Haredi women have far-reaching influence within their families and communities, as they are mostly the household breadwinners in Israel. This gradually transforms the gender power relations within Haredi communities.
Israel’s Haredi population is perceived as a group that does not hold the environmental cause close to its heart. Haredim account for 11 percent of the Israeli population and are comprised of many diverse subgroups. This talk will focus on environmental awareness among Haredi women who belong to two marginal groups within Haredi society: newly religious, low-income Mizrahi families and middle-class, Anglo-Saxon new immigrants. It focuses on women from two distinctly different neighborhoods in the city of Bet Shemesh.
The halakhic patterns of action that these women sustain in their homes and, particularly, in the family kitchen, are examined in this study in order to discuss theoretical and practical issues of environment and sustainability.
I argue that intersectional analysis promotes a complex and nuanced understanding of Haredi women`s attitude towards environmental issues, based on identity axes such as class and ethnicity, thus shedding light on a lacuna in the literature, stressing the importance of the overlapping fields of gender studies, environmental studies and Israel studies.
The study finds that Haredi women take dialectic positions within the environmental discourse and in every-day, domestic praxis, and that the tension between their various courses of actions, with regards to the environment and sustainability, are dynamic and depends on their intersectional identity. These finding may have far-reaching implementations for the Israeli society and for its environment.