Seam Line: Arab Workers and Jewish Managers in the Israeli Textile Industry » (1)

Israel Drori is Lecturer in Public Policy at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of Arab Industrialization in Israel: Ethnic Entrepreneurship in the Periphery (with Y. Schnell and M. Sofer).

This book explores how Arab workers (mainly women) and Jewish managers in the Israeli textile industry negotiate the terms and meanings of factory work. It examines the tension between traditional familial and social roles and the demands of industrial life, as well as the complications created by Arab-Jewish political and military conflict.

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Based on five years of ethnographic research, this book examines how Jewish managers and local (primarily female) Arab and Druse seamstresses negotiate the terms of factory work, integrating work culture with the norms of local communities to allow these employment arrangements to succeed. Drori (public policy, Tel Aviv U.) explores the demands of working life, including the strains on family and social roles, and the ways that managers have co-opted Arab values to paternalize control of the manufacturing plants. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)