Mark Lennihan/AP

Stock traders work at the New York Stock Exchange Dec. 31, 2019. Despite recession fears during 2019, the S&P 500 index of U.S. stocks posted its largest gains since 2013.

A nuanced optimism has crept into the stock markets and forecasts about the world economy.

Where traders and economists once predicted a U.S. recession in 2020 or certainly by 2021, many now believe instead that growth will remain positive this year, with the pace slackening to a low in the first quarter or half and then chugging forward at a moderate rate. According to this view, global growth will follow a similar path. 

That outlook suggests good prospects for everyone from workers, benefiting from a tight labor market, to investors, who enjoyed a sparkling 2019 and look forward to solid stock returns in 2020. It could also have political implications, since strong economies tend to benefit political incumbents seeking reelection. This year that includes President Donald Trump.

“We all were worried” in 2019, says Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist at Barclays Investment Bank. The U.S.-China trade war was escalating. Job growth was slowing in the service sector. Even now, “we don’t see a lot of catalysts for a major pickup in growth. ... But our global growth outlook is still stronger.”

Behind this shift in outlook is the resolution ​– or expected resolution ​– of four key uncertainties that weighed on markets during much of 2019: a “phase one” U.S.-China trade deal, a replacement for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Brexit, and monetary policy for the leading central banks. With paths becoming clearer for all four, the crystal ball for 2020 appears a little less foggy, giving businesses more confidence to invest in new products and factories.

“The global economy seems to have dodged a recession,” says Nariman Behravesh, chief economist of IHS Markit, in a recent report. Last summer, the business information provider pegged the risks of a 2020 recession at 1 in 3; it now puts it at only 1 in 5.

Perhaps the biggest sigh of relief came in December when the United States and China said they would sign a deal this month that puts at least a temporary stop to their tit-for-tat trade war. Instead of tariff increases on Chinese goods, which Mr. Trump had threatened to institute Dec. 15, he and President Xi Jinping have agreed to a pact, set to be signed Jan. 15, that rolls back some tariffs on both sides and includes Chinese pledges to buy more American goods, take various steps to protect intellectual property, and open its financial sector to foreigners.

The phase one deal represents more of a cease-fire than a breakthrough, analysts say. Wall Street has even coined a term for it: peak tariffs. The idea is that neither side will raise tariff levels as negotiations continue for the next several months and perhaps through the November election, as President Trump will not want to upset markets.

The deal “will provide a little bit of a floor that will probably help us see some bounce back of private investment in China,” says Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. But “we should not expect that this phase one deal will fundamentally calm things down.”

Another key resolution is the passage of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which by many accounts is a significant improvement over the NAFTA deal it replaces. After more than a year of talks between the White House and Democrats, the Democrat-controlled House passed the deal in December. The Senate is expected to follow suit this month, giving companies in all three nations more certainty in trade rules going forward, another boost for investment.

British voters resolved another key political uncertainty in December ​– Brexit ​– by strongly returning the Conservative government of Boris Johnson to power. The vote has given the prime minister the mandate to definitely pull Britain out of the European Union by Jan. 31. Economically, however, the future remains as fuzzy as ever, since both sides still have to negotiate a trade deal and no one is quite sure what the prime minister really wants.

If Mr. Johnson really expects to complete that by the end of this year, as his Conservative Party has pledged, that is barely enough time to negotiate a bare-bones trade agreement, says Olga Bitel, a global strategist at William Blair, a Chicago-based investment firm. That means substantial short-term disruption for the United Kingdom’s already anemic economy. 

“On a multiyear view, forecasts so far point to the UK economy being smaller under any Brexit scenario,” she writes in an email. “Most of the past seven decades (and thousands of years of human history) point to economic integration. For a small, open economy to elect going it alone, is a substantial departure from trend.”

Finally, key central banks have made clear they’re not going to raise interest rates anytime soon. The Federal Reserve, which entered 2019 expecting to raise rates, instead cut them three times when economic indicators started flashing warnings. With recession fears receding, the central bank now looks set to stand pat for months to come. The European Central Bank has also made borrowing cheaper. And China’s central bank on Wednesday said it would cut cash reserve requirements for banks, effectively pumping more money into the economy.

None of this suggests the beginning of a 21st-century “Roaring Twenties.” Last year was the slowest for world economic growth since the financial crisis a decade earlier, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and this year will be only slightly better.

Outside of a very few outliers, such as an accelerating Brazil, most nations are expected to see only muted improvement. And a major reason for that: China’s huge economy continues to slow.

