Sister: Mizrahi Women Aritsts In Israel

The exhibition is an initiative of Antea – a womens artspace at Kol Ha’Isha

An awakening of Mizrachi artists has been taking place in recent years, in the fields of music, cinema and literature. In these fields women are creating consciously as Mizrahi women artists, working with materials based on their own life experiences, their own narratives, while confronting pressing social issues…In visual arts, the conditions are perhaps more comples, we were led to wonder what circumstances in the visual arts account for the difficulties encountered by Mizrahi artists…
Rita Mendes-Flor from the catalogueIn Israeli society there exists a predominant desire to blur the cultural differences between diverse ethnic groups and create a new and “enlightened” Israeli character. The “reborn” identity of Jews who settled in the land of Israel received its source of inspiration from Europe. Jewish immigrants from Muslim countries were compelled to erase their culture, and with it their identity, and to behave according to europocentic norms of behavior.
The exhibit “Sister – Mizrahi women artists in Israel” concerns itself with the very definition of personal identity and its socio-political implications, and tried to speak about Mizrahi identity from the inside, from a personal and cultural experiences of each artist – not as presented by someone else, but instead, as self-representation.
Shula Keshet, from the Catalogue
IN HER OWN EYES – Rita Mendes-FlohrAn awakening of Mizrahi women artists has been taking place in Israel in recent years, in the fields of music, cinema and literature. In these arts women are creating consciously as Mizrahi women artists, working with materials based on their life experiences, their own narratives, while confronting pressing social issues – and often, especially in the realm of music, turning to the artistic forms and language of their own family’s backgrounds in the Arab world.
In the visual arts, the conditions for self-expression of Mizrahi women artists are perhaps more complex, as we have come to see in the course of our research towards Sister – Mizrahi Women Artists in Israel. Many visual artists seem to face considerable difficulties in speaking out as Mizrahi women in their art. Some artists we talked to felt that that being born into a Mizrahi family had nothing to do with their art, and they could not see themselves participating in an exhibit of Mizrahi artists. Even artists with a clear identity as Mizrahi women, did not always see it as legitimate to allow that subject matter to filter into their work. At the same time, others were excited that this exhibit at long last encourages them to create art without denying their social and cultural roots, that it allows them to explore their Mizrahi identity, to present the world as they see it, as Mizrahi women, from within.
We are led to wonder what circumstances in the visual arts account for the difficulties encountered by Mizrahi artists. A major obstacle that visual artists in Israel have to contend with, is posed by the lingering modernist claim that art is pure and should be devoid of politics, psychology and other references to personal experience. These stubborn residues of modernism continue to plague Mizrahi visual artists, despite the rise of the post-modern critique – a critique that exposes the ‘a-political’ and the supposedly ‘universal’, as in fact supporting the worldview of a very particular (Western) culture. It was this modernist attitude that hindered women’s art, as a concept, from gaining legitimacy in Israel, so that it was only in 1990 that an exhibit of women’s art, Feminine Presence, was possible at a major Israel museum, while in the USA feminist art had prevailed since the nineteen-seventies. (1)
Similarly, the art of difference, an art that speaks from the experience of non-hegemoneous groups, has made an impact in the USA and the world more than a decade ago, while in Israel the art of Mizrahim is still lagging, as a concept. One pertinent example of such art of difference was the exhibit of Chicano artists, entitled Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985, (CARA), which in 1990, traveled to six mainstream museums throughout the USA. It exhibited an art that offered an aesthetic based on the bold, flashy colors of popular taste and presented a political narrative that challenged the generally accepted one. In other words, the CARA exhibit presented the art of a different aesthetic and social viewpoint, that equally laid claim to being American – giving expression, as it were, to an “alter-native” culture. (2)
In Israel, where the melting pot ideology is even stronger, especially as it makes appeals to a common Jewish ancestry, to speak from a Mizrahi experience of difference is easily branded as divisive, as letting the ‘ethnic genie’ out of the bottle. The difference, and the discrimination that often accompanies it, is not allowed to be perceived as difference, resulting in the claim we heard from a few of the artists we spoke to, that the Mizrahi experience is no longer relevant to the offspring of the immigrant generation. Conversely, the critique of Zionist ideology by leaders of the new Mizrahi movement, shows the seemingly universal category of ‘Israeli’ to be the view of a very particular social group, ignoring the (different) experience of others. It exposes the slanted Zionist view of Jewish history, of Jewish communities in Muslim countries and of the policies of immigration and settlement in Israel (3). This critique, like the feminist critique, is not simply aimed at getting a greater piece of the pie for a particular social segment, rather, it implies the rewriting of the basic assumptions of an entire society.
Another hurdle the Mizrahi woman visual artist faces lies in the tension between localism and internationalism, that is deeply entrenched in the history of Israeli art. On the one hand, there was the expectation, in an emerging nation, for culture to play a crucial role in forging national identity, often taking on romanticizing, orientalistic qualities, as seen in the To the East exhibit at the Israel Museum, in the summer of 1998. On the other hand, artists working in the modernist orientation have always been wary of being seen as ‘natives’ of Western culture, especially if they aspired to participate in world centers of art. For this reason, turning to traditional arts and crafts was not an option for women artists in the seventies, as it was for their colleagues in the USA (4).
