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 autonomy, assertiveness, and power, yet both in their postmodern phases show critical self-awareness, and are keen to revise earlier overreaching generalizations on behalf of a universal Woman or universal Jew (Spivak, 1987; Mohanty, 2006; Scott, 2011; Kimmerling, 1983; Shafir and Peled, 2002; Shohat, 2006). In both cases difference emerges as a crucial challenge to earlier representations that favored the white, middle-class woman, or, in Zionism, the Ashkenazi man (Almog, 2000). Both Zionism and feminism have been forced to revisit, revise, and question assumptions and both reached a crisis of consciousness which has forced a critical reorientation. But much as Lyotard’s definition of “the Jews” as the outcasts, nomads, immigrants, blacks, and women is appealing, we cannot ignore the fact that each collective identity has a separate history, visions, and challenges. This reader asks questions on behalf of women who identify as Jews, Zionists, Israelis, women, or feminists to various degrees. The scholars hold both Zionism and feminism to account, revealing their promising, fraught, and tortuous relationships, and opening out new trajectories toward a long overdue dialogue between Israel studies and Women’s studies.