Revista de Historia de Arte, 2015

This article addresses the work of Mizrahi women artists, i.e., Israeli-Jewish women of Asian or African ethnic origen, using the artist Vered Nissim as a case study. Nissim seeks to affirm the politics of identity and recognition, as well as feminism, in order to create a paradigm shift with regards to the local regime of cultural representations in the Israeli art scene. Endeavouring to find ways of undermining the rigid imbalances between different social groups, she calls for a comprehensive reform of the status quo through artistic activism. Nissim employs a style, content, and medium that disrupts the accepted social order, using humour and irony as unique weapons with which she takes liberties with conventional moral, social, and economic values. Placing issues of race, class and gender at the centre of her work, she seeks to undermine and problematize essentialist attitudes, highlighting the political intersections of different identity categories as the critical analysis of intersectionality unfolds.

  Israel Studies, 2022

How does Zionism's relation to Mizrahi women affect their situated imagination of identity? This article offers an answer to the question through a close reading of artworks by third-generation Mizrahi women artists. In their works, the artists reveal a struggle between their lived experience of an emotional burden; an intergenerational inheritance assigned to them against their will: cleaning work, and the desire to imagine a future beyond it and the social limitations that constructed it. Against the backdrop of this struggle, and in response to it, I argue that the artists use their work as an arena of Mizrahi feminist situated imagination through which they negotiate their forced identity and resist the emotional politics in Mizrahi women's cleaning work using artistic identity management strategies to seek a sense of worth. They do so while creating a shift from the institutional construction of Mizrahi women's image in Zionist visual colonial archives as the voiceless racialized intranational "others" of Zionism, to their own self-imaging.

When News from Within asked me to contribute an article on the upcoming first Mizrahi Women's Conference, I was absolutely delighted. As someone who had been involved in establishing the Mizrahi Feminist Forum in the wake of the fiasco at the Tenth Women's Conference in , and as a moderator of a session on Mizrahi feminism at the upcoming conference, I thought it would be a wonderful occasion for us as Mizrahim to represent ourselves in terms of the background, the agenda, and the analysis of multicultural Mizrahi feminism. I also wanted to share an under-represented political vision with the magazine's international Left readership. As someone who has attempted, through writing, lecturing, and organizing, to link Mizrahi, Palestinian, and feminist concerns as part of a broad critique of Euro-Zionist discourse and practice, I have felt frustrated, over the years, with diverse Left-progressive constituencies: with the radical Ashkenazi Left and their reductionist view of the Mizrahi struggle as merely "class;" with the simplistic Palestinian dismissal of Mizrahim as "right-winger" Zionists; with Ashkenazi feminism's contemptuous approach to the problems faced by Mizrahi women as solely the result of gender/sexual oppression; and with Mizrahi men's fears that feminist Mizrahi assertiveness destroys ethnic-based organizing by caving in to an Ashkenazi agenda. (There are of course moving exceptions within every constituency.) Most progressive outlets in Israel and abroad have, for the most part, systematically and patronizingly refused to engage with the Mizrahi perspective, let alone with one that tried to bring gender into the debate. One alliance of this kind began in , when News from Within translated the plenary speeches, "Breaking the Silence: My Oppression as a Mizrahi Woman," given by Mira Eliezer, Tikva Levi, and myself at the Published in English translation in News from Within (Alternative Information Center), vol. , no. , April .

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2012

2018

This research paper focuses on the art of three women artists – Fatima Abu-Roomi, Samah Shihadi and Fatma Shanan. The research paper focuses on the work of three women artists who are ‘double-minority’—Fatima Abu-Roomi, Samah Shihadi, and Fatma Shanan. Their ‘doubleminority’ status comes from being Arab women, raised in patriarchal communities as Muslims (Abu-Roomi and Shihadi), or Druze (Shanan), who live and work among a Jewish majority in the Western-based environment of Israel. The objectives of this research are to point out the significance of their art as an innovative and unique voice within the Israeli art scene that reflect the conditions of young Arab women living in Israel today. Through analysis of their art, the research will aim to explore the artistic strategies, topics, and styles, as a means of negotiating their identity as a ‘double-minority’. A feminist reading of the artwork will be followed by another theoretical point of view from the psychoanalyst Donald W. W...