Consequently, the term ‘folkloristic’ continues to haunt Mizrahi artists and many are afraid to touch their own cultural backgrounds and be branded by this label. This is the case even today, in an era of postmodernism, where the distinction between ‘high culture’ and ‘low culture’ is broken down. According to this discourse artists are free to incorporate articles of crafts and popular culture into their works – as long as these elements are bracketed or otherwise follow the rules of contemporary art, and these handicrafts or expressions of an alternative aesthetic are not presented as standing in their own right.*An artist who concerns herself with ‘low art’ in a contemporary language, is Nomi Siman-Tov, who was already active in the eighties and participated in Feminine Presence. She paints the textures of woven cloth and ornamental carpet designs, focussing on the crafts traditionally done by women that were not included in the History of Art. Her critique of Western culture goes even further, as she intertwines these representations with texts that shed light on implicit racism in Israel and the West. Shuli Nahshon embeds scraps of embroidery into the hardened material of plaster of Paris, relating to her own grandmother’s occupation in Morocco, and simultaneously facilitating a meeting with women producing local, Palestinian crafts.
The dialogue with popular culture and with aesthetic tastes that pose an alternative to those of ‘high culture’, takes place in several of the works presented here. Chen Shish juxtaposes the reproduction of a Mark Rothko painting, with a gaudy orange women’s handbag, made of synthetic materials – picking up on the same hue of the modernist master, but coming from a very different aesthetic sensibility. Materials of popular aesthetics occur in the works of Orna Zaken, who stretches nylon stockings of bright colors over wooden frames as her ‘painting’ material – dealing with the (sometimes ambivalent) feminine concern with fashion and beauty. Shula Keshet places trinkets from the flea market as pawns on her game-table-installation, and Meira Shemesh’s works incorporate beads and cheap decorative materials. Zmira Poran Zion paints on flat galvanized tin surfaces, on shiny containers of industrial oil. The choice of these essentially cheap and unrefined materials, contrasts with the way the artist draws/paints on them, which is poetic, delicate and consciously deliberate.
Offering an alternative to Western artistic traditions in a manner wholly different from the one sanctioned by postmodernism, are the works of artists who have not been trained in the language of contemporary art – Rina Shmuelian, with her naive portrayals of biblical themes and memories from Rafsanjan, and, to some extent, Esperance Shenhav, with her bold use of pure color. Or if they received such instruction, as did Rahel Dahari-Amar, chose to create art that speaks from a different aesthetic sensibility, one that was not considered legitimate in art school. All three of these artists started to create art at a later stage in their lives, after having fulfilled more traditional women’s roles.
Parvin Shmueli-Buchnik, drawn to classical painting precisely for its pre-modernist sense of artistry, carries on a dialogue with the masters of Western culture, Leonardo and Michaelangelo, borrowing from them her decorative motifs – the rose, the painted frames – while subversively infusing her works with feminist themes.
Shula Keshet juxtaposes her self-portrait with works of art from both ‘high’ and ‘low’ art forms of Islamic traditions (a modernist distinction that is highly culture-bound), exploring her own identity. At the same time, she tries on masks that reveal the different archetypal personalities she harbors inside. Meira Shemesh, also concerned with her self-portrait, returns the gaze with which the Mizrahi woman is perceived.
Sigal Eshed tries on a magnificent, outrageous, perhaps unattainable item of clothing, in a foreign country fitting-room, while furtively filming herself, as if committing a forbidden act. Her video installation evidences that ambivalent, yet often creative and enriching movement between insider and outsider, native and stranger – precisely the subtle experience that the Zionist ideology sought to obliterate with its Negation of the Exile.
In Tikva Levy’s Purim sequence of poems, the girl bound for the wealthier North Tel Aviv tries on the costume of soap opera character Alexis, while in the city’s South there are women who dress as Alexis all year round – revealing another aesthetic and very different dreams. It is a poem sequence with a strong spatial dimension, mapping out the center and periphery of culture and affluence. Similarly, Shula Keshet’s game-table-installation is a testimony to a journey through the country’s periphery – of development towns and disadvantaged neighborhoods.
Dafna Shalom shows a series of photographs of dirty dishes in her mother’s sink, randomly arranged, asking questions about (aesthetic) taste, order, chance. She invites us to take a different look at the Mizrahi kitchen, commonly presented as the only cultural stage of the Mizrahim in Israel, as if eating is the sole activity of their culture. Shuli Nahshon also focuses on her mother’s very Moroccan kitchen, showing three simultaneous video-loops of Sima, her mother, preparing food at different times of her life – before and after the death of Shuli’s father – as if perpetuating life in this endless loop, affectionately holding on to the palpable details of dough, couscous, hands, face, not allowing them to disappear forever. Cooking as a ritual of enchantment, if not sorcery plays an integral part in the work of Chen Shish, who integrates perishable foods and banal kitchen utensils into her works.
Some of the artists express a critical perspective by speaking out politically. Ahuva Mu’alem’s works speak of rampant consumerism, phallic edifice building, atomic disinformation, in an underground effort to subvert the established order – while working in internet art, a medium that frees the artist from the tastes and politics of museums and art galleries. And Zmira Poran Zion speaks out as a protest artist, raising penetrating questions about the rituals of sacrificing our sons on the altar of unnecessary wars.
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Sister – Mizrahi Women Artists in Israel opens up the possibility of examining experiences and vantage points not usually expressed in Israeli culture, where the Mizrahi woman is viewed as the Other, and does not exist as a subject in her own right. At the same time, it lays the foundation for connecting to the surrounding culture – that of the Middle East. It is our hope that this exhibit constitutes the beginning of a different cultural proposition, one that can be translated into an alternative order of priorities and a new vision of society.

