In “Who is a Jew?”, Alana Newhouse (editor in chief of Tablet Magazine, which covers Jewish life and culture), relates that a new bill before the Israeli Senate would:

…give the Orthodox rabbinate control of all conversions in Israel.

If passed, this legislation would place authority over all Jewish births, marriages and deaths — and, through them, the fundamental questions of Jewish identity — in the hands of a small group of ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, rabbis.

It seems that this is the result of that eternal whore: Power.

Rivkah Lubitch, an Orthodox woman who is a lawyer in Israel’s rabbinic court system:

Even if you didn’t go to register for marriage, and even if you didn’t go to a rabbinic court for any reason, and even if you didn’t pass by a rabbinic court when you walked down the street — the rabbinic court can summon you, conduct a hearing about your Jewishness and revoke it,” she wrote. “In effect, the entire nation of Israel is presumed to be Not-Jewish — until proven otherwise.

Not that I actually give a flying fuck, but I know some secular Jewish Atheists who might be concerned that they could possibly be hauled before a theocratic court. (Other than the strongly theocratic supreme courts in the USA, of course, or Cherie Bliar.)