Wayne State University Press Concrete Boxes: Mizrahi Women on Israel's Periphery (Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology)

Review Concrete Boxes is an achievement that will be of great interest to scholars who explore gender relations in minority communities and communities of color.--Orit Bashkin "Journal of Palestine Studies" (6/1/2020 12:00:00 AM)Concrete Boxes offers a deeply attentive account of the pragmatics, aspirations, and connective networks of life amongst female immigrants in the expanding remote town of Yerucham in southern Israel. Each woman offers her own personal account of making a living, creating a religious life, and aspiring to a new future. A remarkable work, which enriches the ethnography of Israel and offers a case for the comparative study of women's experience in the expanding phenomenon of migration in search of work and a cultural life.--Jane I. Guyer "professor emerita of anthropology, Johns Hopkins University" (2/28/2018 12:00:00 AM)As carefully researched as it is brave, this study breaks out of the 'concrete boxes' of established academic thinking. Motzafi-Haller's account of coping and agency in some of the most marginalized women in Israel realizes feminist methodologies at their best. Clearly situating the author as originally of and from her interlocutors, the unashamedly political insights of this book are moving, honest, and important.--Rela Mazali "author, independent scholar, and activist" (2/28/2018 12:00:00 AM)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" (2/28/2018 12:00:00 AM)For too long the community of Mizrahi women on Israel's periphery has languished in obscurity and their voices have been silenced but this important work addresses the lacuna enabling them to be heard in all their complexity.--Jennifer Langer "Journal of Modern Jewish Studies" (9/7/2020 12:00:00 AM)Motzafi- Haller shows the elaborate system of choices and decisions these women face, and the ways in which they demonstrate self- awareness and motivation to change. Focusing on one specific development town, her nuanced account is valuable in its furthering our understanding of social structures in general, and, in particular, the ways in which women take decisions and shape their worldviews.--Hila Shalem Bahard "Studies in Contemporary Jewry" (6/1/2021 12:00:00 AM)This book is a delight to read. It's much more than an academic sociological study. The author's fieldwork allows readers to gain a complex view of poor women in the periferya.--Aaron Howard "Jewish Herald-Voice" (5/31/2018 12:00:00 AM)This timely book reminds us, at a moment of high visibility of the fight against sexual harassment, that liberal feminism does not represent the sufferings nor the desires of women of color, of Mizrahi ethnicity, and of those who reside in the 'concrete boxes' of Israel's periphery. Motzafi-Haller transcends the #MeToo language to offer intersectionality of gender, class, and ethnicity in the lives of the women whose stories she tells, thus creating an alternative methodology of equality and partnership with them.--Orly Lubin "chair of the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics at Tel Aviv University" (2/28/2018 12:00:00 AM) Product Description Concrete Boxes: Mizrahi Women on Israel's Periphery offers a rich depiction of contemporary life in one marginalized development town in the Israeli Negev. Placing the stories of five women at the center, author Pnina Motzafi-Haller depicts a range of creative strategies u