“While it is tempting to blame much of the recent slowdown on the U.S.-China trade war, the decade-long deceleration is the result of both structural and cyclical factors,” such as an aging population and falling productivity, says Mr. Behravesh of IHS Markit. Already, China’s 6.2% growth rate in 2019 was the slowest expansion in three decades, he points out. And he expects growth to fall below 6% this year.

Other analysts, such as Mr. Kennedy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, are more sanguine. He says growth already bottomed out last year and will pick up slightly as China continues to transition from its reliance on exports to the growth of its huge domestic market. 

“The upside sources of growth are going to be expanding consumption by Chinese consumers,” he says. “China has more middle-class consumers than anybody.”

In the U.S., too, hopes for a better 2020 rest on consumers. “The upside story is built around continued durability of consumer spending,” says Mr. Gapen of Barclays.

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Bubba Nelson grew up on the Mobile-Tensaw Delta near Mobile, Alabama. He spends tens of thousands of dollars a year shoring up his fish camp with pilings and backfill, Nov. 15, 2019.

With his black Ford pickup, Gator-Tail skiff, and Go-Devil motor, Bubba Nelson comes off as the quintessential delta man.

Here in Alabama’s Baldwin County, in the heart of the massive and dynamic Mobile-Tensaw River Delta, the corner church and President Donald Trump are beloved. Environmentalists and the federal government, less so. Thick-bearded, baseball cap pulled low, Mr. Nelson in many ways embodies this dynamic: He has no problem with the United States exiting the Paris Agreement to cut global carbon emissions, as it did formally in November, calling it “toothless.”

Packed into his Gator-Tail on this chilly November morning at a Hurricane boat ramp are two large wooden pilings, part of a desperate plan to fortify a 200-foot shoreline at his upriver fish camp against erosion. Thanks to upstream channelization and more frequent storms, erosion is threatening his life’s work. In just two decades, 14 feet of shorefront is gone, partly the result of a 26% increase in major flood events attributable to climate change.

Yet as he pours tens of thousands of dollars a year into safeguarding his camp, Mr. Nelson is wrestling with a broader challenge: a deep abiding love for a place that he fears is being endangered by a president whom he otherwise supports.

Mr. Trump’s deregulatory policies “are great for the economy,” says Mr. Nelson, “but I wouldn’t say it’s helping the environment.”

Intensified by a rash of disasters from Hurricane Katrina to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to flooding last year that transformed the delta into a 13-mile-wide river, the debate over the delta’s future highlights a historically poor state coming to terms with the costs of sacrificing deeply held environmental values.

“Alabama is a mixed bag,” says Bill Stewart, an expert in local politics and an emeritus professor at the University of Alabama, in Tuscaloosa. “We have conservative Republicans who favor minimal ... environmental regulations. But obviously we admire the aesthetics of a still-beautiful state. Those who are engaged in hunting and fishing don’t want their areas messed up so that those interests they have are no longer viable.”

At a crossroads

When Alabama became a state in 1819, Governor William Wyatt Bibb adorned the state seal with its greatest treasures: its rivers. These waterways have served as the backbone of industry throughout the state. They are also a wellspring of life, supporting more species of freshwater fish, mussels, snails, and crawfish than any other state.

Karen Norris/Staff

Here, where the state’s “Five Rivers” – Mobile, Spanish, Tensaw, Apalachee, and Blakeley – converge, ramshackle fish camps dot the marsh banks. Trump banners – “Get on the Trump Train 2020” – hang from nearly every trailer. Mullet bullet through the creeks. It is so diverse that ecologists suspect that species that were never discovered have gone extinct. At least 100 known ones have, including, it was long thought, the rusty gravedigger, a tiny crawfish whose fragile redoubts have long since been paved over. (But more on that later.)

The beauty belies another legacy. Mobile Bay, where the watershed dumps, is one of the most polluted waterways in the country. In the 1970s, a picture from space showed a plume of mud emptying into the bay from upstream development. Nearly 26 million gallons of sewage swept into Mobile Bay in 2017 from multiple sources, including accidental releases considered “acts of God” like lightning strikes, according to says Casi Callaway, the director of the Mobile Baykeeper organization in Mobile. 

That year, one such strike led to 500,000 gallons spilling into D’Olive Creek, in Daphne, Alabama, over the span of 12 hours. But in 2018, in large part due to public attention to the topic, that was reduced to 3.5 million gallons released.

