) 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 outsiders, the survivors were understood as strangers, and excluded from privileged discourses of national heroism (gevurah). The Shoah has become gendered as the quintessential representation of Jewish powerlessness, effeminate passivity, and victimization. Powerlessness thus became associated with the memory of the European destruction of Jews, while masculinity defined the very essence of Zionism. The sin of exile exacted a terrible price from the Jewish minority in Europe, and the Zionist leadership vowed to learn the only lesson taught by the catastrophic results of anti-Semitic violence—which was to affirm its commitment to sovereignty and military security. But while the memory of the Shoah was used as a moral justification for Zionist policies of self-defense and preemptive aggression against Palestinian “enemies,” Shoah survivors were constructed as strangers rather than “natives”—as neither insiders nor outsiders, as ambivalent models of a discarded gendered identity. Despite stigmatic representations of cowardice, indolence, and immorality by the Zionist leadership during the first decade of statehood, the historical record shows that Shoah survivors participated in military struggles and were as productive as others in the labor sector. Their story of double victimization has been repressed in the hegemonic national narrative.
Dafna Izraeli’s “Gendering Military Service in the Israel Defense Forces” argues that the military has been, contrary to expectation, a crucial site for producing and reproducing gendered regimes of power in Israeli society. The institution most frequently cited as proof of women’s national partnership in effect serves as a primary agent in the construction of their difference. Though women conscripts do perform crucial work in for the Israel Defense Forces, their contribution is perceived as secondary and expendable. One reason for this public perception is the traditional exclusion of women from combat and reserve duties. Though military conscription is compulsory for both sexe