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Notes:
1.a distinction made by Ellen Ginton in her introductory essay to the catalogue of Feminine Presence. Israeli Women Artists in the Seventies and Eighties, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Summer 1990. Curator Ellen Ginton.
2. a term developed by Alicia Gaspar de Alba, in her book Chicano Art Inside/Ouside the Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition, The University of Texas Press, 1998 Austin, Texas.
3. as Ella Shohat argues in her essay “Mizrahim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims.” Social Text: Theory, Culture and Ideology, Vol. 19/20, Fall 1988 (reprinted in News from Within, January 1997)
4. see Ruth Direktor “The One With Her Back To Us. On Women, Creativity and the Seventies”, in Catalogue of Women Artists in Israeli Art – 1948-1998, Haifa Museum of Art, 1998. Curator Ilana Teicher

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MIZRAHI IDENTITY FROM WITHINIn Israeli society, there exists a predominant desire to blur the cultural differences between diverse ethnic groups and create a new and “enlightened” Israeli character. The “reborn” identity of Jews who settled in the land of Israel received its source of inspiration from Europe. Jewish immigrants from Muslim countries were obliged to erase their culture, and with it their identity, and to behave according to eurocentric norms of behavior.At the same time, all those who immigrated from Muslim countries were grouped under the category “Mizrahim”, and characterized from the standpoint that purports to know more about them than they do about themselves. The Mizrahim were perceived as social failures, as primitive, unrestrained, exotic, Other. Their culture was viewed as inferior and ethnic forms of expression, such as weaving, pottery, embroidery, were considered to be “low culture”, mere handicrafts; whereas elitist forms of expression, like painting or sculpture were seen as “high culture” – in other words, art.This point of view took root among the Mizrahim, who began to feel ashamed and uncomfortable about their ethnic and cultural origins. Their sense of shame, with time, was turned into a sense of defiance, evolving into the understanding that the term “Mizrahi” must be defined anew, by the Mizrahim themselves.
The exhibit, “Ahoti – Mizrahi Women Artists in Israel” concerns itself with the very definition of personal identity and its socio-political implications, and tries to speak about Mizrahi identity from the inside, from the personal and cultural experiences of each artist – not as presented by someone else, but, instead, as self-representation.