Today, perhaps the greatest threat to the bay sits just a few miles above Mobile: a vast coal ash pit leaching heavy metals, ensconced by a dyke that, to many, is a disaster in the waiting. If it were to release, says Raft River fish camp owner Marl Cummings, the toxic substrate would “kill a large chunk of the delta and the bay, there’s no question about it.”

The question of who to trust to safeguard the state’s natural legacy is complicated by not just states’ rights politics, but religious beliefs. For one, in a majority-Christian corner like Baldwin County, the idea of human-driven climate change clashes with God’s supremacy over His dominion. But Evangelicals here also wrestle with biblical admonishments to care for nature. Jeremiah 2:7, for one, scorns those who “came and defiled my land and made my inheritance detestable.”

“‘How do I make it better?’ can be a harder question here [than in other parts of the country],” says Ms. Callaway of Mobile Baykeeper. “But people realize we are at a crossroads. What do we want to be?”

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Casi Callaway, director of Mobile Baykeeper, describes Southern environmentalism as localized, reactive, and court-focused than preventive, Nov. 14, 2019.

Not far away, along the causeway that connects Spanish Fort on the bay’s eastern shore with Mobile, Ray White offers one vision.

Here to pluck blue crabs out of the bay, his feet are surrounded by fast-food cups and empty cigarette packs.

“I don’t think we need the federal government down here telling us what to do,” says Mr. White, a hamburger cook at a local franchise, who spends most of his days off fishing. “The way I look at it, local authorities are keeping the crabs safe to eat.”

About 47% of Alabamians say stronger environmental regulations are a barrier to economic growth, while 45% say that cost is worth tougher rules for polluters, according to a 2014 Pew Research survey.

Those findings may belie a greater call from Alabamians for balance as economic pressures and development stress an already struggling ecosystem.

Instead of engaging in ideologically tainted debates about climate change, many conservatives in the Delta now look more deeply askance at the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, which rarely turns down new permits for new discharges. It is the least-funded state regulator in the country, despite the heavy discharge load into the bay. ADEM, which relies on historical climate trends rather than scientific forecasting, did not respond to requests for interviews.

“Global warming may be a problem in Bangladesh, but it’s not a problem here,” says Mr. Cummings, whose family owns a 24-acre fish camp on an island in the Raft River. “And if the federal government tries to take hold of this delta [by making it a national park], it’s going to be World War III.”

At the same time, he and many of his neighbors worry when lax regulations translate to channelization and pollution of the state’s rivers. 

“We are the recipient of every pollution source all the way up from the Tenn-Tom River and all the state of Alabama river systems,” he says. “It all winds up down here in Mobile.”

A pragmatic strain

The tension of science versus faith is embodied in the 2020 election. On the ballot with President Trump will be Sen. Doug Jones, a Democrat who won a special election in 2017 and is seeking reelection.

Mr. Trump has publicly questioned climate science and his administration has gutted air and water quality rules, winning him plaudits from many here. But Mr. Jones has firmly embraced scientific findings, saying the United States needs to wean from the fossil fuel sources that threaten the Mobile-Tensaw. To be sure, much of Mr. Jones’ support came from his work in prosecuting the Ku Klux Klan. But many Alabamians remember him as the court-appointed authority that oversaw a settlement on behalf of victims in a case in Anniston involving polychlorinated biphenyl.

“Alabama is closer to 60% approval of Trump, so I don’t think he’s in any danger of losing Alabama,” say J. Miles Coleman, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, and an associate editor at the political prediction site Sabato’s Crystal Ball. 

Given the current level of hyperpartisanship and local support for President Trump, Sabato’s lists Mr. Jones as a slight underdog. But, “if you were going to go into a lab and draw up a Democrat who can win in Alabama, it would be Doug Jones,” Mr. Coleman says. 

The issue of ecology looms large for him personally. “It it something that worries me all the time,” he says.

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Trump voter Ray White spends most days after work at a hamburger restaurant crabbing on the causeway between Spanish Fort and Mobile, Alabama, Nov. 15, 2019.

Conservative Alabamians like Mr. Cummings, a past president of the Mobile County Wildlife and Conservation Association, are helping to drive a different strain of environmentalism.

For one, the state has put tens of thousands of acres into the Forever Wild Land Trust, which protects against development. Facing lawsuits and pressure from environmentalists, one of the state’s biggest polluters, Southern Company, has begun to truck coal ash to safer locations, abandoning plans to simply cap the leaching old fills.

