppel's answer is to build the datasets, the benchmarks, the morphology, the models, and to release enough that others can check the work.
Through 2023, through the war, through Kohelet's collapse in funding, that work continued.
Judaism Straight Up: Why Real Religion Endures appeared in 2020, forty years after the dining hall. It began as a blog called Judaism Without Apologies.
The book puts Shimen and Heidi side by side, though they never meet. Shimen inhabits an inherited world of ritual, kinship, food restrictions, memory and specific obligation. He cannot give a philosophical defense of most of what he does. His Judaism is a first language. Heidi's is a second language, learned through stated rules in formal settings, and she assumes that a practice earns allegiance only after it justifies itself by independently established principles.
Koppel's argument is that practice precedes belief. Nobody selects a theology and then deduces a life. People acquire habits, loyalties, reflexes and expectations by growing up among other people, and their stated beliefs come along afterward as explanation and repair. A tradition survives because its institutions keep producing people willing and able to carry it, not because each generation re-derives its propositions.
The argument is Hayekian in structure, though Koppel draws on economics, game theory, anthropology and moral psychology rather than applying Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) to religion. Knowledge can be distributed across a community and stored in practices. A rule that looks pointless in isolation may be holding up a system that produces trust and restraint. The reformer sees the inconvenience. He may not see the network.
Koppel does not claim that survival vindicates a practice. Slavery survived. His claim is narrower and harder to dismiss: inherited practices deserve interpretation before demolition, because they may contain information the reformer cannot see, and the burden falls partly on whoever proposes to dismantle a system whose coordinating functions nobody has mapped. He builds his account of moral foundations on Richard Shweder (b. 1945), arguing that Shimen's world runs on fairness, loyalty and restraint together while Heidi's runs on fairness alone.
The particularism follows from this. Concrete obligations to family, neighbors and Jews are the institutions through which moral responsibility becomes something a person can act on. A man who claims equal concern for everyone may find he owes no one anything in particular. A man embedded in thick relations knows whose children need help this week.
The critics found the construction unfair, and they had a case. Heidi is thin where Shimen is thick, and the coercion and cruelty available inside traditional communities get less attention than the sterility of cosmopolitan life. Benjamin Schvarcz, writing from Princeton's James Madison Program, pressed a different point: Shimen thanks America the way a guest thanks a hotel. If patriotism is a form of loyalty, Shimen has less of it than Heidi does, and Koppel's own Israeli argument depends on the kind of political loyalty his hero lacks. The Fathom reviewer pressed the sharpest one. Shimen's children were murdered. Whether his Judaism transmits across generations is precisely what the case cannot show.
Koppel entered Israeli constitutional politics before he built anything. He sat in on the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee under Michael Eitan (b. 1944), drafted the sections on religion and state, and later co-authored two complete draft constitutions, one of them with Eitan. He also wrote the 2011 law requiring Israeli nonprofits to disclose funding received from foreign governments. Supporters called it transparency about foreign state intervention. Opponents said it stigmatized European-funded human rights groups while leaving private foreign donations to right-wing organizations in the dark. That objection would come back.
He founded the Kohelet Policy Forum in February 2012, in offices at Am Ve'olamo 8 in Givat Shaul, Jerusalem. It ran on Jewish nationalism, market economics, individual liberty, and a theory of representative government hostile to unelected authority. Avraham Diskin, Avi Bell and Eugene Kontorovich were among the principals.
The innovation was not the ideology. It was the delivery. Israeli parties and members of Knesset have thin research staffs. A think tank that arrives with a finished bill, a memorandum answering the objections, comparative material from six countries, a witness for committee, and a lawyer who will stay through the amendments has leverage that an essay does not have. Kohelet supplied the right with what it had never had: a bench. Its scholars contributed to the 2018 Basic Law declaring Israel the nation-state of the Jewish people, and Ayelet Shaked (b. 1976) drew on its network during her years as justice minister. A former Kohelet researcher became legal adviser to the Knesset's Constitution Committee. A Kohelet fellow became director general of the Education Ministry.
Koppel told the Jerusalem Post in 2024 how he scores this kind of work. A think tank wins when it converts a nonissue into an issue. Judicial reform, he said, had been nothing at all. Kohelet made it something.
On January 4, 2023, six days after Benjamin Netanyahu (b. 1949) assembled his coalition, Justice Minister Yariv Levin (b. 1969) announced a program in five parts. The attorney general's advice would stop binding the government, which could hire its own counsel. Administrative decisions could no longer be struck down on reasonableness alone. Basic Laws would not be subject to judicial review. Statutes could be struck only by a supermajority of a full panel, and the Knesset could override. The judicial selection committee would be reweighted toward elected officials.
Kohelet had been publishing on four of those five for a decade. Levin named Aviad Bakshi, head of Kohelet's legal department, as one of the scholars he had consulted.
Koppel disliked the override from the start, and said so where he thought he was among friends. Sixty-one members of the Knesset could pass a law and then use the same sixty-one to immunize it. In February he told a closed meeting of young immigrants in Tel Aviv that it was a “stupid idea.” In March, Channel 13 aired leaked remarks in which he told a small crowd that Kohelet's advice to Levin and to Simcha Rothman (b. 1980) had been that the override is completely idiotic, and that it was in the package for coalition reasons rather than for anyone's stated ones. The Times of IsraelKohelet Forum
By then the country was in the street, and Kohelet was on the map.
