Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Note on Transliteration -- Introduction -- "Reaganomics," Ḥok HaHesderim, and the Oslo Boomtime -- The Hudna -- Knafonomics: Vicky and I -- On Ethnographic Data -- Wrapped in the Flag of Israel's Bureaucracy: A Road Map -- 1. Left Is Right, Right Is Left -- Ḥad Horit: Notes on the Hebrew Etymology of Single Motherhood -- The Typology of Israel's Single Mothers -- On Zionism -- Why Mizraḥim Support the Right Wing -- Why Mizraḥi Feminists' Hands Are Tied -- 2. Protesting and Belonging -- Figurations of Agency -- Protesting and Belonging: An Argument in Six Parts -- Capturing and Conveying Elusive Bureaucratic Torture -- 3. Take 1 -- Classificatory Schemes of Bureaucratic Logic -- Negative Communitas: Bureaucracy's "Tough Love" -- The Plus-Minus Model of Torture -- The Zone of Repulsion: Plus-Plus Relationships of Pain -- Documents as Implements of Torture -- Bureaucracy's Essence: GendeRace -- Response to Bureaucracy: Bracketing -- Impossible Articulation, Impossible Agency -- 4. Take 2 -- 5. Take 3 -- 6. The Price of National Security -- Knafoland-The End -- This Is Exactly What We Did -- Epilogue: Israel, Summer 2011 -- Afterword(s) -- Bureaucratic Torture: When Agency Becomes Impossible -- The Translation Block -- Agency -- Torture -- One People One Heart: The War on Gaza 2014 -- The New Black Panthers, or HaLo Neḥmadim -- Ḥok HaHesderim 2014 -- Labor Hill B-Jamusin -- The Ḥamas Salary Fiasco -- Operation Brother's Keeper -- The War on Gaza-Protective Edge -- Under the Smokescreen of War -- Elections 2015: The Center Moves Further to the Right -- The Mizraḥi Cultural Renaissance -- The Steady Drumbeat of Eternal Return -- Acknowledgments -- Glossary of Hebrew, Arabic, and Yiddish Terms -- Notes -- References -- Index

AbstractWhat is the relationship between Mizraḥi feminism and Israeli ultranationalism? What is the relevance of gender justice activism to Operation Protective Edge (the 2014 Gaza War) and Israel's foreign policy? Mizraḥi protests dissipate and disappear when the Israel‐Palestine conflict dominates the headlines. This essay connects intra‐Jewish racial and gendered dynamics to the 2014 Gaza War. It tracks sequences that began with social protest and ended with elections that bolstered Israel's political right wing. In between came bloodletting between the Israeli Defense Forces, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel's neighboring Arab states. The 2014 Gaza War was a watershed not only for the Israel‐Palestine conflict; under the smokescreen of war, Israel accelerated neoliberal economic reforms. The first victims of this restructuring were Mizraḥi single mothers. Palestinians, however, would pay the highest price for Israel's Mizraḥi‐Ashkenazi rift.

In summer 2003, Vicky Knafo marched 125 miles from her desolate development town to the Finance Ministry in Jerusalem to protest welfare cuts for Israel's single mothers. Single mothers from all parts of Israel joined her. Most of the mothers were Mizrahim—Jews with origins in the Arab and Muslim World. They constitute 50% of Israel's citizenry. But like the 20% Palestinian Israeli citizens, they are treated as a racinated minority by the ruling 30% Ashkenazim (European Jews of Yiddish-speaking origins). This article consists of diary fragments recording the author's participation in the protest as a single welfare mother, ethnographer, and Mizrahi feminist.

This paper analyzes the failure of Israel's Ashkenazi (Jewish, of European, Yiddish-speaking origin) feminist peace movement to work within the context of Middle East demographics, cultures, and histories and, alternately, the inabilities of the Mizrahi (Oriental) feminist movement to weave itself into the feminist fabric of the Arab world. Although Ashkenazi elite feminists in Israel are known for their peace activism and human rights work, from the Mizrahi perspective their critique and activism are limited, if not counterproductive. The Ashkenazi feminists have strategically chosen to focus on what Edward Said called the Question of Palestine—a well funded agenda that enables them to avoid addressing the community-based concerns of the disenfranchised Mizrahim. Mizrahi communities, however, silence their own feminists as these activists attempt to challenge the regime or engage in discourse on the Question of Palestine. Despite historical changes, the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi distinction is a racialized formation so resilient it manages to sustain itself through challenges rather than remain a frozen dichotomy.

Drawn from the ethnography of Mizrahi feminist activism, my essay partakes of Michael Selzer's 1967 monumental The Aryanisation of the Jewish State. It analyses the oratory process through which Israel's feminist 'Peace Camp' racinates the question of Palestine. While this camp – which is almost 100 percent upper middle class Ashkenazi – opens up for the Palestinian nationalist feminist, allowing her space between her 'nation' and 'race', it manages to transcend its colonialist deracination of the Mizrahim, Israel's demographic non-European majority. The essay argues that the racinated Mizrahi is not allowed to enter either the peace-club or any sites of the tight-knit Israeli cultural-economic elites promoting the Oslo Peace Process. Such deracinated peace-witchcraft is rarely practised to improve the disenfranchised lived realities of most (poor) Mizrahim, who often resort to charities, right-wing and/or ultra-orthodox by default. Paradoxically, however, these progressive feminists admit their bounds of race through the appropriation of postmodern-queer-multicultural-border postures to apologise for their domination of the public peace sphere.

Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity challenges conventional understandings of identity based on notions of nation and culture as bounded or discrete. Through careful examinations of various transnational, hybrid, border, and diasporic forces and practices, these essays push at the edge of cultural studies, postmodernism, and postcolonial theory and raise crucial questions about ethnographic methodology.This volume exemplifies a cross-disciplinary cultural studies and a concept of culture rooted in lived experience as well as textual readings. Anthropologists and scholars from related fields deploy a range of methodologies and styles of writing to blur and complicate conventional dualisms between authors and subjects of research, home and away, center and periphery, and first and third world. Essays discuss topics such as Rai, a North African pop music viewed as westernized in Algeria and as Arab music in France; the place of Sephardic and Palestinian writers within Israel's Ashkenazic-dominated arts community; and the use and misuse of the concept "postcolonial" as it is applied in various regional contexts.In exploring histories of displacement and geographies of identity, these essays call for the reconceptualization of theoretical binarisms such as modern and postmodern, colonial and postcolonial. It will be of interest to a broad spectrum of scholars and students concerned with postmodern and postcolonial theory, ethnography, anthropology, and cultural studies.Contributors. Norma Alarcón, Edward M. Bruner, Nahum D. Chandler, Ruth Frankenberg, Joan Gross, Dorinne Kondo, Kristin Koptiuch, Smadar Lavie, Lata Mani, David McMurray, Kirin Narayan, Greg Sarris, Ted Swedenburg

Creativity and play erupt in the most solemn of everyday worlds as individuals reshape traditional forms in the light of changing historical circumstances. In this lively volume, fourteen distinguished anthropologists explore the life of creativity in social life across the globe and within the study of ethnography itself. Contributors include Barbara A. Babcock, Edward M. Bruner, James W. Fernandez, Don Handelman, Smadar Lavie, José E. Limon, Barbara Myerhoff, Kirin Narayan, Renato Rosaldo, Richard Schechner, Edward L. Schieffelin, Marjorie Shostak, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and Edith Turner.