That strain of pragmatic environmentalism – adjudicated not in legislatures, but in the courts – courses through Alabama history.

In the 1970s, the state attorney general fought the U.S. Army and the Tennessee Valley Authority over responsibility for toxic wastes left behind on military bases, setting a national precedent.

In 1980, in a precursor to the the 1996 lawsuit by the town of Hinkley, California, led by Erin Brockovich, the commercial fishermen of Triana, Alabama, filed suit against a DDT manufacturer for tainting their waterways – and won.

And when state agencies balked at taking climate change into account when siting new oil tanks, Mobile City Council voted on tougher zoning to force industry to place the tanks on higher ground.

“I think people make a mistake seeing the South as an environmental backwater,” says Ellen Spears, an American studies professor at the University of Alabama and author of “Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution and Justice in an All-American Town.”

To be sure, she says, “one of the biggest obstacles to sensible action is the rejection of scientific realities by the key players on the national scene. And of course that anti-science bias trickles down. But we are plugging away at institutional change and talking about it within families.”

Near Daphne, Alabama, there’s a little riffle of a creek where an environmental reporter named Ben Raines stumbled upon a fitting metaphor for both the hope and tenacity of this place. While poking around the rocks, he found a stunning sight: a rusty gravedigger crawfish, happily plucking the muck. The discovery of what was thought lost reverberated far outside Baldwin County – representing, to some, a tiny-clawed hope for the Mobile-Tensaw.

Even as developers in the beach communities of Gulf Shores and Orange Beach test the capacity of local sewer systems, the county has invested heavily in eco-tourism along the still-pristine northern reaches of the county, where the Tensaw River still teems with life and mystery and undiscovered species. 

As he gets ready to push off from Hurricane for the 20-minute boat ride to his camp, Mr. Nelson has little choice but to keep driving pilings into the moving bank. The costs of safeguarding every camp from erosion is far too high for government to subsidize, he says. But there are, he believes, ways to slow down the destruction – to let nature catch up with man’s frenetic pace.

“I just want [politicians] to stop trying to hurt each other and start focusing on the people who care most about the land,” he says. “That’s us.”

Simon Gottwalt opts for salad and lasagna. It’s the strategic choice of a seasoned host who likes to focus on his guest once they cross the door, and of a parent keen to keep it simple.

“We always have a lot of people around,” says Mr. Gottwalt, a German living in Switzerland, before popping his signature dish into the oven. “It is rare that it is just us.”

What to cook can be a stressful decision when hosting, more so if the guest comes from a country with different culinary traditions. This is the second time that Mr. Gottwalt and his partner, Julia Buhmann, are welcoming a refugee into their Zurich flat, which they share with another couple who just had a baby. They all found the first time relatively positive, although it was a struggle to keep the conversation going and connect with the military experiences of their Afghan guest.

This September evening, the conversation flows. It transitions smoothly from somber moments – such as discussing the 17 months Filmon Heileab spent detained for illegal entry and separated from his own young family – to lighter ones. “It is because of prison that I got strong,” shares Mr. Heileab, an Eritrean who tried to cross from Italy to Switzerland three times before gaining refugee status.

Alternating between basic English and German, Mr. Heileab shows off family pictures and a video of the gravity-defying, laughter-inducing climbing skills of his toddler. He has two daughters, and their antics set the stage for common ground. His dinner hosts are parents to a toddler who was in bed by dinner and an alert baby who relished a new set of arms and smiles.

“Children make things easier,” reflects Mr. Gottwalt after the dinner. “They help create a connection.”

Mr. Heileab also left feeling positive. “The energy was good,” he says. “I like the opportunity to learn about what is happening in Switzerland.”

Such encounters are the fruit of the thoughtful matchmaking efforts of Gemeinsam Znacht – Dinner Together – a Zurich-based nonprofit founded in 2014. Its work was inspired by a similar initiative led by Ebba Akerman in Sweden. 

“I thought we have to do something in Switzerland, in the middle of Europe,” says Martina Schmitz, who recalls reading a New York Times feature about Ms. Akerman. Ms. Schmitz felt it crucial to take action in the face of the highest levels of displacement since World War II and launched Gemeinsam Znacht with the help of volunteers. 

An unprecedented 70 million people have been forced from their homes globally. In the face of this challenge, communities all over the world are turning to dinner projects, convinced that one of the best ways of breaking down barriers is the tried and true tradition of breaking bread. The range of hosts includes individuals, groups of friends, and even businesses. 

