Pnina Motzafi-Haller, In the Cement Boxes: Mizrahi Women in the Israeli Periphery

Abstract

“Incisive . . . dialogue,” “courageous . . . ethnography”—these are a few of the superlatives that describe the work of Pnina Motzafi-Haller on the back cover of In the Cement Boxes: Mizrahi Women in the Israeli Periphery. Does the book stand up to the expectations they raise? I will endeavor to answer that question by discussing the ethnographic and anthropological challenges that Motzafi-Haller set for herself. The book surveys the lives of five women residents of Yeruham, which MotzafiHaller refers at as a “development town”—a pejorative often used by non-Yeruhamites to refer to this town in Israel’s southern Negev desert, implying its backwardness, though Yeruhamites don’t see their town as backward. It is located near Sede Boker, where Motzafi-Haller lives. Over four years, she met and communicated regularly with her subjects, whom she calls Nurit, Efrat, Rachel, Esti and Galit. The book’s chapters describe their life-webs, setting out a complex picture of what she saw and decodes as their “diverse strategies of survival” (Chap. 1), including “strengthening” their Jewish practices (hitḥazkut; Chap. 2), leading “hybrid lives” (Chap. 3), juggling (Chap. 4), subversive interpretations of reality (Chap. 5), rebellion (Chap. 6), and returning to oneself (Chap. 7). All these strategies reveal the continual struggles triggered by life’s necessities. First and foremost are the economic struggles, which are simultaneously the women’s struggles against oppressive practices at home and in the public sphere. Their maneuvers in coping with conflicting norms and values, with their social and religious communities and with the bureaucracy stand at the heart of this study. We read about the women’s negotiations with law-enforcement authorities, welfare services and education, health, housing and work officials. Motzafi-Haller uses one woman to exemplify the theme of each chapter; thus, Nurit demonstrates survival strategies, while Esti presents subversive modes of operation. Unfortunately, my sense was that this technique tended to reduce the women to the dimension discussed in “their” chapters.