Mapping the Legal Boundaries of Belonging is a welcome addition to the comparative politics of diversity management, and to the growing literature on the place of religious diversity within the multicultural paradigm. Focusing on Canada and Israel, it studies the complex and mutually dynamic interaction between religious identities and the legal regimes that seek to map them for practical political purposes. The introduction by Caylee Hong and René Provost emphasizes the fabricated and fluid character of social identities, describing their imagined boundaries as “ineluctably and perpetually contested terrain, a process of mythological construction that is necessarily collective, continuous and unstable” (1). The volume's chapters explore the contestation of this terrain at sites where legal regimes recognize and attempt to accommodate religious diversity and identity, tracing in particular the challenges encountered by the discourses of religious freedom and multiculturalism.

The chapters in the first section of the volume, “Multiculturalism and Western Secularism,” examine the specificity of Western secularism, whose way of separating the sacred and the profane relies, as Suzanne Last Stone observes, in a Protestant understanding of religion as a matter of private belief and conscience. Stone compares this mapping with visions of political space within traditional Judaism, arguing that although the contemporary Western state may be the product of Christianity, there are resources within Jewish law for distinguishing the political and religious realms and for supporting religious freedom (52). Sylvio Ferrari similarly examines different positions on divine and natural law within the theological and legal traditions of predominantly Jewish, Christian, and Muslim countries. On the basis of this analysis, Ferrari proposes that rather than adopting a model developed in another religious context, “it is preferable for each civilization to look within its own religious and cultural tradition for the suitable tools to address the problem of the ‘other’ in terms that are appropriate to contemporary society” (35).

This point, however, is complicated by Ferrari's observation that the positions he isolates are not exclusive to one religion or another, but that it is “instead a matter of potentialities that have been more fully developed in one system and less in another” (31). In that case, one might ask about the factors responsible for these varied developments, and wonder whether the political arrangements based on them are a function of intrinsic religious differences (supposing religions do have intrinsic characters, a debatable claim), or whether altered social and geopolitical circumstances might yield new theological as well as legal possibilities. A related issue in this section concerns the relation between religion and human rights. While Stone notes the blurring of the religious-secular boundary in the absolute character of human rights (51), Shai Lavi examines critiques of the secular foundations of human rights in the thought of Hannah Arendt, Talal Asad, and John Milbank.

The next section of the volume raises parallel questions about the cultural specificity and historical roots of multiculturalism and religious freedom. In “Religious Freedom as ‘Reflexive Law,’” Ino Augsberg considers the fact that state neutrality presupposes a distinction between the religious and political spheres which some religions may not accept. He proposes a model of “tolerant reflexivity” between law and religion, where both accept distinct social functions and “learn to live with each other's distinctiveness” (93). At the same time, Augsberg suggests that while the state may not support religious beliefs that ignore or undermine the separation of religion, religious freedom also compels it “not to press the internal development of religious groups toward a certain direction” (94). In “The Distinctiveness of Religious Liberty,” Victor M. Muniz-Fraticelli also emphasizes the need to respect the independence of religious groups from the state. While differentiating claims of religious liberty from claims of culture, Muniz-Fraticelli argues for a greater appreciation of libertas ecclesiae, of concern for the institutional autonomy of religious organizations, which, he claims, has largely been forgotten in the framing of religious freedom as respect for individual rights.

Muniz-Fraticelli's contention that this framing is due to the assimilation of freedom of religion to the multicultural paradigm is debatable, however, given that the latter has often been centrally concerned with the authority of the group over individuals. The author's claim that liberal multiculturalism's point of departure is “the autonomous individual” (103) is true of some versions but less so of others, which are “liberal” to different degrees and in different ways. Another difficulty not addressed in either chapter is that of internal rules and restrictions that violate the moral norms of the state. Members of religious communities are also citizens of the state, after all, and exit from their religious community may be unfeasible or highly costly.

In the third section of the volume, “Negotiating Identity between State and Religion,” Shauna Van Praagh discusses two cases that reflect cultural biases in the liberal state's engagement, through law, with religious identity. The first is (R)E v JFS, in which the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled that a Jewish school's admissions policy basing Jewish identity on being born to a Jewish mother constituted racial discrimination. The second is the province of Quebec's ban on religion in publicly-funded day care centers. Van Praagh notes that the first decision is based on a view of religious identity as grounded in belief and behavior that is foreign to Judaism. By contrast, the second decision, because it permits the celebration of holidays and the display of certain symbols but forbids religious instruction, asks leaders of day care communities “to turn religious commitment into cultural manifestation” (133). The following chapter by Daphne Barak-Erez, “Who is a Jew and the Law: Between London and Jerusalem,” likewise points out the Christian biases in the JFS case, and goes on to compare Israeli Supreme Court decisions about Jewish identity that determine who has the right to immigrate to Israel under its “Law of Return.” The chapter examines the varied criteria Israeli courts have used in making this determination, observing that these reflect anxieties and inner contradictions within Israeli society. Her comparative story does not lead to firm conclusions, but it does help to separate the existential and legal dimensions of the question about who should count as a Jew and who has the authority to decide the question.

Section four addresses the vexed question of religious practices that contravene the established norms of the liberal state. Menachem Mautner's “A Dialogue between a Liberal and an Ultra-Orthodox on the Exclusion of Women from Torah Study” focuses on gender quality, but its fictional dialogue assumes that such a dialogue would constitute a “cross-cultural encounter” — as if traditionalism were a foreign concept to Western liberals. In addition, while the dialogue alludes briefly at one point to the fact that here are two men talking about the place of women, this consideration is set aside far too hastily (165). The result is that the central point to be addressed — the exclusion of women from discourses that govern them, be these religious, cultural, or political — is not confronted at all. Angela Campbell's chapter, on the other hand, “Religious Claims as Public Reason? Polygamy as a Case Study,” offers a nuanced argument for expanding debates about ostensibly “religious” practices to consider other kinds of reasons that might be at play. Her argument draws on conversations with women in the polygamous community of Bountiful, British Columbia, which revealed that many of these women looked upon polygamy favorably for economic, social, and political reasons.

The last section of the volume is entitled “Multiculturalism, Religion, and the Geography of Power,” and consists of two rich chapters on the concrete results of interactions between religious actors and Israeli law. Michael M. Karayanni studies the “multicultural entrapment” — Karayanni's term for the problem of how liberal multiculturalism should relate to religious minority groups seeking accommodation for illiberal practices — of Palestinian-Arab religious minorities in Israel. Karayanni points out that these multicultural theories assume a socio-legal order to which individuals can exit, but in Israel there is no unified civic identity that all citizens connect with equally. Consequently, there is nowhere for members of minority religious groups to exit to, leaving Palestinian-Arab women vulnerable to the patriarchal norms of family law in their communities, since the Israeli state has been less willing to intervene in decisions by Muslim religious courts than in those of Jewish ones. In the final chapter, “Localizing Religion in a Jewish State,” Yishai Blank describes how localities in Israel have exercised their powers to benefit their own preferred religion, with the aid of Israeli Supreme Court decisions that have incentivized and even forced people to live within their own religious communities. The result has been religious residential segregation and an increase in religious homogeneity at the local level.

Mapping the Legal Boundaries of Belonging offers a host of finely detailed studies of the problems that arise for managing religious diversity through the frames of secularism, multiculturalism, and religious freedom. It will be of obvious and significant interest to scholars and policymakers engaged with the processes and conundrums of such management in Canada and Israel. The volume also provides valuable insights into contemporary difficulties of state-religion interaction more generally, and especially into the ways that legislative policies impact the negotiation of religious identities by their members.