Abstract
Smadar Lavie has written a brave and scholarly autoethnography, using an extended case study method, of a social movement in contemporary Israel made up of single mothers within the Mizrahim, those Jews of color whose ancestors were formerly part of Muslim and Arab worlds. The Mizrahim mostly came to Israel in the 1950s from countries of the former Ottoman Empire—nations in Northern Africa, Eastern Europe, Pakistan, and the Middle East. Although they make up 50% of the current population of Israel, the Mizrahim constitute the majority of Israel’s disenfranchised residents and citizens (p. 1).
The author is a feminist anthropologist and Mizrahi single mother of Yemini ancestry. In 1999, she fled with her son to Tel Aviv, Israel, from her home in Berkeley, CA, where she had lived and worked as a tenured professor at the University of California, Davis, in order to protect her 9-year-old boy from her violent ex-husband who had just been granted full custody of the child. She provides a firsthand account and analysis of her research and life experiences between 1999 and 2007 in Israel. While there, Dr. Lavie became an activist in and member of the executive board of a feminist nongovernmental organizational known as Ahoti, Hebrew for “Sistah—for women in Israel.”
In 2003, Israel’s National Security Bureau (NSB), the equivalent of the U.S. Social Security Administration, mailed a notice to all single mothers informing them that the national government was immediately slashing their monthly income assurances (welfare checks), rent assistance, and income supplements. This set of drastic, welfare cutbacks left most Mizrahi single mothers without sufficient money for food, rent, or clothing.
Ahoti responded by organizing the Single Mothers’ March in 2003 on Jerusalem’s NSB. Because most Ashkenazi single mothers (Jews with European roots) were able to find financial and residential help from their middle-class kin, the Single Mothers’ March was composed of only Mizrahi women, women of color living with their children in poverty. The author details what she sees as the impossibility of protesters succeeding in making demands on a state that they love. Lavie argues persuasively that single mothers of color in Israel, who are immigrants and refugees beholden to a state that has taken them in as citizens, are constitutionally unable to be sustained agents of their own liberation. Despite the racism and poverty they endure daily, the Mizrahi single mothers, suggests Lavie, are not psychologically or morally equipped to hold the State of Israel responsible for their oppression and poverty.
With theoretical sophistication and granular accounts of day-to-day struggles of her own and other single mothers’ efforts to survive and gain access to resources and entitlements as Israelis, Lavie sets forth a theory of bureaucracy as a system torture. She identifies in nuanced fashion the mental, physical, and existential torments that accompany the processes of requesting hearings, appeals, and procedural fairness. Kafka’s (1957) The Trial comes to mind as Lavie illuminates through diary entries, narrative accounts, and analytic paragraphs the intra-Jewish racism and class discrimination she and many other Mizrahim experienced and continue to undergo in seeking administrative and legal redress in Israel.
This is a painful account well worth reading. Social workers from many nations who are involved in difficult macro- and mezzo-practice would find illuminating the many elements of social movement activity and peer-group support that Lavie characterizes and theorizes so powerfully.