Trust at the table

In Zurich, one of the more multicultural cities of Switzerland, the number of applications from wannabe hosts boomed in 2015 when media focused on the thousands of refugees trudging along the Balkan route and those drowning at sea – including the Syrian Kurdish child, Alan Kurdi, who struck a nerve far and wide.

“We had this spike of applications but we did not have enough refugees,” recalls Anna Stünzi, a member of Gemeinsam Znacht’s board. The women and children who dominated media images rarely ended up in Switzerland. And those who did typically arrived via neighboring Italy from Libya rather than through the Balkan route.

Now, she says, the host-to-guest ratio is more or less even, although host interest can dip after events such as the 2016 Germany attacks, some of which were carried out by refugees. Sometimes hosts want to be reassured and ask if the organization does background checks. They don’t. Others question whether checks should be done for hosts. It took considerable effort and multiple visits to asylum centers to establish trust with potential guests.

“We had to convince them that this project is neither governed by the government, nor is it the police, nor is it any lawyer or something that would trick them,” adds Ms. Stünzi. “But also that it is not something where they would simply be looked at. ... That it was really about getting to know each other.”

One challenge is the language barrier. This made it difficult to coordinate dinners and ensure that guest reached their destination – although as time passed refugees acquired the local language, German. Hosts are instructed to follow up their invitation phone call with a message clearly stating the time and place of the dinner. Ms. Schmitz, who has overseen the coordination of more than 1,000 dinner events in the span of five years, is adamant that the first contact should be done over the phone.

“You can’t just send a WhatsApp message and say ‘Come to my place,’” she says. “It is a question of decency.”

‘Life changing’

The website features an FAQ section. The most common question from potential hosts is what to cook. Meals that are heavy on cheese – a major staple of the Swiss diet – are discouraged as guests might be lactose-intolerant. While a no-pork diet is safe to assume for a Muslim guest, hosts are also reminded of the multiple fasts followed by Christian Eritreans of the Orthodox Church.

Some hosts worry about wealth disparity and ask whether they should hide some of their belongings. Others have reservations over hosting single men. While the nonprofit screens both hosts and guests to ensure a match, it is not an à la carte process. About 80% of the potential guests are young men between 16 and 25, mainly from Afghanistan and Eritrea, reflecting refugee and asylum-seeker figures in Switzerland.

“I’ll always tell the mother of a family to take a young man as a guest because they come from big families. They have no distance to children. They’re not afraid of children. They accept them,” she says. “And 99.9% that is true.”

In a country where the nuclear family is small and the extended family rarely part of the picture, many Swiss hosts report being pleasantly surprised by guests who were delighted to play with their children and hold their babies while cooking was underway.

“If they do it, they open up to a completely different level of acceptance,” she adds. “All these young men you see in train stations, in trams, and suddenly you know one of them and you know he’s a nice guy. It’s a life-changing experience.”

In July, three men from an ultra-Orthodox, or religiously devout, radio station carried bucket after bucket brimming with coins into the small office of an Orthodox Jewish feminist organization in Jerusalem.

It was not a donation dutifully collected in a school charity drive. It was the 30,000 shekels an Israeli court had ordered the station, Kol Be’Ramah, to pay the religious women in court fees after ruling it had illegally discriminated against women by keeping them off the air, either as interviewees or broadcasters.

Delivering the equivalent of $8,470 in nickels and pennies was intended to be provocative. But the feminist group, Kolech, responded that money was money, and they were delighted that “every penny” would be going to a fund to help women.

Kolech, Hebrew for Your Voice, is part of a larger struggle for gender equality and against religious fundamentalism that is being waged by religious Jewish women in Israel, from modern- to ultra-Orthodox. They are trying to find solutions to the divides – often physical and behavioral in addition to philosophical – being placed between women and men by powerful members of the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, sector.

As the ultra-Orthodox community swells in Israel – today it numbers 1,125,000, or 12% of the population – so has its political power to fight for its own socially conservative mores. Specifically, its preference for gender segregation, citing reasons of religious modesty, a shorthand for avoiding sexual tension or distraction. Long observed during prayer in Orthodox synagogues and at community celebrations, such as weddings, it now extends, among some, to objecting even to photos of women displayed in public places, such as on billboards or within media.

Over time, the pattern and methods of the ultra-Orthodox marginalization of religious women have crept increasingly into secular society as well, creating a national political battleground with almost daily skirmishes.

