In this book Devorah Kalekin-Fisman and Karlheinz Schneider analyze how the relationship between the traditional and the modern is unfolding in a particular milieu by centering on the Haredi women in Israel who become part of the national (rather than the community) work force. The book is based on analyses of interviews with people in the Haredi world. The authors’ goal is to attain an understanding of what women’s work means to the women, to their families, and to the Haredi community as a whole, by placing women’s self-presentations in the context of sociological literatures relating to the sociology of religion and the sociology of gender.
The focal issue is the question of how traditionalism fares when the legitimator / monitor of tradition in the home encounters the constraints of modernity through her studies and her work.