Introduction Israeli Feminist Scholarship
Gender, Zionism, and Difference
Esther Fuchs Zionism and feminism are discourses that share a complex relationship with European modernity. Along with Foucault (1984, 39) I understand “modernity” not as a distinct period, but rather as a “way of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation to belonging and presents itself as a task.” With roots in the eighteenth century, both movements were spurred by a consciousness of the discontinuity of time, a break with tradition, and a conviction of novelty. At the same time, both can be conceived as responses to European humanism, which excluded women and Jews (among other classed, racial, and colonial “others”) from the definition of “man” as the agent of history. In light of this exclusion, both claimed a new collective identity and subject position for Jews and women based on the promises of rationalism, individualism, liberty, and equality. Zionist and feminist manifestoes demanded that Jews and women reform themselves before deservedly laying claim to the “rights of man” (Hertzberg, 1970; Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, 1980; Eisenstein, 1983; Tong, 1998). Both movements argued for social and political change that will make women and Jews more like the “man” of Enlightenment humanism. Both struggled to “gain a place in linear time as the time of project and history” (Kristeva,  1997, 201).
The nation-state that emerged in Europe in the eighteenth century, while embracing the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, fraternity, and equality, excluded the Jews, women, and colonized minorities from full participation in the new bastions of power: the military, government, and university. European nationalism was buttressed by imperialist and racist ideologies that rationalized colonization, imperial mapping, arbitrary borders, and the enslavement of blacks as commodities in a new international order. Imperialism and Orientalism—the perception of the Orient as inferior to the West—were interrelated with anti-Semitic and 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 develope