Ilan Segev is an ambitious young journalist working for a large daily paper and his wife Smadar is a feminist radio announcer. During the culture conflicts of an election year they engage with individuals from sectors of Israeli society far removed from their ordinary secular ambiance. The pesky wife of his former boss ropes him into helping her set up a promotion campaign for the Hebrew translation of a novel by her chareidi daughter, Barbara Silber. Ilan meets Ariel Ben-Ami, a religious high-school student who is thinking of continuing in yeshiva instead of going into the army and becoming a journalist afterwards.

In order to put journalism in a glamorous light, Ilan invites Ariel to accompany him on a visit to Al Quds University, since Ariel understands Arabic. When their host, Dr. Abdullah Jabarin, confides that he is not getting paid for work he is doing inside the Green Line because of bureaucratic snafus, Ariel's mother, Aviva, is drafted to help Dr. Jabarin get his salary. Ariel's brother, Bentzi, who is campaigning for a party on the far Right, investigates the participation of underworld elements in the election cmapaign.

Ronny Arzi, the Silber's foster son, is having difficulty finding a match in the chareidi community because of his secular family and his schizophrenic biological mother. Both the publicity campaign for his foster mother's book and the election-generated tension between chasidim, Litvaks and Sephardim seem to be making a difficult task yet harder.

This is not a book about people who change their ideology but rather about those who learn to communicate with each other or discover the consequences when communication breaks down.