This book is about Israel, about Judaism and about contemporary religion. Its purpose is both descriptive and analytic. As a case study, it shows there is much in common between certain trends in Judaism and broader trends in world religion, but it also aims to elucidate Israeli Jewish society, especially its many cross-cutting ethnic and religious frontiers, the very distinctive patterns of political mobilisation which proliferate around them, and the changes which are coming about in contemporary Judaism as a consequence of the t’shuva movement of ‘return’ to strict observance.