On March 9, 2023, about a hundred demonstrators from Brothers in Arms, the reservists' organization, blocked the Givat Shaul entrance with sandbags and barbed wire. On March 15, protesters followed him through Jerusalem as he met a delegation from the Jewish Federations of North America. On March 22, Israeli expatriates and American Jews filled a street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a few blocks from where the Gerrer men had prayed, to protest his appearance at an Aish New York event. On April 2, six women from a feminist group entered the offices, and were arrested; the group said it was protesting Kohelet's positions on sexual assault, domestic violence, the poor and the LGBTQ community, and a Kohelet employee wrote that a woman had run at her and tried to hit her. On June 1, demonstrators came to his home in Efrat, in the Judean hills south of Jerusalem, over the Green Line, and posted flyers on his fence: “Here lives a collaborator with a dictator.” A neighbor turned a garden hose on them.
In the essay he wrote that autumn, Koppel recorded two more. A retired chief education officer of the IDF posted a call for his elimination, specifying that he meant the word “in the military sense” and not as a figure of speech. A retired defense minister told him there would be blood in the streets, and that although the minister's own friends would be spilling it, the blood would be on Kohelet's hands.
His account of the meetings is the part of the record that will interest historians most, and it comes from one side only. He and his colleagues met pilots, magnates, former security chiefs, former ministers. He says his interlocutors almost never wanted to discuss the reform's contents or how to improve them. He says he could not make sense of what they were saying until he found the premise that made all of it coherent: that the wrong people had won the election and would keep winning, and that unless the court and the legal bureaucracy retained unlimited power, Israel's unelected institutions would fall into unfit hands. He named the premise the Barbarians at the Gates axiom.
He also produced a scene. Four leaders of the Kaplan Street protests came to Kohelet to demand that the forum renounce the reforms. Koppel and his colleagues said policy should be set by the elected government and legislature. One of the men, a magnate who led the chant of de-mo-krat-ya at rallies, asked whether Koppel seriously imagined his own political preferences should count no more than those of a taxi driver from Beit Shemesh. Koppel replied with the line from The Princess Bride about a word not meaning what the speaker thinks it means. kohelet
The story is his, told in Tablet in June 2026, with no name attached to the magnate and no corroboration offered. Take it as what it is: the memory of a participant with an argument to win. It is also the single most useful thing anyone has published about what those rooms were like, and nobody on the other side has published a competing account of the same meeting.
Meanwhile the compromise track ran. Koppel says opposition politicians refused to sit with Levin, and that he tried repeatedly to get them into a room. He and his counterparts in rival policy shops then negotiated privately for two months and reached detailed agreement on everything except the composition of the selection committee. The package went to President Isaac Herzog (b. 1960), who was hosting the national compromise effort. Herzog, Koppel says, was in close contact with sitting and retired justices, and returned with a proposal much closer to the hard opposition's position. It went nowhere.
Koppel's diagnosis of why compromise failed is the one honest thing in the essay that cuts against his own side's interest. So long as both camps feared a worse outcome, a deal was available. Once pressure on the government not to move without broad consensus made unilateral action unlikely, the opposition had no reason to trade. The people demanding consensus destroyed the conditions for it.
He finished the essay on October 6, 2023.
He did not look at it again for three months. When he did, he left the text alone and added a postscript.
His policy view had not moved. His sense of proportion had. He described it to the Jerusalem Post the following April, in his house in Efrat on a rainy day, as a married couple in the middle of a fight who get hit with a family health crisis and cannot believe what they had been shouting about.
“I don't think I was wrong, but it wasn't that important,” he said. Episciences
He said the reform had been far from perfect, that the opposition had had perfectly good reasons, that there was blame to go around for how the political process ran and that he took his share. His son and son-in-law had spent months in Gaza. Most of Kohelet's senior staff had been there too. He noted in the essay that his interlocutors' sons and his own were serving together, and that a little more grace on both sides would have gone a long way.
He did not convert. He argued in the same postscript that legislation had been the wrong instrument all along, because the court had by then struck down the one piece of the reform that passed and could strike down any future limit on itself. He argued that the war had wrecked the prestige of the institutions he opposed, and that prestige, not statute, is what determines who defers to whom. He borrowed Peter Turchin's (b. 1957) elite overproduction to explain the fury: a generation of Israeli magnates, retired generals and former ministers had been produced in numbers the country's top jobs could not absorb, and Netanyahu's longevity had blocked the rest.
The money went first. Arthur Dantchik, the Philadelphia investor who was Kohelet's principal benefactor, announced on August 4, 2023 that he had stopped giving to Israeli think tanks, saying the country needed to “focus on healing and national unity.” Protesters had been outside his house in Philadelphia; Koppel said afterward that he understood a man not wanting to pay for the privilege of being harassed. Kohelet's income fell from 30 million shekels in 2022 to 24 million in 2023 to 13.6 million in 2024. It let go dozens of employees, cut research, and stopped funding allied groups. Of the roughly four million dollars it took in during 2024, about three and a half million came through the Central Fund of Israel. In January 2025 the Knesset Finance Committee left it off the list of 138 nonprofits approved for donor tax credits while the Tax Authority examined claims that it engaged in partisan political activity; the authority found no basis for the claims, and the committee restored the status in March, with ten coalition members turning up to make sure the vote carried. Kohelet said more than ten thousand Israelis had recently given it money. The Times of Israel
The organization that had once been sustained by one American now advertised a tax refund to small domestic donors.
Shani Granot-Lubaton, a New York-based leader of the protests and of the campaign against Dantchik, was given a right of reply by the Jerusalem Post. She said the Israeli public was troubled by Koppel's attempt to damage Israeli democracy and the rights of women, minorities and everyone else; that Dantchik had faced legal, determined and effective protest and nothing beyond it; and that Koppel's delicacy about being demonized had not extended to the campaigns run against liberal organizations in Israel. She said the protesters were defending Israeli democracy for Koppel's children too.
