“…in haredi communities in America and especially in Israel, “learning,” regardless of aptitude, has replaced working as a male adult norm”

In traditionally religious European communities, for example, most men worked for a living; the numbers of talented boys pursuing lengthy yeshiva study were highly limited. Today, by contrast, in haredi communities in America and especially in Israel, “learning,” regardless of aptitude, has replaced working as a male adult norm. Consequently, normal rates of adult productivity are stifled, and haredi families comprise the poorest segments of the American and Israeli Jewish population. Is this “authentic” Judaism?

Sylvia Barack Fishman, “Let Us Now Praise Modern Orthodoxy”, Mosaic (August 2014) [http://mosaicmagazine.com/supplemental/2014/08/let-us-now-praise-modern-orthodoxy/]