But within the religious fold there has been an internal backlash by some women, many of them the products of a new generation of observant women trained in Jewish scholarship. They are fighting back against what they see as a religious extremism that excludes, separates, and in some cases attempts to all-out erase women and girls from the public sphere.

The resistance comes in different forms, including a group of ultra-Orthodox feminists who call themselves “the last of the suffragists in the modern world.” They are lobbying to give women from their community a voice in politics and recently won a court battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that an ultra-Orthodox party had to rescind its ban on electing women.

Others have also turned to the courts to secure their rights for everything from giving eulogies for their loved ones at cemetery chapels to being able to walk on certain neighborhood sidewalks.

Social media has also been a tool. A Facebook group called Chochmat Nashim, Hebrew for the “wisdom of women,” works to highlight examples of women’s exclusion. The group’s members also work to spread the word that there is, according to them, no basis in Jewish law to call for this kind of exclusion.

“Our mission is to raise awareness of policies doing damage and present alternatives – to say this is what is happening and this is what you can do about it,” says Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll, one of the group’s founders. “The more it spreads, the more people are pushing back and saying this is warped.”

Back of the bus

Yael Rockman, executive director of Kolech, says that the first sign of creeping gender exclusion came to the fore around 2011, when women were being seated at the back of some bus lines, mostly serving religious areas.

Kolech took part in the fight against the segregated buses, which eventually were ruled illegal by the Supreme Court.

“The problem with separation [of genders] is that it normalizes not seeing women and girls, and that makes for an unhealthy society. We need to teach each other how to treat each other well and with respect; that’s what we need to invest in – not separation,” Ms. Rockman says.

In the last decade, she says, Kolech has found that a two-pronged strategy works best to help women hurt by gender segregation and exclusion. The first is legal action if deemed necessary; the second is working to bring women’s voices forward by helping place them in leadership and management positions within the religious world. That second strategy is linked to the phenomenon in recent years of Orthodox women studying the Torah in depth, to the point that some are qualified as rabbis in all but name.

To help boost the visibility of these female Torah scholars who teach and can answer questions regarding Jewish law, Kolech has set up a program where the women can be “scholars in residence” over Shabbat in communities across the country.

“It’s helped create in-depth discussion of the role of women in the community,” says Ms. Rockman, adding that it’s part of the response that women, more than just belonging and being seen, can be at the center of Jewish life specifically and societal life in general.

Galvanized to action

The once-sleepy town of Beit Shemesh, nestled in a valley between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, has been a flashpoint of violence and gender discrimination.

Nili Philipp’s activism began the day she was hit with a rock by an ultra-Orthodox man in 2011 while riding her bicycle on the edge of town.

Ms. Philipp, who is Orthodox, was galvanized by that attack and by a wave of other sometimes violent assaults on local women and girls that involved kicking, pushing, and spitting for the purported crime of “immodest dress.” She joined a grassroots movement of fellow Orthodox women against religious extremism in their town.

Steve Kamilar

Nili Philipp, who is Orthodox, says her battle against religious extremism in Beit Shemesh is "not a battle against religion or against tradition."

She and four other women took the city of Beit Shemesh to court for failing to remove signs, posted unofficially around town, that call for women to dress modestly and bar them from walking on some sidewalks. They won the case, but face ongoing harassment and threats.

Ms. Philipp blames the extremism for promoting the “fear and hatred of a woman showing any form of agency, autonomy, and power to decide for herself where she walks, what she wears.”

She says she and the other women in the community did not know it would be such a long, ongoing struggle when they began. She says she measures victory in the way they are beginning to see an impact – for example, in the growing number of high school students who have come to her and to other activists wanting to learn more about their fight and in some cases to document it in film and articles.

“To me that means the message is really getting through, and that gives me a tremendous amount of hope that we really did win,” Ms. Philipp says. It “proves this is not a battle against religion or against tradition. To the contrary, it’s to make sure that the religion and traditions we keep are the ones we have chosen ... through consent.”

Representation in parliament

The rise of the Haredi parties’ political clout has made the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, a showcase of sorts for the marginalization of Orthodox women.

An organization called Nivcharot, the Haredi Women’s Movement, successfully sued an ultra-Orthodox political party that had stipulated that only men could serve as its lawmakers. The party, United Torah Judaism, still has no female lawmakers; nor do any of the other Haredi parties, but several ultra-Orthodox women have run with other political parties.