Studio of Her Own – a Space for Young Female Artists in Jerusalem was founded by Ziporah Mizrachi in 2011 as her final project in the Gender Studies Program’s field activity track at Bar-Ilan University. It is the only association of young female artists in Israel today, artists who create and present their works at group exhibitions in public art spaces. The Studio brings together young religiously observant female artists by giving them a working space for a period of two years as well as offering them professional support. In the group’s early exhibitions, the direct engagement with body and sexuality stood out. The direct and explicit engagement of these young women artists with body and sexuality can be associated with the 1970s American feminist radical art. However, the singularity of their works derives from the meaningful revision they have introduced into the modern Orthodox world: apparently, they produce a radical feminist artistic discourse similar to that of the past (even the forming of creative groups of women brings to mind a prevalent feminist practice of the 1970s’ American feminist artists); but, actually, they pick up former feminist discourse, transplant it into the present and link it to their Jewish-Orthodox world thus shifting it to a particular, cultural, new place. In this essay, I shall argue that even though their creation, as they perceive it, is not meant to produce a critical discourse of resistance, it does, in fact, constitute a subversive feminist act. All in all, my aim here is to highlight, explain and culturally contextualize a significant phenomenon transpiring in Israeli modern Orthodox society’s field of art.

Israel Studies, 2011

Feminist art is currently thriving in Israel after having come a long and curvy way. Although early twentieth century Zionism promoted gender equality in the spirit of first-wave feminism, the movement never gathered the momentum needed for it to develop into second-wave feminism. While its influence could be seen in the art of the 1970s, particularly in the United States, feminist ideology remained absent from the work of women artists in Israel. This state of affairs continued until the 1990s, when a turning point occurred. The article shows the influence of second and even thirdwave feminism on Israeli women's art. It also considers the reasons for lack of a distinct category of feminist art prior to the 1990s, as well as the conditions and features of its emergence, using the case of American feminist art for comparison. The article demonstrates that although Israeli women artists were initially slow to develop a second-wave feminist ideology, it took them less than a decade to make a "quantum leap" into the next theoretical and practical stage. Within a decade and a half, Israeli women artists caught up with their colleagues overseas and are now creating cutting-edge, relevant, and contemporary feminist art.

"Re-Reading Women Artists and Feminist Discourse in 1980s Israeli Art." Israel Studies, vol. 28 no. 1, 2023, p. 162-182., 2023

The article proposes a gender-based re-reading, re-appreciation, and re-contextualization of the endeavors and works of several Israeli women artists in the 1980s. Adopting a mixed method (visual, gender, and critical research) and based on archival data and current interviews, it sheds light on silenced aspects in the works of women artists but also expands on the way aesthetics and politics in the field of art are understood within the dominant symbolic order.

2017

This interdisciplinary study examines the social and cultural contribution of the Jewish feminist art movement that developed beginning in the 1990s in the two main centers of world Jewry, Israel and the United States of America. It is the first in-depth study dedicated to feminist art critical of Jewish tradition, halakha (Jewish law), and religious institutions. The study interrogates this art in the context of feminist art in both the US and Israel and in relation to the various feminisms of the Jewish religious spheres. The dissertation illuminates the reception of feminist Jewish art in the two art

Published in Journal of Middle East Women's Studies Vol. 7 (2), pp. 56-88.

This paper analyzes the failure of Israel's Ashkenazi (Jewish, of European, Yiddish-speaking origen) feminist peace movement to work within the context of Middle East demographics, cultures, and histories and, alternately, the inabilities of the Mizrahi (Oriental) feminist movement to weave itself into the feminist fabric of the Arab world. Although Ashkenazi elite feminists in Israel are known for their peace activism and human rights work, from the Mizrahi perspective their critique and activism are limited, if not counterproductive. The Ashkenazi feminists have strategically chosen to focus on what Edward Said called the Question of Palestine-a well funded agenda that enables them to avoid addressing the community-based concerns of the disenfranchised Mizrahim. Mizrahi communities, however, silence their own feminists as these activists attempt to challenge the regime or engage in discourse on the Question of Palestine. Despite historical changes, the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi distinction is a racialized formation so resilient it manages to sustain itself through challenges rather than remain a frozen dichotomy.