At the age of four, Hareven and her parents were forced to leave their home in Chernivtsi and live in an internment camp in Ukraine due to their Jewish heritage.
Hareven's early life contributed to her familiarity with languages including German, French, and English, in addition to her native Romanian and Hebrew.
She worked with her Ph.D. advisor John H. Bremner and others on Children and Youth in America, a seminal three volume collection that launched the field of the history of childhood.
Before the 1970s, studies of history focused primarily on individuals in positions of power and status in society, such as politicians, military leaders, and those in the upper social classes.
Between 1972 and 1977, Hareven and a group of student assistants conducted hundreds of intensive oral history interviews with former employees of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company.
In the course of this research, Hareven met Randolph Langenbach, an architectural historian and photographer, who was in the process of recording New England industrial buildings for historical preservation.
From 1979 to 1983, she joined forces with anthropologist Kathleen M. Adams to conduct additional oral history interviews with children, spouses, siblings, and parents of former Amoskeag workers.
Her research in Japan led to her last book, The Silk Weavers of Kyoto: Family and Work in a Changing traditional Industry, which was published after her death in 2002.