Smadar Lavie
Smadar Lavie received her doctorate in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley. She specializes in the anthropology of Egypt, Israel, and Palestine, with emphasis on issues of race, gender, and religion. She published her book The Poetics of Military Occupation (UC Press, 1990) on resistance theatre of the Mzeina Bedouin of the South Sinai, Egypt. The book won the 1990 Honorable Mention of the Victor Turner Award for Ethnographic Writing and is still in print and in demand. She co-edited Displacement, Diaspora and Geographies of Identity (Duke Univ. Press, 1996), and Creativity/Anthropology (Cornell Univ. Press, 1993). Lavie was awarded the 2009 Gloria Anzaldua Prize from the American Studies Association for her paper titled, Staying Put: Crossing the Palestine/Israel Border with Gloria Anzaldúa. Lavie's recent book is Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture (Berghahn 2014, Nebraska 2018). It received the 2015 Honorable Mention of the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies Book Award Competition and was also one of the four finalists in the 2015 Clifford Geertz Book Award Competition of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. Lavie has served in several feminist and anti-racist social movements and NGOs in Israel-Palestine and the San Francisco Bay area. In 2013, Lavie won the “Heart at East” Honor Plaque for lifetime service to Mizraḥi communities in Israel-Palestine.
Address: Department of Anthropology
University of California at Davis
Davis, California 95616
USA
Address: Department of Anthropology
University of California at Davis
Davis, California 95616
USA
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Books by Smadar Lavie
Wrapped in the Flag of Israel Second Edition examines neoliberal bureaucracy in the Global South using feminist critical race theories. It interrogates the relationship between the State of Israel and its Mizrahi single mothers who are at the forefront of Mizrahi feminism. It also presents a model of bureaucracy as divine cosmology that preempts the agency of disenfranchised Mizrahim who are Israel’s demographic majority. Mizrahi protests fall flat when the Israel-Palestine conflict dominates the headlines. While most studies of neoliberal bureaucracy employ a Foucauldian or Marxian lens, this book illustrates how Israeli bureaucracy draws on a theological essence that fuses religion, gender, and race into the foundations of citizenship. It sets out to understand why Mizrahi mothers remain loyal to a state that injures them though its bureaucratic system.
The extensive Afterword to the Second Edition connects intra-Jewish racial and gendered dynamics to the 2014 Gaza War. It tracks sequences that began with social protest and ended with elections that bolstered Israel’s political right. In between came bloodletting between the IDF, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel’s neighboring Arab states. The 2014 Gaza War was a watershed, but not only in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Under the smokescreen of war, Israel accelerated neoliberal economic reform. The first victims of this restructuring were Mizrahi single mothers. Palestinians, however, would pay the highest price for Israel’s Mizrahi-Ashkenazi rift.
From the interview:
'...I called the first indexer for an update, only to be told the manuscript went against everything she was raised to believe about Israel. Indexer number two used the index as a tool of censorship. Categories such as “apartheid,” “Zionism,” “Palestine,” and “race” were nowhere to be seen. She insisted her categorization improved the book, refusing to change them before sending me a pricey invoice via her attorney. It took the third indexer, who had no expertise in Middle East Studies, to treat the manuscript with the professionalism it required...'
Three prints of the 1st edition were sold between April 15, 2014 - July 31, 2015. The book went out of print and its adventures in publish-land are discussed here:
https://www.academia.edu/41932472/Jadaliyya_-_New_Text_Out_Now_Author_Interview_with_Smadar_Lavie_on_Wrapped_in_the_Flag_of_Israels_Revised_Edition_with_the_New_Afterword._January_20_2020
The romantic, nineteenth-century image of the Bedouin as fierce, independent nomads on camelback racing across an endless desert persists in the West. Yet since the era of Ottoman rule, the Mzeina Bedouin of the South Sinai desert have lived under foreign occupation. For the last forty years Bedouin land has been a political football, tossed back and forth between Israel and Egypt at least five times.
