In the Cement Boxes: Mizrahi Women in the Israeli Periphery by Pnina Motzafi-Haller (review)

“Incisive . . . dialogue,” “courageous . . . ethnography”—these are a few of the superlatives that describe the work of Pnina Motzafi-Haller on the back cover of In the Cement Boxes: Mizrahi Women in the Israeli Periphery. Does the book stand up to the expectations they raise? I will endeavor to answer that question by discussing the ethnographic and anthropological challenges that Motzafi-Haller set for herself.

The book surveys the lives of five women residents of Yeruham, which Motzafi-Haller refers at as a “development town”—a pejorative often used by non-Yeruhamites to refer to this town in Israel’s southern Negev desert, implying its backwardness, though Yeruhamites don’t see their town as backward. It is located near Sede Boker, where Motzafi-Haller lives. Over four years, she met and communicated regularly with her subjects, whom she calls Nurit, Efrat, Rachel, Esti and Galit. The book’s chapters describe their life-webs, setting out a complex picture of what she saw and decodes as their “diverse strategies of survival” (Chap. 1), including “strengthening” their Jewish practices (hitḥazkut; Chap. 2), leading “hybrid lives” (Chap. 3), juggling (Chap. 4), subversive interpretations of reality (Chap. 5), rebellion (Chap. 6), and returning to oneself (Chap. 7).

All these strategies reveal the continual struggles triggered by life’s necessities. First and foremost are the economic struggles, which are simultaneously the women’s struggles against oppressive practices at home and in the public sphere. Their maneuvers in coping with conflicting norms and values, with their social and religious communities and with the bureaucracy stand at the heart of this study. We read about the women’s negotiations with law-enforcement authorities, welfare services and education, health, housing and work officials. Motzafi-Haller uses one woman to exemplify the theme of each chapter; thus, Nurit demonstrates survival strategies, while Esti presents subversive modes of operation. Unfortunately, my sense was that this technique tended to reduce the women to the dimension discussed in “their” chapters.

Motzafi-Haller writes: “The challenge that I faced in conducting this research was to develop the ability to listen to the stories of the people of Yeruham and allow them to be heard in their own terms, and not as narratives of ‘others’” (p. 5; all translations from the Hebrew are my own). Later on, she writes that the women she researched and documented “were more similar than I expected to those who made them others” (p. 6). From these statements, we learn of Motzafi-Haller’s initial approach to the women. Before even beginning to present their stories, she designates them as having been cast as others. The “othering” force is not explicit. It flickers when the women contest the governmental authorities or the excluding social and community forces that deny them jobs, education or welfare services.

The reader’s resulting impression is that there must be a hidden “big other,” as Lacan calls it, bad and alienating, that is responsible for the women’s victimization. This is an Archimedean point from which the women’s condition can be seen as one of constant struggle, subversion and resistance. Nevertheless, the “big other” remains unclear or even “doesn’t exist,” as Slavoj Zizek puts it (Journal of European Psychoanalysis, 1997). Occasionally, Motzafi-Haller points to what we already identify as the “big other,” including the government, the bureaucratic system and the history of how Mizraḥim—Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin—have been treated in Israel, but these references leave the “big other” amorphous and all-embracing. Gender relations, too, are included; for example, by analogizing the cement boxes to the notion of the “glass ceiling,” Motzafi-Haller hints at the feminist processes that, while promoting women’s rights in Israel, have left the women of Yeruham behind, as many earlier scholars have pointed out. Eventually, the reader is left pondering what great truth might be concealed within the book’s “small moments.”

From the beginning of the...