Nivcharot, which started as a Facebook group, was the brainchild of Esti Shushan, an ultra-Orthodox woman. Its members first met secretly, then started hosting workshops to spread the word about their campaign.

“It’s Jewish law that is blamed for this kind of exclusion, but Jewish law knows how to be flexible. When someone wants to find a solution, rabbis find them,” Mrs. Shushan says.

In the meantime, she and her fellow activists are explaining to others in their community why their mission is essential. They chose the political sphere, she says, because “the exclusion from making political decisions is the most meaningful and impactful on our lives.”

Mrs. Shushan says she and her family have been maligned personally because of her efforts.

“Of course there is a price; you can’t have a battle like this one without paying one,” she says. “But the price of silence is much higher.”

Through a large arched door with a heavy metal bolt lies a small and winding souk where three-dozen men and women knit, snip, iron, and smooth to keep a centuries-old craft alive.

This ancient Tunisian society of professionals is busy fending off one of its latest challenges: Chinese knockoffs of their chachiya hat.

But the giant lock to Souk Chaouachine is largely ceremonial. What truly guards this market in Tunis’ old city is a close-knit community that amid tufts of red wool has ruled its craft with an iron fist, transforming a woven hat into a national icon and continentwide fashion statement.

For the chachiya, the product of this exclusive club in Tunis, is everywhere.

The smooth, red wool cap lines shop windows and adorns the heads of shopkeepers, bakers, couriers, imams, and every other man over the age of 50.

It is the headwear of choice for all ages during holidays and festivals; even street cleaners don a chachiya during the cold winter months.

But here at the market, which the hat has made a national landmark, you either have to be invited or inherit the right to spin the most popular headwear in North Africa.

“As an outsider, it took years of hard work and convincing before they finally accepted me and invited me into the family,” says hat-master Abdullatif Zurdazi, 68, as he combs the frizzy ends of a white chachiya at his store at the center of the souk.

“But once you are in, you are in for life.”

A general’s admiration

This band-of-brothers camaraderie is said to date back to the very first chachiya, itself forged on the front lines of battle and linked to the 7th-century arrival of Islam in North Africa.

Legend has it that leading an army of Muslims from western Asia across North Africa, Uqbaa bin Nafaa, a general, admired a red cap worn by one of his Uzbek infantrymen as they prepared for battle against Berber fighters in what is now central Tunisia.

Due to the general’s enthusiasm, the cap was modified and became in vogue among the soldiers. After the victory, the capital that they founded – Kairouan – began an industry producing the hat.

An economic collapse in the 10th century drove Kairouan’s hatmakers across the Mediterranean and to southern Spain, where they were introduced to soft Spanish wools, local dyes, and a unique knitting process. It all came together to create the perfect lightweight warm cap for the wet and unpredictably chilly Mediterranean winters. The chachiya was born.

The Christian armies’ drive south and eventual defeat of Muslim city-states in Granada and Toledo in the 14th and 15th centuries drove tens of thousands of Andalusian refugees – and the chachiya makers – to flee to North Africa.

Sensing an economic opportunity, Tunis’ ruler invited the refugees to set up shop near the iconic Zaitouna mosque, where they remain today.

Code of honor

More than just artisanal know-how, these Andalusian refugees brought with them their clanlike guild and an honor system that is enforced to this day.

The artisans and families have internal laws, a council, and a strict system outlining how the hats must be constructed, what shape and color, and who should be allowed to open up shop.

Under the guild system, only the maalm, or master hatmaker, is licensed to run a shop and stamp his family name on the hat cartons. It’s a title that must be earned or inherited.

An apprentice must work for several years and pass rigorous tests judged by fellow hatmakers to be even considered for a hat-master license.

With families controlling the art for generations, it is a notoriously hard line of work to break in to.

Even rules of inheritance are strict: Only one son can be selected as a successor as hat-master, a stipulation designed to prevent family feuds among brothers from splitting the business and creating rival branches.  

Mr. Zurdazi is already printing the names of his eldest son, Mohammed Ali, next to his on their hat boxes.

The strict specifications, quality control, and exclusivity have helped the chachiya remain a hat made entirely by hand.

The chachiya starts its life out as thick wool thread, which Tunisian women spend an hour knitting with five thick needles balanced between their fingers to produce a kaboos, a comically oversized white knitted hat.

Workers then spend 12 hours washing and soaking this knitted wool in boiling water and soap until it shrinks, firms, and takes shape. The hat is then dyed and dried, and apprentices painstakingly comb out the rough edges to give the hat a soft feel and a buoyant, fuzzy body.