This volume exemplifies a cross-disciplinary cultural studies and a concept of culture rooted in lived experience as well as textual readings. Anthropologists and scholars from related fields deploy a range of methodologies and styles of writing to blur and complicate conventional dualisms between authors and subjects of research, home and away, center and periphery, and first and third world. Essays discuss topics such as Rai, a North African pop music viewed as westernized in Algeria and as Arab music in France; the place of Sephardic and Palestinian writers within Israel’s Ashkenazic-dominated arts community; and the use and misuse of the concept “postcolonial” as it is applied in various regional contexts.
In exploring histories of displacement and geographies of identity, these essays call for the reconceptualization of theoretical binarisms such as modern and postmodern, colonial and postcolonial. It will be of interest to a broad spectrum of scholars and students concerned with postmodern and postcolonial theory, ethnography, anthropology, and cultural studies.
Contributors. Norma Alarcón, Edward M. Bruner, Nahum D. Chandler, Ruth Frankenberg, Joan Gross, Dorinne Kondo, Kristin Koptiuch, Smadar Lavie, Lata Mani, David McMurray, Kirin Narayan, Greg Sarris, Ted Swedenburg."
Dedicated to the memory of Victor Turner, the volume is at once playful and political, bridging innovative theory and practice."
Wrapped in the Flag of Israel -- Book Reviews by Smadar Lavie
Wrapped in the Flag of Israel Second Edition examines neoliberal bureaucracy in the Global South using feminist critical race theories. It interrogates the relationship between the State of Israel and its Mizrahi single mothers who are at the forefront of Mizrahi feminism. It also presents a model of bureaucracy as divine cosmology that preempts the agency of disenfranchised Mizrahim who are Israel’s demographic majority. Mizrahi protests fall flat when the Israel-Palestine conflict dominates the headlines. While most studies of neoliberal bureaucracy employ a Foucauldian or Marxian lens, this book illustrates how Israeli bureaucracy draws on a theological essence that fuses religion, gender, and race into the foundations of citizenship. It sets out to understand why Mizrahi mothers remain loyal to a state that injures them though its bureaucratic system.
The extensive Afterword to the Second Edition connects intra-Jewish racial and gendered dynamics to the 2014 Gaza War. It tracks sequences that began with social protest and ended with elections that bolstered Israel’s political right. In between came bloodletting between the IDF, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel’s neighboring Arab states. The 2014 Gaza War was a watershed, but not only in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Under the smokescreen of war, Israel accelerated neoliberal economic reform. The first victims of this restructuring were Mizrahi single mothers. Palestinians, however, would pay the highest price for Israel’s Mizrahi-Ashkenazi rift.
From the interview:
'...I called the first indexer for an update, only to be told the manuscript went against everything she was raised to believe about Israel. Indexer number two used the index as a tool of censorship. Categories such as “apartheid,” “Zionism,” “Palestine,” and “race” were nowhere to be seen. She insisted her categorization improved the book, refusing to change them before sending me a pricey invoice via her attorney. It took the third indexer, who had no expertise in Middle East Studies, to treat the manuscript with the professionalism it required...'
Three prints of the 1st edition were sold between April 15, 2014 - July 31, 2015. The book went out of print and its adventures in publish-land are discussed here:
https://www.academia.edu/41932472/Jadaliyya_-_New_Text_Out_Now_Author_Interview_with_Smadar_Lavie_on_Wrapped_in_the_Flag_of_Israels_Revised_Edition_with_the_New_Afterword._January_20_2020
The romantic, nineteenth-century image of the Bedouin as fierce, independent nomads on camelback racing across an endless desert persists in the West. Yet since the era of Ottoman rule, the Mzeina Bedouin of the South Sinai desert have lived under foreign occupation. For the last forty years Bedouin land has been a political football, tossed back and forth between Israel and Egypt at least five times.
This volume exemplifies a cross-disciplinary cultural studies and a concept of culture rooted in lived experience as well as textual readings. Anthropologists and scholars from related fields deploy a range of methodologies and styles of writing to blur and complicate conventional dualisms between authors and subjects of research, home and away, center and periphery, and first and third world. Essays discuss topics such as Rai, a North African pop music viewed as westernized in Algeria and as Arab music in France; the place of Sephardic and Palestinian writers within Israel’s Ashkenazic-dominated arts community; and the use and misuse of the concept “postcolonial” as it is applied in various regional contexts.
