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 coming to voice of Mizrahi feminist intellectuals is a process threatened by the negation of their difference, the denial of this collective identity and its distinctive material and symbolic claims. The double exclusion of the Mizrahi woman’s voice from cultural representation denies her the privileged identity of an “Israeli” subject position, though theoretically she is part of the national collective. This state of affairs was altered only in the late 1990s. Thus hegemonic academic representations reproduced the essentialist, predetermined definitions of Mizrahi women, rather than challenging them. Hegemonic “scientific” statistical data on the ethnic gap do not provide a theoretical or analytic explanation, as they fail to attend to the politics of knowledge, the ideological bias of scholarly construction. Feminist data fail to intersect gender with ethnic and class differences. Motzafi-Haller suggests that hegemonic feminism posited the privileged Ashkenazi male as the norm, while distancing itself from the allegedly uneducated and less-deserving women whose existence they erased on their path to equality with the norm. A future research agenda must posit the Mizrahi woman as the starting point of research. The research must follow a trajectory of identification from a minority perspective that is relational, considers other collective identities, and is always aware of the context of power. The goal is not to create more knowledge about Mizrahi women, but to displace current scholarly practices by focusing on the daily experiences of Mizrahi women so as to subvert the transparency of the male Ashkenazi subject.
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s “Reexamining Femicide: Breaking the Silence and Crossing ‘Scientific’ Borders” focuses on a major concern for Palestinian feminism: honor killing. The essay redefines this cultural tradition as femicide, and demands that it be treated as both a crime and a human rights violation. The broadening of the concept allows border crossings between disciplines whose distinctiven