Description: Evocative feminist ethnography focused on the rarely documented lives of Mizrahi women in a marginalized Israeli community.
Brief description: Pnina Motzafi-Haller is an associate professor of anthropology at Ben Gurion University at the Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research. A leading Mizrahi feminist scholar and activist, she has edited key texts of Mizrahi-centered scholarship, including Mizrahim in Israel and Mizrahi Voices. The Hebrew version of Concrete Boxes was adapted into a play produced by the Dimona Theater.
Review Quotes:
Five women from the Israeli periphery are at the center of this exceptionally interesting book, five women whose moments of happiness, despair, and suffering fill the pages. Despite structural discrimination and oppression by patriarchy and by the Israeli state, these women creatively shape their own lives even in the most difficult circumstances. Telling their enchanting stories, the feminist anthropologist Motzafi-Haller avoids standard authoritative academic tone and jargon creating an accessible and enjoyable yet sophisticated academic ethnography.
--Tamar Hager "senior lecturer in the education department and gender studies program, Tel-Hai College, Israel"