In exploring histories of displacement and geographies of identity, these essays call for the reconceptualization of theoretical binarisms such as modern and postmodern, colonial and postcolonial. It will be of interest to a broad spectrum of scholars and students concerned with postmodern and postcolonial theory, ethnography, anthropology, and cultural studies.
Contributors. Norma Alarcón, Edward M. Bruner, Nahum D. Chandler, Ruth Frankenberg, Joan Gross, Dorinne Kondo, Kristin Koptiuch, Smadar Lavie, Lata Mani, David McMurray, Kirin Narayan, Greg Sarris, Ted Swedenburg."
Dedicated to the memory of Victor Turner, the volume is at once playful and political, bridging innovative theory and practice."
traditional methods of ethnographic research and emphasizing the
necessity of subaltern auto-ethnography, particularly in the study of marginalized groups... Scholars of social movements
should follow [Lavie's] lead by focusing on similar cases of unsuccessful mobilization, or indeed those that have minimal possibility for mobilization. Furthermore, for those engaged in anthropological and ethnographical research methods, this book provides an excellent justification for appealing to subaltern auto-ethnographies of marginalized groups to truly grasp their predicament. As Lavie says herself, “as luck would have it, I was a welfare mother in the lines when I conducted my research” (23). Another approach would not have produced as rich a study as she has achieved.
encapsulated in a drop of “fieldwork.” Indeed, this is a tour de force of the unique abilities reserved to anthropology’s insight production.
state as a given... The book thus deals – explicitly and straightforwardly – with the very historical, political, social and cultural realities that lie at the basis of the circumstances that eventually brought about Knafo’s failed protest. These have to do, first, with the history of Zionism and Mizrahi women, and the wider socio-politics of Mizrahim in Israel. Lavie offers a masterful analysis of the historical Mizrahi support of the Right..."
Corrigendum:
Please note the following reference was inadvertently omitted from Smadar Lavie’s “Gaza 2014 and Mizrahi Feminism” PoLar 22(1) 85-109. The reference that should have been 2014b is:
Knesset of the State of Israel. 2014b. Plenum no. 157. Second Session Meetings 157-159 [in Hebrew]. no. 35: 14-16, July 14, 16:01. https://main.knesset.gov.il/Activity/plenum/Pages/SessionItem.aspx?itemID=555497
The omission impacted the sequence of references in the bibliography. The previous “Knesset of the State of Israel 2014b” is now “Knesset of Israel 2014c”:
Knesset of the State of Israel. 2014c. “Ratification of Amendment to Ḥok HaHesderim” [in Hebrew] The Book of Laws 2461: 638, July 27. http://fs.knesset.gov.il//19/law/19_lsr_303825.PDF
Page numbers are from the final PoLar printed version of the article.
More Info: NOTE: This material is intended for purposes of education, research, scholarly communication, or critical commentary, all in conformity with “fair use” and the established practice of authors’ providing single offprints for noncommercial use. Any other use is unauthorized and may violate copyright.
Please note: Because of technical difficulties, this paper had to be re-uploaded. Before the upload, the paper had 379 views.
would rather have Lavie and her research disappear. Needless to say that shortly after this article saw print in the Hebrew original in 2008 its analysis of the possibility for a one state solution for the Israel/Palestine conflict was appropriated and published without proper quotation or citation.
23 דצמבר 2018 – ט"ו טבת תשע"ט
55 דקות.
ההרצאה עוסקת בהיותן של תנועות חברתיות המונהגות ע"י פמיניסטיות מזרחיות חוד החנית במאבקים לצדק חברתי, במחירים האדירים שהן משלמות על כך, ובצורה שפעילותן מנוכסת אל המיינסטרים הישראלי.
