- 03 Mar 2015
Mizrahi Mothers, Wrapped in the Flag: Ultra-Nationalism, Apartheid, and the Divinity of Bureaucracy
Abstract:
This lecture posits a model of state bureaucracy that operates by theological decree. In this system, the categories of religion, gender, and race become the ironclad rubric used to sort citizens into binaries: Jews versus Goyim, rich versus poor, Men versus Women, White versus Black. In so doing, the lecture explores the relationship between social protest movements in the State of Israel, violence in Gaza, protest movements in the surrounding Islamic World, and the possibility of a third intifada or a nuclear conflict between Israel and Iran. As partly auto-ethnographic, this lecture details Professor Lavie’s life as a welfare mother and her leadership in Ahoti, Israel’s first Feminist of Color movement. It also exposes the structural apartheid between Jews from the Muslim and Arab World, or Mizrahim ―Israel’s majority citizenry―and the state’s European Jewish ruling minority. Through the lens of the 2003 Single Mothers’ March led by welfare mother Vicky Knafo and the “Tel Aviv-Tahrir” mass demonstrations of 2011, the lecture reveals how bureaucratic entanglements lead directly to pain, or what arguably can be seen as torture. The lecture uncovers the conundrum of loving and staying loyal to a state that uses its bureaucratic system to repeatedly inflict pain on its non-European majority who, despite this pain, is willing to sacrifice their lives for what they conceive of as the state’s security. The lecture is based on Professor Lavie’s new book, Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture.
About the Speakers
Scholar in Residence
Beatrice Bain Research Group
University of California, Berkeley
Smadar Lavie is an anthropologist, author, and activist specializing in the anthropology of Egypt, Israel and Palestine, with special emphasis on issues of race, gender and religion. She is a visiting professor at the Institute for Social Science in the 21st Century, University College Cork. She received her doctorate in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley (1989) and spent nine years as Assistant and Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Lavie authored The Poetics of Military Occupation (UC Press, 1990), receiving the 1990 Honorable Mention of the Victor Turner Award for Ethnographic Writing, and Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture (Berghahn 2014). She also co-editedCreativity/Anthropology (Cornell UP, 1993) and Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity (Duke UP, 1996). Lavie won the American Studies Association’s 2009 Gloria Anzaldúa Prize for her article, “Staying Put: Crossing the Palestine-Israel Border with Gloria Anzaldúa,” published in Anthropology and Humanism (2011). In 2013, she won the “Heart at East” Honor Plaque for lifetime service to Mizraḥi communities in Israel-Palestine.
