A WOMAN IN MODERN ISRAEL: ATTEMPTING TO BUILD A SOCIAL PORTRAIT

Abstract

This article aims to present a «collective» social portrait of a modern Israeli woman. The complexity of this task is determined by the fact that Israel is a country populated with people of a wide number of cultures, who in different years repatriated to their historical homeland. With the exception of Judaism, the views of these communities on many issues of the daily life differ significantly, and this creates an extremely difficult perception of the gender topic in this country. The female audience of Israeli society can be divided into two large groups: religious and secular, although within each of them there are also numerous strata, worthy of investigation. In this article, the authors focus on the priorities of each group, while paying primary attention to the description of a religious woman: her understanding of the canons of family life, spiritual ideas, fashion, etc. Focusing on these manifestations allows, to the very much extent, to imagine the «make-up» of the Israeli woman, so that through the prism of this perception to see the ideological and moral principles of this country. Analysing priorities of the religious part of the female population is fundamentally important for understanding the spiritual canons of Israeli life and its uniqueness when comparing the background of modern world processes of modernization and globalization, not to mention that this article is one of first enabling to have a look at the role of the Israeli woman in this society.