Concrete Boxes: Mizrahi Women of the Periphery of Israel by Pnina Motzafi-Haller (review)

Almost as if it were a time machine, the title of Pnina Motzafi-Haller's new book, Concrete Boxes: Mizrahi Women on Israel's Periphery, instantaneously took me back to my childhood. I could almost touch the walls of those "train-wagon-like" buildings—as they were called in Hebrew slang—for their bland homogenous architecture. Built to provide an immediate solution to the high demand for housing caused by waves of immigration to Israel in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, these neighborhoods were erected in almost every newly established town and city. In many of the smaller, distant towns, they dominated the urban landscape. As time passed and those who could afford it left them, they became the physical embodiment of class hierarchies and ethnic divisions in Israel.

In her book, Motzafi-Haller draws attention to Yerucham, one of Israel's most stigmatized development towns, located in the Negev (in southern Israel). She focuses on Mizrahi women living there, suffering from triple marginalization—as women, as part of a group considered "oriental," and thus socioculturally backward, and as residents of a low-income town on Israel's periphery. In a detailed account of her interviews with five women, the author opens a window into their daily lives, struggles, and dreams.

In her introduction, Motzafi-Haller sets two main goals for the book. The first is to counter the demeaning images of lower-class Mizrahi women in hegemonic middle-class Israeli discourse. Throughout the book, she draws attention to the women's proactivity and agency in the face of the hurdles of life. The second goal is to explore issues that have a broader social relevance to Israeli society through the interviewees' stories. Analyzing her role as an interviewer who is herself a Mizrahi woman from a small development town, the author also speaks openly about "the messy reality" of field research (6), and about the problematic process of representation.

Concrete Boxes is made up of seven chapters. The first presents Nurit's story. It was chosen to open the book partly because it vividly "makes real the politics of class and cultural capital that stand at the center" of the encounters between her and the author. (21) As Motzafi-Haller tells Nurit's story, she also discusses the tensions inherent in collecting information through person-to-person interviews.

While the book is structured around women's life stories, each chapter is also dedicated to a coping strategy utilized by these women to carve a place for themselves in their world. Of the next six chapters, four focus on the lives of only two women. One of the repeated themes in the book is hitchazkut (the process of becoming more religious and observant), by which some of the women gain a better position in their community. Another is the question of obtaining a higher education and/or adopting middle-class norms of respectability as means of upward mobility. Motzafi-Haller points to the limited efficacy of these practices to serve as catalysts for socioeconomic change within the confines—physical and constructed—of Yerucham.

The author chose to focus on these five specific women as they were the most articulate of her interlocutors. Including her encounters with the women's families—husbands, partners, and children—in her analysis, the author calls into question some prevalent stereotypes of female Mizrahi subordination and male dominance. Thus, Concrete Boxes offers a fascinating account of gendered power relations and the ways they are shaped and negotiated. The reflective accounts presented in the book reveal what ethnic, class, and gender marginalization looks like in contemporary Israel. This is one of this book's most important achievements. Concrete Boxes also makes a significant contribution to future research of Israeli society. While it is primarily anthropological research, the book provides new knowledge relevant to social history and the research of representations in Israeli literature, cinema, and...