Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry by Samuel C. Heilman (1992, Hardcover)

An ethnographer's safari into the black-and-white world of Ultra-Orthodox Jews. To the subjects of this rare study, Heilman, an adherent of Modern-Orthodox Judaism, was both an insider and an outsider, and the resulting combination of partial access yet professional distance gives the author's voice a dynamism lacking in many sociological studies of comparable subcultures. Heilman (Sociology/CUNY) takes us inside the ritual baths, study halls, synagogues, kitchens, and bedrooms of these half-a-million singular denizens of Jerusalem and Brooklyn. While it is tempting to think of these pious black-hatted or scarved Jews as being somewhat medieval, Heilman explains how they are very much a modern and post-Holocaust reactionary phenomenon