בעזרתה של נעמי צרפתי המוכשרת, העלתי לדף הבית שלי ב"אקדמיה דוט קום" את ההרצאה שנתתי ב"בית אחותי" לפני שנה, על הקשר בין פוליטיקת הזהויות האקדמית והאקטיביסטית והצורה בה המאבק המזרחי, הנוטה בעקבותיה שמאלה, לא מצליח לייצר שינוי מבני במערכות הממשל בארץ, מערכות הנוטות כל הזמן ימינה -- כלכלית, פוליטית וחברתית
Noé Hakim Serfaty
למרבה הצער הבטרייה נגמרה כך שהדיון המרתק אחרי ההרצאה לא מופיע.
This talk coincided with the IDF Operation Cast Lead (December 27, 2008 – January 18, 2009) and with the Israeli elections on February 10, 2009.
This is a re-load of the talk, which was presented here December 2012, because of the elections in the State of Israel that were scheduled for January 22, 2013. These early elections came on the heels of the IDF "Pillar of Clouds" operation (November 14-21, 2012).
Due to length considerations, the Irish-Palestine Solidarity Campaign has edited the audience's questions and comments out of the video.
In Israel, racism exists between Jews of European origin (also known as Ashkenazim) and Jews from North Africa and the Middle East (also known as “Mizrahim”, the Hebrew for “Easterners”). Even though the Mizrahim form the majority of the Israeli Jewish population, they do not control the policies of the Israeli state, which are still driven by a ruling elite which comes from the Ashkenazi minority. It is worth noting that it was this Ashkenazi elite, rather than the Mizrahim, who planned and executed the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
This talk will suggest that the 2014 Israeli War on Gaza was partly motivated by a desire among the ruling elite to pre-empt a summer outbreak of violent protests, mainly by Mizrahim, against the effects of the neo-liberal economic policies introduced by the Ashkenazi elite.
In striving to prove themselves to be just as Israeli as the Ashkenazi elite, many Mizrahim have become the strongest supporters of Israeli ultra-nationalism and, therefore, of the 2014 war. Thus, there is the paradox that a war which was partly intended to squelch Mizrahi protest, a war in which most of the Israeli casualties, both civilian and military, are Mizrahim, is a war that is strongly supported by most Mizrahim.
The tragedy is that the Palestinians are, yet again, paying the price of these intra-Jewish ethnic tensions: in this war, the main victims are the people of Gaza, who have suffered a man-made disaster worse than anything else that has happened to the Palestinians since the Nakba in 1948.
Prof. Smadar Lavie is a Mizrahi Jewish anthropologist who was a co-founder of Ahoti, the feminist-of-colour movement in Israel. A winner of several prominent prizes in the disciplines of Anthropology and Women’s Studies, she is affiliated with both University College Cork and the University of California at Berkeley. Her most recent book deals with the predicament of Mizrahi women in Israel; it is called “Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture”.
Salvaging Mizrahi cultures, the Israeli academe-regime has established a financial monopoly over the materiality of exotic Judaica discourse not only in scholarly knowledge production but also in the expert trade of intellectual, cultural and real properties. When it comes to protecting Mizrahi TK and folklore, WIPO’s 2002 post-TRIPS forum recommendations interrelating IP and TK are yet to arrive to Israel from Oman. As is Israel’s compliance with the 1886 Berne Convention, or with the Hague 1954 Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property, or with the UNESCO 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property – when these treaties are scrutinized through the optics of collective Mizrahi IP.
My talk will be very preliminary – a collection of ruminations stemming out of my archival research into the Yemeni-Jewish scriptures and ornaments affair of the 1950s, its brief surface into the Israeli public sphere in the mid 1980s, and the possibilities for post-TRIPS Mizrahi activism against the appropriation and commodification of Mizrahi identity in light of the current postcolonial reshapings of the notion of authorship, and the repatriation of cultural properties from the Eurocenter back to communities of color.
Printed, expanded Hebrew version available here: 2007.
“Cultural Property Rights and the Racial Construction of the Mizrahi as a Trade-Mark: Notes on the Revolving Door of Israel’s Academe-Regime.” In 2007. A Rainbow of Opinions: The Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow’s First Decade. (Keshet Shel De`ot: `Asor LaKeshet HaDemokratit HaMizrahit, Hebrew) Pp. 198-204. Tel Aviv: November Press. REPRINTED IN 2008 Mahbarot Kolno`a Darom (“South Cinema Notebooks”, Heb. – a Humanities periodical) 2:161-166.