Then the thing he wanted arrived.
In January 2026 the coalition advanced a bill placing ministry legal advisers under the directors general appointed by ministers rather than under the attorney general. On July 15, 2026, after eleven hours of filibuster and nearly seventy committee sessions run by Rothman, the Knesset passed the central measure: the attorney general's written legal opinions cease to bind the government, which may declare that an opinion does not state the law, and may take its own position in court and hire private counsel if the attorney general will not argue it. Netanyahu was absent from the vote. Bezalel Smotrich (b. 1980) congratulated Rothman on a decision of enormous significance for Jewish identity, Zionism, security and settlement.
That is item one on Levin's list of January 4, 2023, close to word for word, and it is the item Koppel argued for most consistently and most publicly for a decade.
Note how it came. It passed by roughly a dozen votes as part of a bundle assembled with the Haredi parties, who supplied their votes after the coalition advanced a Basic Law on Torah study, froze arrests of draft evaders, and reversed changes to kosher certification. The vote nearly collapsed anyway when Moshe Gafni (b. 1952) held out over funding for ultra-Orthodox kindergarten teachers, and Rothman stretched a speech to buy time while Netanyahu put the funding item on the cabinet agenda. The provision splitting the attorney general's role was dropped. Within thirty days of the law taking effect the government must decide how future attorneys general will be appointed, which critics read as a route to removing Gali Baharav-Miara (b. 1959) without the professional committee that blocked the last attempt.
The law takes effect on January 1, 2027. The election is expected in late October 2026. The coalition that passed it may not be the government that lives under it.
Deputy Attorney General Gil Limon told the committee that once the bill passes the government will decide for itself what the law is. Petitions reached the Supreme Court the same night. The Times of Israel
Koppel's own standard for this class of decision, stated in the essay he finished on October 6, 2023 and sharpened in a Kohelet piece in November 2025, is the veil of ignorance: constitutional arrangements should be designed without knowing which camp will hold power when they are used, because nobody knows what the coalition and the court will look like in thirty years. He applied the test to his opponents and asked whether they would grant the same powers to unelected institutions if Oranges ran them and Blues formed the government. He said we all knew the answer.
The test is available to be run in the other direction on a law passed by sixty-odd votes, in the last weeks of a Knesset, as part of a package traded for draft exemptions and kindergarten money, coming into force after the election. Koppel has not published on it as of this writing.
Set the two halves of the career next to each other.
At Dicta, every claim has a held-out set. Vocalize the text and a scholar can check the vowels. Find the parallels and a Talmudist can open the two pages. Split Jeremiah from Ezekiel and count the twenty-six verses that went wrong. When the wires said his algorithm had proved the Torah had many authors, Koppel wrote three thousand words explaining that the number of authors was an input he had chosen, that the method could not have discovered it, and that the whole exercise was silent on the question everyone actually cared about. He gave away the strongest claim available to him because it was not supported.
At Kohelet there is no held-out set. A constitutional arrangement is run once, on one country, by the people who wanted it, against opponents who will not concede the result. There is no Jeremiah to shuffle with Ezekiel. The output cannot be scored and the error rate cannot be estimated, and the operator's choice of how many families to look for goes uncorrected, because nobody can run the experiment again with the other assumption.
His philosophy holds that a community stores knowledge in practices its members cannot state, and that the man who redesigns the practice from a diagram is likely to break something he never saw. His career has consisted of writing the diagrams. He built classifiers to extract what writers do not know they do, formal logic to describe what halakhists know before they can say it, language models to carry Hebrew that no grammar exhausts, and a policy shop to hand finished statutes to men in a hurry.
He argued that Israel's problem was a small, self-selecting body of credentialed people who converted professional expertise into political authority and could not be voted out. He was right that such a body existed. He answered it by building a small body of credentialed people, funded for a decade by one foreign billionaire, that converted professional expertise into political authority and could not be voted out. Both are true at once, and Koppel, who spent his life on the difference between what a method shows and what it does not, is better placed than most to say so.
Shimen would have had no idea what any of it was for. Heidi got her answer forty years late, in book form, from a man who had spent the interval learning to speak her language well enough to tell her why he would not adopt it. The state is the third party to the argument, and it does not read.
Notes
Biography and career. Wikipedia, Moshe Koppel (born 1956; NYU Courant 1979 under Martin Davis; IAS postdoc; aliyah 1980; Bar-Ilan; Har Etzion; YU). Kohelet’s own bio page, Prof. Moshe Koppel. Yeshivat Har Etzion, Dr. Moshe Koppel.
The Princeton scene and Heidi. Benjamin Schvarcz, Acton Institute, Tradition: A Guide to Social Survival in the 21st Century. This is the source for the kosher dining hall, Heidi’s challenge, and the “slack-jawed” self-description, and also for the patriotism objection I quote. The reviewer is writing from Princeton’s James Madison Program, which he notes sits at the address of the former kosher dining hall.
Shimen. Book of Books review (Lodz, Auschwitz, wife and two children murdered, the handgun and the hidden children, Wiesel in the shtiebel, the “high-minded pieties” passage). First Things, “Mere Judaism”. Jewish Action review by Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein. Fathom review for the objection that Shimen has no surviving children. The blog that became the book was Judaism Without Apologies; Elli Fischer’s Lehrhaus review coined “the Torah of the Kishkes.”
Authorship attribution. Koppel, Schler & Argamon, Computational Methods in Authorship Attribution, JASIST 2009. Koppel, Schler & Bonchek-Dokow, Measuring Differentiability: Unmasking Pseudonymous Authors, JMLR 2007 (the Torah Lishmah case, 524 vs 509 documents). Argamon, Koppel, Pennebaker & Schler, Automatically Profiling the Author of an Anonymous Text, CACM 2009. The 2003 press cycle: Charles McGrath, “Sexed Texts,” New York Times, August 10, 2003; Clive Thompson, “He and She: What’s the Real Difference?”, Boston Globe, July 6, 2003.
