ist lesbian movement began to emerge into public discourse as a distinct group. Shadmi identifies three major points of empowerment and alliance that supported the lesbian– feminist movement: the peace movement that linked nationalism with gender analysis, the emergence of Mizrahi and Palestinian feminisms, and the political organizations for civil liberties and individual rights. On the other hand, lesbian feminism has been constrained. Ignored by mainstream public discourse as well as academic feminist publications, lesbianism as a political revision of heterosexuality and Zionism has been co-opted and neutralized. The original radical vision of the lesbian feminist movement may yet be reconstituted as part of an ongoing process of identity formation despite its current orientation and its alliance with other radical groups.
In her essay “From Gender to Genders: Feminists Read Women’s Locations in Israeli Society” Hanna Herzog notes that Israeli gender studies has evolved from a focus on woman as a unitary social category to a genders perspective that sees women in every class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. The hierarchical relationships between Israeli women and the various forms of knowledge their positioning produces make it impossible to refer to a feminist politics of knowledge that applies to all women in Israel. Herzog argues that it is possible to channel the differences into alternative modes of sociopolitical diffused activities. Following Kuhn’s model of revolutions in paradigms of knowledge, Herzog proposes that a shift has occurred in Israeli sociology in the 1990s that has moved from “Israeli women” to “wo/men in Israel.” The earliest phase of social research was based on a model of modernity, which evaluated families on a continuum from traditional to modern. In this early phase that spanned the 1960s and the 1970s, women were defined as a sexual biological category. In the 1980s, the criterion of gender equality emerged as a social analytic lens. Social institutions including the military and the family began to be considered as aspects of a gendered regime that structured Israeli society in general and that reproduced itself. In the 1990s, revisions of historical accounts of the pre-state era highlighted the role of women as active partners in shaping national and social institutions despite prevalent discrimination. A new research agenda via the researcher’s reflexivity raised the issue of the privileged position of the feminist conducting social research. This shifted attention to the objects of inquiry—poor women and female victims of rape-.and reconfigured them as informants and shapers of feminist knowledge. The interest in the researcher’s social location as producer of knowledge created new feminist Mizrahi and Arab– Palestinian research agendas. The stratification of sexuality and queer theory enabled the emergence of a reexamination of masculinity, notably Mizrahi and Palestinian masculinities. In view of such multiplicities, is a shared feminist agenda for social change possible? This dilemma reveals that a feminist politics that represents all women in Israel is impossible. However, while a unified separatist feminist movement is no longer feasible, the understanding of feminist knowledge as a political force practiced diffusely by various subjects in various ways is possible.
In one of the most notorious anti-Zionist and anti.feminist books that has ever been published, Otto Weininger presents Jews in feminine terms, and women in Jewish terms (Weininger,  2005; Harrowitz and Hyams, 1995). The abstract universalizing Woman and the equally essentialist Jew Weininger posits do not deserve the rights, prerogatives, and privileges that Aryan men deserve. Zionism does not represent all Jews, just as feminism does not represent all women, but as intellectual traditions they are interested in investigating, examining, and promoting the interests of these collective identities (Laqueur, 1978; Shimoni, 1995; Sachar, 1996; Cott, 1987; Offen, 2000). Both traditions are interested in questions of auto