Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel: Life History, Politics, and Culture

Introduction

Introduction T his collection was prompted by a search for the concealed identity of women in the history and culture of the Yishuv, the Jewish settlement in pre-state Israel, and by the call for a new national discourse. Issues regarding women and gender have been largely ignored in the historiography of the Jewish community in Palestine and research into its culture.1 Even today the discourse is overwhelmingly male dominant.2 This exclusion of women is the direct continuation of women having been barred from public life in Jewish communities in the past.3 The attempt to establish a new society based on ideological foundations of equality did not succeed, and its lack of realization created frustration and anguish.4 The fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel was the catalyst for convening a multidisciplinary interuniversity conference on the topic “Women in the Yishuv and the Early State of Israel,” which was held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It was co-sponsored by the Leifer Center for Women’s Studies at the Hebrew University as well as The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and The Jacob and Libby Goodman Institute for the Study of Zionism and Israel, both affiliated with Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts . The participants, from universities in Israel and the United States, addressed a wide range of topics: history, sociology, historical geography , political science, literature, anthropology, folklore, musicology, history of philosophy, and cinema studies. The forty or so lectures given in the course of three tightly packed days stimulated considerable interest. This peer-reviewed multidisciplinary anthology in English comprises a selection of articles based on the conference presentations. Reverberations of the second wave of feminism, which also reached Israel , prompted there, too, the desire to reveal the feminine voice and the genderization of the past. Over the last two decades, we have been fortunate to see pioneering initial studies responding to the invocation “to seek, tell and write new narratives that will give expression to woman’s life, to the story of her activities, to her contribution, and to her naturean the authentic multifaceted Hebrew-Israeli voice.”5 Postmodern contemporary research permeated by concepts of cultural pluralism serves as a catalyst for a revised national discourse, one that also expresses the world of women and issues of gender. Intense preoccupation with the myth of the equality of the sexes in Eretz Israel, an ethos that has been scrutinized and smashed in extensive research, led to a number of basic questions: What was the reality of life for women in Jewish society in Eretz Israel in the early years? What was the contribution of women to the renewal of Israeli society and culture? What is the place of gender perceptions in the study of the new Eretz Israel identity? In a stimulating, challenging programmatic article, Billie Melman has called for not being satisfied with seeking out and exposing the hidden half but rather for applying new insights derived from feminist research to create a new historical-cultural narrative.6 Her evaluation that “Zionism was perhaps the most conscious and intensive attempt to change the concepts of gender against the background of national realization,” presents the study of “Israeliness” as a gender test case of unique importance.7 The original articles in this anthology, each in its own way, forge an innovative response to one or more of the questions presented above and can be viewed as a representative sample, reflecting the state of research in the field. Analysis through the prism of gender should greatly enhance our understanding of the key issues for Israeli society. This volume is divided into six sections, each chronologically presented. In the first section, “Constructing the Historical Narrative,” Deborah Bernstein, Yossi Ben-Artzi, and Henriette Dahan-Kalev address issues of methodology and historiography. The first two authors propose a map for future research in this field, while Henriette Dahan-Kalev focuses on the study of Oriental women and informs us of the special problems involving the “other.” The articles in the second section, “Women and Immigration,” deal with four different groups of immigrants. Michal Ben Ya’akov elucidates immigration patterns of traditional women from North Africa who headed for Eretz Israel in the nineteenth century. Joseph Glass assesses the contribution of women immigrants from the United States to the Yishuv. Esther MeirGlitzenstein sensitively depicts the encounter of young Iraqi women with 2 Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel [18.226.251.68] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 21...