WRAPPED IN THE FLAG OF ISRAEL
Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture
Wednesday, April 23 at 12:00 noon
235 Blegen Hall, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
AND
Thursday, April 24, 2014 at 7:00 pm
May Day Books, 301 Cedar Ave., Minneapolis, MN
UPDATE April 21: There are two opportunities to see Smadar Lavie: a brownbag lunch at Blegen Hall on the University and May Day Books on 301 Cedar Ave. Hope to see you there!
Smadar Lavie Visiting Fellow, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, UC Berkeley; Visiting Professor, Institute for Social Sciences in the 21st, Century, University College Cork
What is the relationship between social protest movements in the State of Israel, violence in Gaza, and the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran? Why did the mass social protests in the State of Israel of summer 2011 ultimately fail? Wrapped in the Flag of Israel discusses social protest movements from the 2003 Single Mothers’ March led by Mizrahi Vicky Knafo, to the “Tahrir is Here” Israeli mass protests of summer 2011. Equating bureaucratic entanglements with pain—what, arguably, can be seen as torture, Smadar Lavie explores the conundrum of loving and staying loyal to a state that repeatedly inflicts pain on its non-European Jewish women citizens through its bureaucratic system. The book presents a model of bureaucracy as divine cosmology and posits that Israeli State bureaucracy is based on a theological essence that fuses the categories of religion, gender, and race into the foundation of citizenship.
Smadar Lavie is a visiting fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, UC Berkeley, and a visiting professor at the Institute for Social Science in the 21st Century, University College Cork. Lavie spent nine years as Assistant and Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She specializes in the Anthropology of Egypt, the State of Israel, and Palestine, with emphasis on issues of race, gender, and religion. Her publications include The Poetics of Military Occupation (University of California Press) that received an Honorable Mention for the Victor Turner Award for Ethnographic Writing in 1990. She is also the co-editor of Creativity/Anthropology (Cornell UP, 1993), and Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity (Duke UP 1996). She is a winner of the American Studies Association¹s 2009 Gloria Anzaldúa Prize, and of the 2013 “Heart at East” Honor Plaque for lifetime service to Mizrahi communities in the State of Israel.