 women are suspect in the desert, yet women’s art and writing suggest that the desert often provided an occasion for shedding civilized restrictions of conventional femininity and going nomad or native. The dual process of loss as acquisition and the alliance of women and desert spaces are two major themes in the rereading of Savyon Liebrecht’s short story “Apples from the Desert.” The essay suggests that the heroine, Victoria, a submissive Sephardic wife and mother, is liberated by her trip to a desert kibbutz. The traditional Jerusalemite who sets out to reclaim her rebellious daughter reinvents herself through her contact with the desert kibbutz. The story is read as a progressively unfolding mutual dialogue between traditional and modern, urban and agricultural, civilized and desert cultures which reverses the roles of mother and daughter and redefines their relationship as a political alliance against conventionality and hierarchy.
“Tensions in Israeli Feminism: The Mizrahi Ashkenazi Rift” by Henriette Dahan-Kalev traces the historical development of a Mizrahi feminist consciousness. Drawing on black feminist theory she examines the historical manifestations of ethnic discrimination and marginalization within the Israeli feminist movement. As a national movement with roots in European culture, Zionist projects of modernization and development discriminated against Mizrahi immigrants from Middle Eastern countries, who were perceived as uncivilized and backward. Modernization policies rationalized economic exploitation, unequal educational opportunities, and exclusionary practices that produced Mizrahi Jews as second-class citizens. Despite the state’s commitment to ethnic equality in theory, as in other democracies, ethnic, national, class, and gender inequities emerged as systematic problems in Israeli society. Dahan-Kalev argues that the ethnic difference was reproduced in the feminist movement, despite the rhetoric of sisterhood and solidarity. Not only was the leadership dominated by Ashkenazi women, the priorities of the movement focused on career advancement and breaking gender barriers to elite positions for professional women. The dominant feminist agenda did not include the concerns of a majority of working-class women trapped in low-income, low-status, labor-intensive jobs with few prospects for breaking out of the cycle of poverty. Dahan-Kalev traces the evolution of the process that led to the analysis of the double oppression of Mizrahi women along gender and ethnic lines. She identifies a phase of self-empowerment in the early 1990s that led to the creation of a separatist Mizrahi feminist faction within the larger movement. The Mizrahi feminist agenda is committed to deconstructing the ethnic binary in general in addition to gendered power asymmetries. Thus, its rejection of a culture of elitism that caters to the interests of the few at the expense of the many is not merely an issue of cultural but of political difference.
Pnina Motzafi-Haller’s “Scholarship, Identity, and Power: Mizrahi Women in Israel” shifts the analysis to the politics of knowledge and provides a critical examination of scholarly representations of Mizrahi women. The goal here is to deconstruct the category of “Mizrahi women” as a predetermined, objectified, and essentialist topic constructed for the most part by arbitrary definitions of gender and country of origin. Drawing on black feminist and postcolonial theory, the essay identifies three hegemonic approaches to Mizrahi women as objects of academic study. The earliest paternalistic and Orientalist approach diagnoses modernizing mechanisms that will improve their parental and social skills. The second approach taken by feminist sociologists represents Mizrahi women as uneducated, lower-class laborers, advantaged only in comparison to Arab women laborers. These approaches silence the Mizrahi intellectual woman and render her invisible. The third approach, which recognizes the Mizrahi woman as a subject in her own right, emerges only in the mid-1990s, and is still unfolding. The