Conception to Delivery: Sharing an Account of Mizrahi Mothers

Smadar Lavie’s soon-to-be-published book Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture is a personally inspired account that stems from her own life as a single mother in Israel. Following, the author reveals how this inspiration became a book, and speculates about how this account will be received. This is the second of the author’s reflections on the Berghahn blog, read the first here.

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Berghahn Books: What inspired your love of your subject? When?

Smadar Lavie: My years in Israel as a welfare mother forced me to become my own informant. Those years were full of hardship. I am using the privilege of my U. C. Berkeley education and the power and proficiency of my English words to call attention to the plight of all Mizrahi single mothers in the State of Israel.

Continue reading “Conception to Delivery: Sharing an Account of Mizrahi Mothers” →

Transnational Ahead of Its Time: Author Examines Council of Women

National borders are broken down in Oliver Janz and Daniel Schönpflug’s soon-to-be-released collection Gender History in a Transnational Perspective: Networks, Biographies, Gender Orders. The contributors examine historic cross-continent networks of European feminists. Following a short introduction from the author is a excerpt from Karen Offen’s chapter, in which the author examines the International Council of Women, which she considers “transnational” before the term was coined.

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Karen Offen introduces this first part of the volume with reflections on a fundamental question: Can the category “transnational” be applied to the early international women’s movement, even though its representatives did not yet employ the term.

Historical scholarship is pressed to justify anachronistic terminology. It seems, though, that its use is often unavoidable, since historians’ implicit and explicit questions about the past always stem from their own present. Also, from a theoretical and methodological point of view, employing anachronistic terms allows for clearer analytical terminology as the linguistic horizon of the contemporaries is often ambivalent, contradictory and multifold.

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Doubly Disenfranchised: A Firsthand Account of Life as a Mizrahi Woman

The largest population of Mizrahi Jews, those with origins in Middle Eastern countries, lives in Israel. However, in this country Mizrahim are historically and currently disenfranchised, with preference given to Jews of European descent, or Ashkenazi. In Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture, to be published this month, Smadar Lavie, herself a Mizrahi Jewish woman, explores the Israeli bureaucratic system and Mizrahi women’s relationship with it. Following, the author answers the question: What aspect of writing Wrapped in the Flag of Israel did you find most challenging? Most rewarding?

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Most challenging was weaving a text out of two decades worth of fieldwork data. Though I started my research efforts in 1990 as a tenured professor at U. C. Davis, the bulk of the fieldwork was collected during my years as a Mizrahi single mother on welfare between 1999-2007. For a typical book-length ethnography, most scholars spend a total of around two years in the field collecting data, supported by grants and sabbaticals. Afterward, they return to their home university and write the book manuscript, also supported by grants and sabbaticals.

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Berghahn Author Asks: ‘Quo Vadis FEMEN?’

FEMEN is a Ukrainian feminist protest group that has become infamous for its topless protests against patriarchy. The group, founded in 2008, has since grown to be a worldwide phenomenon, and not simply because its protests are often seen as “sextreme.” Marian Rubchak, editor of Mapping Difference: The Many Faces of Women in Contemporary Ukraine, takes a look into the history and meaning of the movement, and asks: Where is it going?

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The year was 2008; 17 years had passed since Ukraine declared its independence and early advocates of change began to espouse high-minded ideals designed to promote women’s rights. These incipient feminists laid the groundwork for raising an awareness of discrimination against women, and were instrumental in advancing the passage of some of the most progressive pro-women legislation Ukraine had yet seen. Fast forward to 2008 — the promising beginnings were moving very slowly, too slowly. Clearly the work of reform would need to proceed to a higher level.

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‘Wrapped in the Flag of Israel’ Author Earns Heart at East Award

On May 21, 2013, in Tel Aviv, the Heart at East Lifetime Achievement Plaque was bestowed upon Prof. Smadar Lavie. Her scholarly and activist voice for the rights of Mizrahi Jewish women living in Israel received formal recognition. Lavie’s two decades of ethnographic research and community leadership to better the lives of those within these populations not only earned her the award, but also led her to write Wrapped in the Flag of Israel, to be published in April 2014. Below, Lavie explains why Heart at East is significant—both within the State of Israel and for herself.

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Smadar Lavie
— Photo by Jutta Henglein-Bildau

I was so thrilled to receive Facebook messages from Reuven Abarjel, co-founder of the Jerusalem Black Panthers, and Shira Ohayon, a longtime Mizrahi feminist and educational director of Israel’s Andalusian Orchestra, that I was to be awarded the Heart at East Lifetime Achievement Plaque in May 2013.

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Down, Not Out: Ethiopian Youth on the Street

Paula Heinonen’s decade of research and reflection led to the publication of Youth Gangs and Street Children: Culture, Nurture, and Masculinity in Ethiopia, which was published as a paperback in June 2013. Based on careful observations and interviews, the volume provides insight into common misconceptions of why Ethiopian boys and girls take to the street.

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Before embarking on my six years longitudinal field research and four years of follow-up enquiry and reflection, I read extensively on the street children phenomena worldwide.

Continue reading “Down, Not Out: Ethiopian Youth on the Street” →

Hot Off the Presses- New Book Releases

New in print from Berghahn:
After The History of Sexuality: German Genealogies with and beyond Foucault, edited by Scott Spector, Helmut Puff, and Dagmar Herzog

Cinema of Choice: Optional Thinking and Narrative Movies, by Nitzan Ben Shaul

Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion: Violence against Jews in Provincial Germany, 1919-1939, by Michael Wildt, translated from German by Bernard Heise

Sharing the Sacra: The Politics and Pragmatics of Intercommunal Relations around Holy Places, edited by Glenn Bowman

Gender, Sports, and Culture: The Victorians and Us

Graduate school ruins your ability to view anything related to your topic of study with an unacademic eye. This is fine if your topic doesn’t come up every day like, say, Byzantine art, but when you choose something that crops up often, like the influence of American music on Continental youth culture in the 1950s, it means you’ll be mentally revising your thesis every time you hear “Johnny B. Goode.” I’m reminded of this phenomenon every Olympiad because I wrote my master’s thesis on sports in Nazi Germany, using the party’s sports policy up until the 1936 Berlin Olympics as a window into their ideas about race and its intersection with political priorities before the war. The fast-approaching 2012 Olympics already have me mentally revising my thesis (something I’m sure I’ll be doing on my death bed), but the most recent issue of our journal Critical Survey has me wondering if I didn’t miss an altogether more interesting topic- sports and gender. Continue reading “Gender, Sports, and Culture: The Victorians and Us” →

Susan Hogan on Revisiting Her Groundbreaking Work on Feminist Art Therapy

Berghahn recently published Revisiting Feminists Approaches to Art Therapy, edited by Susan Hogan. It is both an update and an expansion of the earlier work Feminist Approaches to Art Therapy, first published in 1994. Here, Hogan addresses her reasons for revisiting her seminal work and explains why the topic is just as relevant today.

“Why do we need a book about women’s issues?” I am often still asked. Feminism is the principle of advocating social, political, and other rights of women as equal to those of men. It is necessarily interested in the question of equality. Creating a deep understanding of women’s conditions and women’s experience is one rationale for a volume specifically addressing this subject.

Another raison d’être of all my work in the field of art therapy is to challenge the reductive, and potentially damaging use of psychological ideas in art therapy practice. Continue reading “Susan Hogan on Revisiting Her Groundbreaking Work on Feminist Art Therapy” →

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Tag: gender studies