heterosexist ideologies (Arendt,  1968; Said, 1978; Spivak, 1987; Mosse, 1985; McClintock, 1995). Sexual and racial difference had to be reformed, transformed, and suppressed before these “minorities” could claim full citizenship in the modern nation-state. These exclusions were buttressed by anti-Semitic, racist, and antifeminist ideologies that argued that Jews, women, and blacks are essentially, inalterably “different”—that is, inferior to the Eurocentric “humanist” norm (Weininger, 1906; Gilman, 1985; Gilroy, 1994).
Early Zionists and suffragists sought to reform Jews and women in accordance with European Enlightenment. As modern movements feminism and Zionism were embedded in Eurocentric notions of humanism that included liberalism, capitalism, socialism, and colonialism. To the extent that both were mobilizing ideas, both struggled to claim totalizing representation of the political interests of their constituencies—(all) women and (all) Jews. Both Zionism and feminism were later identified as modalities of European modernisms by multicultural, postcolonial, and poststructuralist postmodernists in the last decades of the twentieth centuries. Both discourses seem to have lost their mobilizing appeal as global movements, and their essentialist uses have been replaced by analytic practices, notably within academic frameworks.
The analogies between feminism and Zionism must not overshadow the serious and obvious differences between them. This reader creates a space for a critical examination of the relationship between these disparate discourses. This reader is about the difference(s).
The Western suffragist discourse on the civil rights of women was reenergized and transformed in the 1930s by Virginia Woolf (1929, 1938) and in the 1950s by Simone de Beauvoir (1952). Both analyzed the lingering effects of male dominance after the official integration of women into the Western body politic. Woolf theorized the continued impact of patriarchy on women, and revalorized women’s difference, while de Beauvoir developed the concept of the “Other” and called for women to liberate themselves from the modern shackles of patriarchy. The Women’s liberation movement that emerged in the 1960s sought to implement the social and political implications of the Second Wave in feminism. The American Second Wave generated analyses of the oppression of middle-class American women (Friedan, 1962) and patriarchal knowledge systems that objectified “woman” and sexual difference (Millett, 1970). In the 1980s as feminism began to become institutionalized as an academic field (de Lauretis, 1986), it was questioned as a white, middle-class, Western idea (Moraga and Anzaldua, 1981; hooks,  1986; Spivak, 1987; Mohanty, Russo, and Torres, 1991). Western feminism was displaced by multicultural and postcolonial “feminisms” (Warhol and Herndl, 1997; Narayan and Harding, 2000).
The concept of gender as a criterion of analysis (Scott, 1988) was also subverted and destabilized as resting on a male/female, masculinity/femininity dualism that cannot account for the politics of sexual difference (Butler, 1990; Weedon, 1999). Poststructuralist analyses of gender and feminism raised the question of language as the inescapable mediation of the politics of sexual identity (Spivak, 1997).
The debates between identity politics and poststructuralist feminism (Nicholson, 1990), black and white, “first” world and “third” world feminists, brought to the fore the politics of difference within feminism. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (1994, 1–36) proposed a theory of “scattered hegemonies” that will displace the hegemonic, homogenizing, and mystifying divisions of “Western” versus “non-Western” feminisms. Susan S. Friedman (1998) argued for a deconstruction of oppositional essentialisms, and for a feminist practice of border crossing and epistemological encounter. Chandra T. Mohanty (2006) argued for decolonizing feminism and demystifying capitalism through struggles of solidarity across borders in her reconfiguration of “feminism without borders.”
In Imperial Leather: 