Israel is the only country in the world that offers free fertility treatments to nearly any woman who requires medical assistance. It also has the world's highest per capita usage of in-vitro fertilization. Examining state policies and the application of reproductive technologies among Jewish Israelis, this volume explores the role of tradition and politics in the construction of families within local Jewish populations. The contributors-anthropologists, bioethicists, jurists, physicians and biologists-highlight the complexities surrounding these treatments and show how biological relatedness is being construed as a technology of power; how genetics is woven into the production of identities; how reproductive technologies enhance the policing of boundaries. Donor insemination, IVF and surrogacy, as well as abortion, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and human embryonic stem cell research, are explored within local and global contexts to convey an informed perspective on the wider Jewish Israeli environment.

Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli is a medical sociologist at the University of Haifa, Israel. Her research concentrates on reproduction-related issues and the interface of health care and state politics. Birenbaum-Carmeli has published extensively in major professional journals and is the author of Tel Aviv North: The Making of a New Israeli Middle Class (Hebrew University Press) and the co-editor (with Marcia C. Inhorn) of Assisting Reproduction, Testing Genes: Global Encounters with New Biotechnologies (Berghahn Books).

Yoram S. Carmeli is an anthropologist at the University of Haifa, Israel, who has researched reproductive technologies in Israel. His other writings focus on popular culture with a particular interest in British circuses. He has also researched sport and consumption in Israel. Carmeli is the co-editor (with Kalman Applbaum) of Consumption and Market Society in Israel (Berg Publishers).

Over the past two decades, Israel has been remaking itself in line with the commercial models of Western market societies. Nowhere is this trend more evident than in private consumption patterns. Most Israelis crave parity with Western lifestyles - private automobiles, mobile phones, spacious housing fashionably furnished, accessibility to shopping malls and leisure travel abroad. Alongside these new aspirations, internationally branded commodities and franchises such as McDonald's, Office Depot, Benetton, IKEA and Toys 'R' Us increasingly feature in the Israeli landscape, and advertising has emerged as a primary vehicle for persuasion, competition and cultural expression. This book is the first to explore fully the significance of these transformations. The authors show how different groups - kibbutzniks, Israeli Arabs, Ultra-Orthodox Jews, new immigrants and middle-class Israelis - alternately exhibit a suspicion towards and enthusiasm for the enhanced individual freedoms of a consumer market society. Lifestyle consumerism is recognized as an alien import, potentially disruptive of the ethos of communality, common destiny and national purpose. At the same time, because consumption helps unite diverse groups to the greater whole of the nation, the globe, and modernity, it conveys a sense of normalcy and affluence in a time of major social transition and political turmoil. Consumption and Market Society in Israel is not only innovative in its research, but it is a timely contribution to a hotly debated topic.

Over the past two decades, Israel has been remaking itself in line with the commercial models of Western market societies. Nowhere is this trend more evident than in private consumption patterns. Most Israelis crave parity with Western lifestyles - private automobiles, mobile phones, spacious housing fashionably furnished, accessibility to shopping malls and leisure travel abroad. Alongside these new aspirations, internationally branded commodities and franchises such as McDonald's, Office Depot, Benetton, IKEA and Toys 'R' Us increasingly feature in the Israeli landscape, and advertising has emerged as a primary vehicle for persuasion, competition and cultural expression. This book is the first to explore fully the significance of these transformations. The authors show how different groups - kibbutzniks, Israeli Arabs, Ultra-Orthodox Jews, new immigrants and middle-class Israelis - alternately exhibit a suspicion towards and enthusiasm for the enhanced individual freedoms of a consumer market society. Lifestyle consumerism is recognized as an alien import, potentially disruptive of the ethos of communality, common destiny and national purpose. At the same time, because consumption helps unite diverse groups to the greater whole of the nation, the globe, and modernity, it conveys a sense of normalcy and affluence in a time of major social transition and political turmoil. Consumption and Market Society in Israel is not only innovative in its research, but it is a timely contribution to a hotly debated topic.