The Bible episode. Koppel’s own correction is the key document: Attribution and Misattribution: On Computational Linguistics, Heresy and Journalism, Seforim Blog, July 11, 2011. All the numbers I cite (200 synonym sets, 17% unclassified, 26 of ~2,200 misassigned, ~90% agreement with the Driver/Friedman consensus, no J/E at four or more families) are his. The underlying paper is Koppel, Akiva, I. Dershowitz & N. Dershowitz, Unsupervised Decomposition of a Document Into Authorial Components, ACL 2011. The Kherson Genizah paper is in Hebrew, Yeshurun 23 (2010), 559-566.
Talmudic work. Meta-Halakhah: Logic, Intuition, and the Unfolding of Jewish Law (Jason Aronson, 1996). Seder Kinnim (Hebrew). Higayon, co-edited with Ely Merzbach: journal page. “Uncertainty Rules in Talmudic Reasoning,” with Dov Gabbay, History and Philosophy of Logic 32(1).
Dicta. Shmidman, Koppel & Porat, Identification of Parallel Passages Across a Large Hebrew/Aramaic Corpus (4,602 pairs, 1.8m words; the arXiv abstract says “just over 30 seconds,” the v2 paper text says 11 seconds, and I used 11 with the twenty-year brute-force estimate that appears in the paper). BEREL, DictaBERT, DictaLM, DictaLM 2.0, Dicta-LM 3.0. Organizational overview: European Association for Jewish Studies showcase.
Constitutional work and Kohelet’s founding. Wikipedia, Kohelet Policy Forum (founded 2012, Am Ve’olamo 8, Givat Shaul, Diskin/Bell/Kontorovich). The 2011 foreign-government funding disclosure law and the two constitutional drafts are documented in the Wikipedia biography with links to the Knesset committee archive.
The 2023 fight. Koppel’s own long account, which is where the compromise negotiations, the Herzog proposal, the Barbarians axiom, the Blues and Oranges, the Turchin argument, the “elimination” post, the “blood in the streets” threat, and the demonstration calling him a foreign implant all come from: The Long Road to Democracy, Kohelet, March 30, 2025, originally in Hashiloach. Note one small discrepancy: he writes there of demonstrators in New Jersey and of “44 years” in Israel; the documented March 2023 protest was on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (Jewish Press), and 1980 to 2023 is 43 years. They may be separate events; I kept the Manhattan one, which is sourced, and paraphrased the “foreign implant” line without a location.
The override remarks: Times of Israel, February 23, 2023 (“stupid idea,” closed meeting with young immigrants in Tel Aviv) and Times of Israel, March 26, 2023 (Channel 13 leak, “completely idiotic,” advice to Levin and Rothman). Levin’s citation of Aviad Bakshi is in the same pieces.
The protests: Times of Israel, March 9 blockade and April 2 office entry; JNS on the six arrests; Haaretz on the Breaking Walls action; Times of Israel, June 1, 2023, on the Efrat home protest (the flyer text and the garden hose).
The taxi driver scene. Moshe Koppel, “De-Mo-Krat-Ya!”, Tablet, June 5, 2026, part of a series tied to Tablet Studios’ The Battle for Israel’s Soul.
October 7 and after. Eliav Breuer, Kohelet’s Moshe Koppel reflects on the judicial reforms a year later, Jerusalem Post, April 13, 2024. This is the source for the couple-fight analogy, “I don’t think I was wrong, but it wasn’t that important,” the sons in Gaza, the think-tank-victory remark, the Dantchik harassment comment, and Shani Granot-Lubaton’s reply, which I paraphrased rather than quoted. Also useful: 18Forty interview, November 2024; Daniel Gordis’s two-part interview.
Money. Times of Israel on Dantchik, August 4, 2023; AP/PBS; Shomrim, July 21, 2025 for the 30m/24m/13.6m shekel figures and the Central Fund of Israel share; Times of Israel, January 20, 2025 and JNS, March 3, 2025 on the Section 46 fight and the ten thousand donors.
The 2026 endgame. Times of Israel, January 7, 2026 on the legal-advisers bill; Times of Israel, January 12, 2026 on the wider package; Ynet, July 15, 2026 for the law’s contents, the Haredi bundle, the Gafni holdout, the January 1, 2027 effective date, the thirty-day appointment clause, and Gil Limon’s line; Times of Israel, July 15, 2026 for the eleven-hour filibuster and Smotrich’s remarks. One discrepancy I did not resolve: Ynet reports the tally as 61-51, the Times of Israel as 65-51.
The veil of ignorance. Stated in The Long Road to Democracy and sharpened in Koppel’s November 2025 Kohelet piece, “Restoring Balance to Government Requires the Veil of Ignorance.” Also Jerusalem Post op-ed, February 2025.
Jurispathic: Moshe Koppel and Robert Cover
In 1983 the Harvard Law Review asked Robert Cover (1943-1986) to write its annual Foreword on the Supreme Court’s term. He was forty, a professor at Yale, an observant Jew who read Talmud and taught law, and he had already written a book about antebellum judges who enforced the Fugitive Slave Act against their own convictions. He produced ninety pages called “Nomos and Narrative.” It is now among the most cited law review articles ever published. He died three years later, at forty-two.
The argument runs like this. We inhabit a normative universe, a nomos, and we hold it together with stories. Rules do not stand on their own. No set of legal prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it sense. Strip the story and the rule is noise.