Hatmakers then fit the cap onto one of dozens of wooden or clay stumps of different sizes and proceed to iron every inch of the hat several times over.

The pressed chachiya sits on the peg for 24 hours to cool before hatmakers must sew their “mark,” a symbol distinct only to them, on the inside of the cap, to prevent imitations.

It is said that 18 different people work on any given chachiya. It is an old-fashioned assembly line that allows this community to churn out 400,000 flawless but distinct hats each year, reaching markets in nearby Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and as far away as East Asia.

Greener pastures?

But after two decades fending off Chinese machine-made chachiyas, the guild may have met its match.

With a vibrant and open post-revolution society, younger Tunisians are moving away from a craft that requires 12-hour workdays, six-day weeks, and marginal profits.

“Banking, finance, doctors – very few young people have the patience to craft an art with their hands,” says Mohammed Mahdi, a hatmaker.

“I want to encourage my son to continue the craft, but I don’t want to push him into a dying profession.”

A market that once held 75 hatmakers has dwindled to 20 artisans, hatmakers say, although demand for the headwear remains high.

In a bid to attract young Tunisians and women both to buy and consider entering the trade, new colors have appeared at the chachiya market; the round wool hats now appear in white, green, blue, and flamingo pink. Tassels have sprouted on the top of some hats; others sport rhinestones, decorative silver pins, and even fake eyelashes.

In the past two years, the souk has welcomed its first female hat-master, and the chachiya has become a trademark piece for models on the catwalks and in magazines. 

But even as the hat once again changes shape, one thing remains the same: the brotherhood’s push to make sure the next generation that follows in their footsteps adopts their ancient ways.

“Together as chachiya-makers we stand, and together we will fall,” says Mr. Zurdazi. “This is not just a hat, this is our inheritance.”

Julio Cortez/AP

The U.S. Capitol in Washington is seen to the right of the bottom part of the Washington Monument before sunrise in December 2019.

A bit of the spirit of Dolley Madison may be quietly at work within the U.S. Congress.

The wife of James Madison, a Founding Father and later the fourth president of the United States, she is often remembered as a gracious hostess. But the “presidentress,” as she was known, accomplished much more. 

Her popular social gatherings, called “squeezes” (for the crowds they drew), brought together the members of Congress in the early 19th century from both sides of the aisle. The deeper purpose: helping politicians get to know each other as individuals, not as anonymous enemies.

Today the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress has taken up that task. Its wide range of interests has included recommending money-saving measures like bulk buying of office supplies, mandatory cybersecurity training for members, and even an overhaul of the budgeting process itself. 

But one of its most important functions may be as a low-key effort to reduce hostility between the parties.

Rather than having more members from the majority party, the committee’s membership is evenly split: six Democrats and six Republicans. And when it meets members don’t sit as two opposing camps but interspersed, as individuals.

Tom Graves of Georgia, the group’s top Republican, has called the committee “a little place of refuge” where members can offer “ideas of how to make this place work better.” Rather than operating as a typical committee, where Republicans put on their red jerseys and Democrats put on their blue jerseys to battle it out, “we kind of made a decision not to do that,” says committee Chairman Derek Kilmer, a Democrat from Washington state. “Everybody’s wearing ‘fix Congress’ jerseys.”

Other than at the House gym or on the floor of Congress itself, members of the two parties have few opportunities to actually meet each other, Mr. Graves notes. The committee recommends that at the start of each new term a bipartisan retreat be held for all members and their families. And it says a bipartisan, members-only space should be created on Capitol Hill as well. 

As part of an effort to reach out, Mr. Kilmer has visited the Republican Study Committee, an influential caucus of conservative members. And Mr. Graves paid a similar call on the New Democrat Coalition, a group of center-leaning congressional Democrats.

The select committee’s proponents include some 40 House freshmen, who are eager to see a change in the highly partisan climate of the chamber, and the Association of Former Members of Congress, which includes members from both parties.

The committee is" a bright spot in all of this [partisan] noise right now,” Mr. Graves has said. 

Last November, the House extended the panel’s tenure through the end of 2020, which promises to be a politically acrimonious year that will include presidential impeachment hearings in the Senate and the November elections.

At the same time the select committee will be trying to bring sensible reforms to the way the House operates. That could pay an even bigger dividend: the realization that Republicans and Democrats can work together for the common good.