This talk coincided with the IDF Operation Cast Lead (December 27, 2008 – January 18, 2009) and with the Israeli elections on February 10, 2009.
This is being presented now, in December 2012, because of the forthcoming elections in the State of Israel scheduled for January 22, 2013. These early elections come on the heels of the IDF "Pillar of Clouds" operation (November 14-21, 2012).
Due to length considerations, the Irish-Palestine Solidarity Campaign has edited the audience's questions and comments out of the video.
Please contact Palestine: Information with Provenance for a copy of the talk via email at [email protected]
“Lavie offers an unflinching political analysis and cultural critique of the struggles of Mizrahi single mothers and their relationship with the domestic policies of the state of Israel and the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict….The Award Committee recognizes Lavie’s innovative approach to academic writing that combines critical theory, autoethnography, and memoirs to animate the lives of women in a community that has long been disenfranchised, particularly in light of limited scholarship on the topic.”
אני מעלה אותו במסגרת המבצע להעלאת מעט מאמרי שנכתבו בעברית, או שתורגמו לעברית, אל הדף שלי באקדמיה דוט קום, כשאני קוראת את המאמר העתיק הזה עכשיו אני מלאת הערכה להתפתחות הנועזת והשיטתית של תחום התיאוריה הקווירית בשני העשורים האחרונים, ושמחה על כך, שעיסוקי הפואטיים בתיאוריה הביקורתית של גזע ובפמיניזם כהה הוליכו אותי ברבות השנים אל הכלכלה הפוליטית וההבנייה הדתית של הגזענות.
Finally, the United Nation is investigating the worldwide prevalence of Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) as abusive tactic in divorce custody cases. Given its exceptionalism, Israel is missing from this UN initiative -- see the Guardian link below.
For the occasion, I've uploaded the 2002 article I wrote about this phenomenon. It was an expert opinion in the Israeli Supreme Court Judgment 6041/02, and since its publication has assisted many mothers, children, and the attorneys who represent them in cases of alleged PAS.
When this article first saw print, the Israeli women studies professors accused it of being "extremist" and "hallucinatory" -- yet another reason for the Israeli and Euro-American pro-Israeli boycott of me (it started in 1993). Nevertheless along the years, as more articles in Israel's major Hebrew media exposed "the only democracy in the Middle East" as pedophile and rapist heaven, Israeli academic gender studies experts used this article's data in their publications, but without any reference or quotation. One major scholar honored me (not the piece itself) with a footnote.
Elaborate discussion of PAS, and how it is used mainly against Mizrahi mothers of color in Israeli courts, can be found in my 2018 book, Wrapped in the Flag of Israel, see under book section here.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/dec/14/un-to-investigate-into-misuse-of-parental-alienation-tactic-in-custody-cases?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
"שונאים, סיפור אהבה:
על מזרחים וערבים (ואשכנזים גם) מראשית הציונות ועד מאורעות תשפ"א"
הלל כהן
ראשון לציון: עברית הוצאה לאור, 2022
סמדר לביא © 2022
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Many Baltic people first encounter black, brown or Asian folks through TV. The queer culture now blossoming in Baltic cities is quite monochromatic – white-on-white. Yet the influx of asylum seekers and refugees from the Global South, including many queers fleeing persecution, demands that LGBTQ+ people in the North reorient themselves toward a more global understanding of their struggle. To shatter stereotypes, reveal the lived realities of racial inequity, and build community, our film series draws on an abundance of excellent cinema representing queer people of color in Asia, Africa, North and South America, the Middle East, and Europe.
ur Queers of Color (QOC) film series includes high-impact, prestigious, award-winning classics and new films that authentically depict the lives of people of color. In telling twenty-first century stories, we acknowledge that we stand on the shoulders of giants – the classic queer filmmakers who paved the way for the current, flourishing era of queer arts and culture. These films highlight a spectrum of gender and sexual identities, informed by a range of cultures and communities – queers from Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Indigenous communities in North America; those from Muslim, Christian, and Jewish backgrounds; Latinx, Black British, African-American, and mixed-race queers. It was to be a Baltic first.
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