Communities make law constantly. Cover called this jurisgenesis, and his claim was that it happens everywhere people share a narrative and take on obligations, in monasteries and unions and families and yeshivas, with no state required. The state is late to this. It does not manufacture normative meaning. It arrives after meaning is already in production, in surplus.
He distinguished two patterns. The paideic is world-creating: a common body of texts, a shared discourse about how to read them, and interpersonal commitment strong enough to make the reading binding. Its natural home is the small group. It is thick, it educates, it obligates, and it fragments, because every serious reading generates further readings, and the community can hold them together only by teaching harder or by expelling people. The imperial is world-maintaining: thin, universalist, procedural, concerned with keeping distinct worlds from colliding. Its natural home is the state. Cover’s judgment on the imperial mode is severe. He called its virtues weak forces, system-maintaining, and said the organizing principle it supplies cannot itself produce the meaning that is life and growth.
Then the move that gave the essay its shock. Hart and Kelsen and Dworkin had all assumed a shortage of law, and had spent their careers explaining how judges make more of it in hard cases. Cover said the opposite. Law is in oversupply. The problem is fecundity. A hard case is hard because two litigants arrive with two valid nomoi, each intelligible inside its own narrative, and the court must pick. When it picks it does not create law. It destroys the other one.
“Judges are people of violence,” Cover wrote, and the office they hold is the jurispathic office. The law-killing office. He did not mean this as an accusation of bad faith. He meant it as a description of the job. Somebody has to reduce the multiplicity, and the court is the instrument, and what makes the court’s version stick is not that it is more correct but that it commands men with guns. His term for the state’s law is the social organization of law as power, which he set against the organization of law as meaning, and he thought the gap between the two was the permanent tragedy of the enterprise. In “Violence and the Word,” three years later, he put it without any cushioning: legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death.
Cardozo Israeli Supreme Court Project
The case he built the Foreword around was Bob Jones University v. United States, decided that term, in which the Court upheld the revocation of tax-exempt status from a Christian university whose religious doctrine forbade interracial dating. Cover was not defending the university’s racial doctrine. What held him was the amicus briefs from Mennonite and Amish groups who had no stake in the racial question at all and who filed anyway, because they understood what the case was about: whether a community may live by its own law when the state’s law says otherwise, and what the state may charge for the privilege. Cover’s complaint against the opinion was that it did the killing without saying so. He called it uncommitted, unwilling to put much on the line, an expression of the passing will of the state rather than a constitutional commitment the state was prepared to own.
Two ways a community can meet the state, in his scheme. Insular: turn inward, ask to be left alone, pay the price of separation. Redemptive: go out, try to remake the whole order in the image of your own nomos. His examples of the second were the abolitionists, Garrison against Douglass on whether the Constitution was a slave document or an antislavery one, both of them reading the same text out of a narrative the state did not share.
And the test that runs under all of it. A legal interpretation “cannot be valid if no one is prepared to live by it.” Meaning is cheap. Commitment is the thing that converts a reading into law. Cover meant lived, and he meant it at cost.
Cardozo Israeli Supreme Court Project
That is the apparatus. I have not found an English-language treatment that runs it over the Israeli constitutional fight of the last three years, which is strange, because the fight is the cleanest specimen the theory has been offered since Cover wrote, and because the man at its intellectual center has spent forty years describing jurisgenesis without ever using the word.
Moshe Koppel (b. 1956) published Meta-Halakhah in 1996. Its thesis is that Jewish law works the way a natural language works. A grammar describes a language without generating every judgment a competent speaker makes. Native speakers know a sentence is wrong before they can name the rule it breaks, and accomplished halakhists recognize that an argument does not fit the tradition before they can say which principle it violates. The intuition is competence, built by immersion in cases, and it exceeds any codification of itself.
That is a theory of jurisgenesis. The law lives in a community’s practice and its stories, the written corpus underdetermines it, and the people who carry it know more than the code contains.
Judaism Straight Up, twenty-four years later, is the same claim scaled up to a society. Koppel sets a Gerrer Hasid he calls Shimen, a survivor of Lodz and Auschwitz who prayed in a Manhattan shtiebel with Koppel’s grandfather, against a Princeton graduate student he calls Heidi. Shimen inhabits a thick weave of ritual, food restrictions, kinship rules, commercial norms, communal memory and specific obligation. His Judaism is a first language and he cannot give a philosophical defense of most of it. Heidi holds a single overriding principle, avoid harm to any person, learned as a rule and applied as a rule. Koppel’s argument is that Shimen’s community can reproduce itself and Heidi’s cannot.
Read that through Cover and it stops being a polemic about Jews and becomes a proposition about law. Shimen’s shtiebel is a paideic nomos: corpus, discourse, commitment. Heidi’s harm principle is imperial: a world-maintaining rule that tells you how to avoid collisions without telling you what to build. Koppel’s charge is that the imperial mode cannot generate normative meaning on its own and is parasitic on paideic communities it did not make and cannot make. That is Cover’s own position, stated on page sixteen of the Foreword, in 1983, by a Yale law professor who would have found Koppel’s politics uncongenial.
Neither man cites the other. Cover was dead before Koppel wrote a word on any of this. Koppel does not seem to have read him.
The machines belong here too. Koppel’s authorship attribution works by finding the residue that a community deposits in a writer without the writer’s knowledge: pronouns, prepositions, suffixes, the rate at which grammatical forms recur. His method for locating parallel passages across the Babylonian Talmud, which found 4,602 of them in 1.8 million words in eleven seconds, is a device for tracing how a nomos propagates itself through repetition and rephrasing. When his group’s clustering algorithm split the Torah along roughly the same line the biblical critics had drawn, he wrote three thousand words on a blog explaining that the number of authors was an input he had chosen and the method could not have discovered it, and that the result was silent on divine authorship because nobody has a theory of what a divine text looks like. He gave away the strongest claim available to him because his data did not support it.
