Introduction

Leisure cultures are subjected to social, interethnic, physical, gendered and sexual changes. Leisure cultures reflect the systems of values, sideals, traditions, anxieties, and desires of the cultures and communities in which they emerge. Leisure activities are often revealed as the locus of intercultural conflicts in changing societies because they involve struggles on public territories for leisure, particularly when one culture maintains its leisure activities on another culture’s territory. The Israeli society, with its multiple communities, ideological tendencies, lifestyles, and tastes, continually changes, develops, and reinvents itself in multidirectional ways. Different leisure consumptions by privileged and unprivileged classes characterize stratified and discriminatory societies, in which leisure is socially divided and hierarchized. Leisure, and “serious leisure” in particular, provides a new understanding of the human life. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.