oman—each framed as a secondary, auxiliary, and complementary counterpart. The early settlements at the turn of the century did not live up to the professed commitment of Zionist ideologues to gender equality. For the most part, women of the first “aliya,” or wave of settlement, were the wives and mothers of farmers and agriculturalists, often excoriated for their passivity and bourgeois manners. Modernization and secularization as cherished Zionist ideals offered urban women few professional outlets, mostly as teachers in coeducational institutions. The liberated woman remained more an ideal than a reality even in the early military defense organizations and kibbutzim. In the 1920s, urban women’s organizations dedicated themselves to securing equal voting rights, while socialist, mostly single women had to insist on equal participation in public life. Defined in masculine terms, Zionism offered the female settlers the option of gender imitation or traditional marriage and reproduction. The conflicting options of revolution and traditionalism left many women frustrated in their struggle to support the Hebrew men’s national adventures, and to reinvent themselves in their new ancestral land. The heroines who emerged from the settlement period 1888–1948 were exceptions whose eventual fame hardly reflects the fate of most women who immigrated to Palestine during that period.
Judith T. Baumel’s “The Heroism of Hannah Senesz: An Exercise in Creating Collective National Memory in the State of Israel” subjects an icon of Zionist heroism to special scrutiny. Baumel studies the process of canonization that inscribed the memory of Hannah Senesz in the national historical interpretation of the Holocaust and Zionist resistance. Baumel traces the early biography of Senesz as a precocious idealist, who left Hungary on the eve of World War II to join a struggling kibbutz in Palestine under the British Mandate (1917–48). Contrary to national myth, Senesz was one of a larger group of Palmach (Jewish defense organization volunteers) who were recruited to participate in a British mission. Baumel points out flaws and excesses in the plan to rescue British pilots behind German lines, and questions as well the reckless sacrifice of the young parachutists whose mission was practically suicidal. Senesz was captured by the Hungarian Nazi authorities and executed after refusing to ask for a pardon. Baumel highlights a sub-narrative that is as widely circulated, namely, the futile attempts of Hannah’s mother to extricate her from her prison, and the anguish both mother and daughter suffered as a result of what the mother will later define as the failure of the Zionist leadership to respond to her pleas. Baumel deconstructs here the mythic polarization between Holocaust victimization and Zionist heroism by reframing the narrative as the story of a mother and a daughter, of individual courage, idealism, and determination. Determined not to let her daughter’s memory fade, Hannah’s mother, a survivor of a Nazi death march, immigrated to Israel and pressed her case against a Zionist functionary who was eventually indicted and prosecuted for negligence. Baumel notes that other posthumous processes, such as the publication of Hannah Senesz’s poems, the ideological controversy about her “true” kibbutz affiliation, and subsequent narrative and dramatic representations of her defiant loyalty to her mission canonized her memory, though other parachutists, both men and women, also perished on this mission. Hannah Senesz reemerged as the subject of historical contentions and academic debates about the policies of the Zionist leadership during the Holocaust of 1933–45.
Ronit Lentin’s “The Feminisation of Stigma in the Relationship Between Israelis and the Shoah” argues that Holocaust (Shoah) survivors who immigrated to Israel were defined by the normative, hegemonic Zionist discourse as outsiders in need of rescue and protection. As representatives of effeminate exilic Jewry, the survivors were stigmatized against the norm of Hebrew masculinity. Stigmatized as o