Hold that standard. It comes back.
Now the court.
The doctrines Koppel spent a decade attacking were forged in a single case, and the case was about whether the state may let a community live by its own law.
In 1986 Yehuda Ressler, an attorney and reserve officer, petitioned the High Court of Justice against the defense minister’s blanket deferment of military service for full-time yeshiva students. Earlier petitions on the same subject had been thrown out twice over, for lack of standing and for non-justiciability. Ressler came with an affidavit from a former head of the army’s manpower planning branch stating that he and his fellow petitioners served longer because the yeshiva students did not serve at all.
Aharon Barak (b. 1936) wrote the judgment, delivered in 1988. He granted standing to a petitioner with no personal grievance beyond membership in the public, and he declared that everything is justiciable, including matters of war and peace. Those two holdings are the foundation of everything that followed: the court’s reach into appointments, security, immigration, budgets, religion. On the merits Ressler lost. The deferment survived, within the zone of reasonableness, with a warning attached that if the numbers kept climbing the answer might change.
Cover would have recognized the structure at once. A paideic community had an arrangement with the state, an arrangement that had never been legislated. It began as an understanding between David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973) and the rabbinic authority known as the Chazon Ish, Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz (1878-1953), covering roughly four hundred students, so that a Torah world destroyed in Europe could be rebuilt. It was a covenant between two nomoi and it existed nowhere in the statute book. The whole subsequent litigation, from Ressler through Rubinstein in 1998, the Tal Law in 2002, the Movement for Quality Government in 2006, Ressler again in 2012, has been the state’s effort to decide whether that unwritten covenant counts as law, and if so at what price.
Barak’s later work extended the jurispathic office in every available direction. Reasonableness, from 1981, let the court substitute its own weighting of considerations for a minister’s whenever it judged the weighting wrong. In 1993 he held that the attorney general’s advice binds the government and that the attorney general is free to argue against the government’s position in court, which put a jurispath inside the executive. In 1995 the court held that ordinary statutes could be struck for conflicting with Basic Laws. In 2019 it agreed to hear a challenge to the validity of a Basic Law, and on January 1, 2024, sitting with all fifteen justices for the first time in Israeli history, it voided one, eight to seven, with twelve of fifteen affirming the power in principle. The amendment it voided was the one that had abolished reasonableness.
Read Koppel’s program against that list and it resolves into a single project. Levin’s five items of January 4, 2023 are, item by item, a contraction of the jurispathic docket. Narrow standing: fewer occasions to kill. End reasonableness: remove the instrument that does most of the killing. Immunize Basic Laws: place certain meanings beyond killing. Supermajority for striking statutes: raise the cost of each killing. Unbind the attorney general: disarm the jurispath inside the government.
Barak’s own defense is where the frame bites hardest. He called the system substantive democracy, and the phrase claims that the court is not choosing among valid nomoi at all, that it is finding the single correct one, that its readings follow from democracy’s nature rather than from the court’s preference. That claim is precisely what Cover set out to demolish. Cover’s target was never the existence of the office. It was the pretense that a court’s interpretation is uniquely correct rather than uniquely enforced, and that what a judge does when he prefers one reading is discovery rather than destruction.
Koppel is thus half a Coverian without knowing it. He has the diagnosis. He has spent a career documenting the paideic. What he does not have is Cover’s conclusion, and the reason is that Cover’s conclusion cuts the other way.
Cover’s communities were weak. Amish, Mennonites, a small Bible college. They asked the state to leave them alone. His preferred settlement was an imperial power modest about its own paideia, holding the ring, cashing out its virtues in freedom of association, declining to impose a story of its own. He worried about a statist paideia because a state committed to its own meaning would use violence to destroy the germ of meanings alternative to those of the power wielders. His famous close was an injunction to stop circumscribing the normative universe and to let new worlds in.
Robert Post (b. 1947), reading the Foreword twenty years later, put his finger on the gap. A community can be insular and turn from the state, or redemptive and try to capture it. But once it holds the levers of government, it seems to lose its association with nomos, because the law it now speaks emanates from a field of pain and death. Cover never worked this out. He wrote as if the paideic communities would always be the ones being crushed.
Koppel’s community is redemptive and it won.
The traditionalist coalition he calls Orange, the amalgam of Revisionists, Sephardi traditionalists, national religious and Haredim, has been winning Israeli elections for most of half a century. It did not ask to be left alone. It went for the state. Koppel built it the instrument it lacked, a policy shop that arrives with finished statutes rather than complaints, and the instrument worked. And on the far side of that victory the roles invert. A nomos that holds the army and the tax authority and the cabinet is no longer the insular community pleading for room. It is the imperial power, and the jurispathic office does not disappear when a court is disarmed. It moves.
The week of July 13, 2026 shows where it went.
On Monday the Knesset passed Basic Law: Torah Study, sixty-three to fifty-two, enshrining Torah study as a foundational value of the state. In Cover’s terms this is a paideic community writing its narrative into the constitutional layer, so that a court reaching for its practice must reach past a Basic Law to get there. On Tuesday the Knesset passed an amendment to the Defense Service Law, fifty-eight to fifty-four, suspending arrest, investigation and criminal proceedings against qualifying yeshiva students through November 30, 2026, and directing the army to set up a committee to decide who qualifies. This is a suspension of the state’s violence against one community, granted by the state, on the community’s terms. On Wednesday the Knesset passed the attorney general law, ending the binding force of the office’s legal opinions and letting the government determine for itself what the law is and how it will be argued in court. Nearly seventy committee sessions had gone into it. The opposition filibustered for eleven hours and so, at the end, did the coalition.
The three were one package. The Haredi parties supplied their votes for the third in exchange for the first two, and the vote nearly collapsed anyway when Moshe Gafni (b. 1952) held out over funding for ultra-Orthodox kindergarten teachers, so Simcha Rothman (b. 1980) stretched a speech at the podium while Benjamin Netanyahu (b. 1949) put the kindergarten item on the cabinet agenda.
Within days Justice Ofer Grosskopf issued a provisional order freezing the arrest suspension and a conditional order requiring the Knesset and government to say why it should not be struck down, citing the implications of halting enforcement against only certain sections of the population. The jurispathic office, still holding the pistol, in the middle of the transfer.
Cover’s test is commitment, and the draft fight is the only place in this story where it is being paid at scale.
The unanimous nine-justice ruling of June 25, 2024 held that with the exemption framework expired there was no legal basis for the blanket deferment or for subsidizing the institutions whose students claimed it, and that the state must act to conscript them. That is the jurispathic office at full extension: the court killing an arrangement that had governed a community’s life for seventy-six years.
The community did not die. It did not report. By early June 2025, of some nineteen thousand summonses issued, about nine hundred and ninety-six men presented themselves at induction centers and two hundred and thirty-two were conscripted. Roughly one in a hundred. Tens of thousands of young men, most of them poor, most of them with no political office and no lawyer, declined to answer the state, and their families absorbed the cut in yeshiva funding, and a portion of them accepted arrest.
By Cover’s standard that is law. Not law he would have endorsed, and not law whose content he would have defended, and the cost of it is carried by other people’s sons at a moment when the army says it is short of men. Cover’s test does not adjudicate content. It asks who is prepared to live by an interpretation, and it registers that a reading nobody will suffer for is not yet law whatever the reporter says. On that measure the yeshiva world’s reading of its own obligation has more purchase in the world than the reading handed down by fifteen justices sitting en banc.
Which is Cover’s point about courts, made from the inside. The court commands violence. It does not command belief. When the two come apart the court can go on issuing orders into a nomos that will not receive them, and this is the position the Israeli Supreme Court has occupied since June 2024.
What Koppel achieved, then, is not the end of jurispathy. It is a change of venue.
A government empowered to declare that the attorney general’s written opinion does not state the law has acquired the office Cover described. It can now select among competing legal meanings and enforce the one it prefers. What it does not acquire, and this is where the frame earns its keep, are the constraints the office carried when a court held it. A court that kills a nomos must publish reasons. It must hear the other side first. It must write in a form that binds it next time. It must do the killing in daylight, under a name, in a document its critics can quote back. Cover thought these were thin protections and said so. He was writing about a court whose violence wore the costume of interpretation, and the costume was what disturbed him, because it let judges believe they were reading when they were choosing.
A cabinet resolution declaring what the law is wears less. Under the new statute the government reports its declaration to a Knesset committee. There is no adversary, no opinion, no precedent, no obligation to be consistent next year.
Cover’s worry about a statist paideia was that a state committed to its own meaning would use force to crush the meanings that compete with it. He assumed the meaning in question would be the secular liberal one, because in 1983 in New Haven that is what a state paideia looked like. The Israeli case runs the experiment with the other side holding the machinery, and it produces the same shape. The law takes effect on January 1, 2027. The election is set for October 27, 2026. Whichever coalition wins will inherit an executive that can decide for itself what the law is, and there is no reason internal to the statute why that coalition should be the one that wrote it.
Koppel has an answer to this in his own writing, and it is the right one. He calls it the veil of ignorance: institutional arrangements should be designed without knowing which camp holds power when they are used, and he applied the test to his opponents and asked whether they would grant the courts these powers if the Oranges ran them and the Blues formed the government. He said everyone knew the answer. He has not, as of this writing, published the same test on a law passed by roughly a dozen votes in the last days of a Knesset, traded for draft exemptions and kindergarten money, coming into force after the election.
Cover has no solution and it is worth saying so plainly, because the frame is not a machine for producing verdicts. He could not explain how plural nomoi coexist once you concede that all of them are jurispathic, that every community sustains its world by excluding the others. Post’s objection stands: Cover would not admit that liberalism is itself a nomos with its own pieties, because admitting it would give liberalism a priority he did not want to grant, and the price of the refusal was that he could never say how the worlds are supposed to live together beyond the weak virtues of an empire he had already declared sterile. He offered no theory of persuasion. He filled the space between communities with conflicts settled in blood, and then he died, and the Foreword ends on an invitation rather than an argument.
That gap is exactly the size of the Israeli problem. Two nomoi, both real, both jurisgenerative, both willing to pay, sharing one army and one tax base and one strip of land, with no umpire either will accept.
What the frame does supply is a way to describe what happened without lying about either side. The court under Barak killed law, which was its office, and dressed the killing as discovery, which was its vice. Koppel documented a paideic world with more precision than anyone else has managed, built machines to make its jurisgenesis visible, and then spent his authority moving the killing office from one set of hands to another while describing the move as its abolition. The yeshiva world, having lost every case, kept its law by declining to appear. And a man who once wrote three thousand words to explain that his own algorithm had not proved what the newspapers said it proved has not yet written the paragraph explaining what the law of July 15, 2026 does and does not establish.
Cover’s last instruction was to stop drawing the boundary so tight and let new worlds in. Israel has let two of them in, and they are standing on the same floor.
Notes
The frame. Robert M. Cover, “The Supreme Court, 1982 Term — Foreword: Nomos and Narrative,” 97 Harv. L. Rev. 4 (1983). Free copy in Yale’s Faculty Scholarship Series: digitalcommons.law.yale.edu. Page cites for what I used: the nomos and the inseparability of law and narrative at 4-5; jurisgenesis at 11 following; paideic and imperial at 12-13; the imperial virtues as weak, system-maintaining forces at 12 and as incapable of producing meaning at 16; law as power against law as meaning at 18; the oversupply of law and the court as its solution at 40; commitment and the validity of an interpretation nobody will live by at 44; judges as people of violence and the jurispathic office at 53; the critique of Bob Jones at 66-67; the warning about a statist paideia at 61-62; the closing invitation at 68. Also Robert M. Cover, “Violence and the Word,” 95 Yale L.J. 1601 (1986), for the field of pain and death at 1601-02.
Reading Cover. Robert C. Post, “Who’s Afraid of Jurispathic Courts? Violence and Public Reason in Nomos and Narrative,” 17 Yale J.L. & Human. 9 (2005). This is the source for the insular-versus-redemptive point I lean on hardest, that a community which captures the state seems to lose its association with nomos, and for the objection that Cover would not concede liberalism is itself a nomos. The 2005 Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities symposium “Rethinking Robert Cover’s Nomos and Narrative” also contains Judith Resnik, “Living Their Legal Commitments: Paideic Communities, Courts, and Robert Cover,” 17 Yale J.L. & Human. 17 (2005). On Cover’s Jewish sources: Samuel J. Levine, “Halacha and Aggada: Translating Robert Cover’s Nomos and Narrative,” 1998 Utah L. Rev. 465, and Levine, “Law and Redemption,” 34 Yale J.L. & Human. 253 (2023). Cover’s “Obligation: A Jewish Jurisprudence of the Social Order,” 5 J. L. & Religion 65 (1987), argues that Jewish law starts from obligation where American law starts from rights, which is Koppel’s Shimen-and-Heidi thesis stated by a Yale professor thirty-three years earlier; I left it out of the body to keep the essay on the Foreword, but it belongs in any longer treatment.
Bob Jones. Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983). On the Mennonite and Amish amicus briefs Cover discusses, see Peter Leithart’s summary at Theopolis, which quotes the brief directly.
Novelty. I searched for English-language work applying Cover to the 2023-2026 Israeli fight and found none. I found Cover applied to Kiryas Joel, to Ghanaian courts and Islamic law, to environmental law, to political constitutionalism generally, and to religious liberty in New York, and I found the Foreword anthologized in The New Jewish Canon (2020) with a commentary by Christine Hayes. That is not proof of absence. Someone should check Hebrew-language scholarship, and Menachem Mautner’s Law and the Culture of Israel (Oxford, 2011) is the obvious place where a Coverian reading might already exist under another name.
Ressler and the jurispathic expansion. HCJ 910/86 Ressler v. Minister of Defence, 42(2) PD 441 (1988). English translation at the Cardozo Israeli Supreme Court Project, which is the best free English archive of Israeli constitutional decisions and worth bookmarking. The subsequent line: HC 3267/97 Rubinstein v. Minister of Defense (1998); the Tal Law, 2002; HCJ 6427/02 Movement for Quality Government v. Knesset (2006); HCJ 6298/07 Ressler v. Knesset (2012). Koppel’s own account of the doctrinal history, which I checked against the cases and found accurate on the facts if not on the tone, is in “The Long Road to Democracy”.
The reasonableness ruling. HCJ 5658/23 Movement for Quality Government v. Knesset, decided January 1, 2024, translated at Versa. Fifteen justices en banc for the first time; twelve of fifteen affirmed the power to review Basic Laws; eight of fifteen voided Amendment No. 3. Commentary from both directions: IDI and Verfassungsblog.
The draft. HCJ 6198/23 Movement for Quality Government v. Minister of Defense, June 25, 2024, nine justices, unanimous. Summary from the Law Library of Congress and from IDI. The enforcement figures I cite, roughly 19,000 summonses, 996 reporting, 232 conscripted by early June 2025, are from IDI’s one-year review, which also gives the roughly 480 million shekels in annual yeshiva funding affected. Treat these as one organization’s count; the Defense Ministry publishes its own numbers and they differ.
The July 2026 week. Basic Law: Torah Study passed 63-52 on Monday, July 13 (Jerusalem Post). The Defense Service Bill (Amendment No. 28) suspending arrests through November 30, 2026 passed 58-54 on Tuesday, July 14 (Israel365, Unpacked). The attorney general law passed Wednesday, July 15 (Ynet for the contents, the coalition package, the Gafni holdout, the January 1, 2027 effective date and the thirty-day clause on future appointments; Times of Israel for the eleven-hour filibuster). Justice Ofer Grosskopf’s provisional and conditional orders freezing the arrest suspension: Jerusalem Post. Election set for October 27, 2026.
Vote counts, unresolved. Ynet reported the attorney general law at 61-51, the Times of Israel at 65-51.
Koppel. Meta-Halakhah: Logic, Intuition, and the Unfolding of Jewish Law (Jason Aronson, 1996); Judaism Straight Up: Why Real Religion Endures (Maggid, 2020); “Attribution and Misattribution: On Computational Linguistics, Heresy and Journalism,” Seforim Blog, July 11, 2011; Shmidman, Koppel & Porat, “Identification of Parallel Passages Across a Large Hebrew/Aramaic Corpus,” J. Data Mining & Digital Humanities (2018). His veil-of-ignorance argument is in “The Long Road to Democracy” and in his November 2025 Kohelet piece on restoring balance.