Shula Keshet

Continually taking on new formsContinually taking on new forms
Fragments from a conversation between participants of “Sister”by Shula Keshet and Sigal EshedShuli: This exhibition helps me understand something about myself, something I wasn’t aware of before. I am participating in a show with other artists defining themselves as Mizrahiot, and I ask myself if I want to be called Mizrahit, a Mizrahi artist. And I think before asking this question I have to figure out the issue of myself as Moroccan. This show makes me come to see the Shuli who did things without grasping them fully. In 1983 I did a performance where I dressed in front of an audience in my grandmother’s clothes, while telling the audience I grew up in a house where the parents didn’t look Moroccan, whereas my grandmother’s house was very different in that sense. I said I was born in Morocco, and heard a sigh of surprise coming from the audience. All my life I’ve been hearing this sigh of surprise. The performance was a chance for me to ask forgiveness from my grandmother; she who wore a traditional dress, her hair wrapped in a scarf, spoke only Arabic and who grew vegetables and raised animals in her house like she did in Morocco. When grandmother came to visit me at school I wanted her to leave. I was ashamed of her looks. Since that day when I dressed like my grandmother I deal with images from her house and with the image of women, as I experienced it in the Moroccan culture in which I grew up. The Moroccan woman is very strong and dominant, but that’s under the surface. On the outside the man is very dominant, he is given the feeling he’s the most important person in the house. But the one who is the most important in the home is the woman. I am a part of Moroccan culture, I was exposed to a Moroccan grandmother and to a mother who wasn’t very different from the grandmother except the fact that she adapted herself to Israeli culture. The world of women interests me and so does my Moroccan culture and I bring both to my work. My mother, as she ages, resembles my grandmother increasingly. By giving a big hug to my mother I feel I’m hugging my shamed grandmother, the Moroccan accent, her singing, the couscous, and in doing that I hug myself – because this is who I am.
Dafna: In the process of growing up in the state of Israel, a “false me” inhabited me and shaped my view of the world. It is she who formulated opinions, taste and a worldview that rejected my parents’ taste, their opinions and spiritual world. That “false me” made me become a part of the extensive process of erasing Mizrahi identity and cultivating western attitudes in this country. My thoughts, opinions, taste, were formulated by that “State of Israel”. The educational system in it did not enable an equally balanced synthesis between Mizrahi culture and western culture. Mizrahi culture wasn’t taught, wasn’t brought to light and in the public domain food was the only expression of Mizrahi identity. No history, no depth. I adopted this gaze, or, in fact, this blindness towards Mizrahi culture and flattened my mother’s image. I looked at her like society looked at her. I covered her up.
I arrived in New York out of a sense of exploration. I stayed out of a basic, instinctive sense of survival, that told me I could grow there. I guess I could do that in Israel as well but in New York I felt I wouldn’t be marked by my ethnic origins or class. Today I’m more in peace with the ethnic and economic labels that are related to the places I come from. Earlier I preferred to be just Dafna. Was that an escape? You could call it an escape, but soon enough I understood you can’t escape. And in New York I came closer to who I am: a Mizrahi woman, from the working class.

Shula: I live next to the new central bus station in Tel Aviv. This used to be a wonderful, quiet neighborhood, until they opened the station, seven years ago. We are still dealing with a lawsuit for compensations, and no one – not the municipality, the government nor the owner, takes responsibility and is willing to provide alternative housing for the residents. They leave the people to die there slowly from poisoned gas and from horrible, incessant noise. These are people for whom this is their home; they didn’t ask for anything, but their homes and their lives were taken away from them. This could be done to them because these are economically powerless people, and everyone ignores this problem as if it doesn’t exist. Human life has very little value here, and capital is what counts. There’s no limit to the exploitation of weak sectors: Arabs, Mizrahim, women, Ethiopian immigrants and foreign workers.
In Israel, the relation to the region we live in is that of alienation and contempt, combined with a fear of the Arab- Muslim environment. But in fact this is our natural environment, our origin. Shame and denial of Mizrahi culture are shame and denial of our own identity. In one of my works in this show, I chose to begin with myself. I take off on a journey, with my own image, in a book about Islamic art, my face changing constantly and telling a different story every time.
Ahuva: You take on new forms, transform. I find it beautiful, and it expresses a very critical point of view; as if you say Mizrahi people often try to hide their identity.
Shula: In my works I deal with identity and with its many faces. “Mizrahi” is a term invented by the Askenazi establishment trying to define us. The West perceives the East as very monotonous and one-dimensional. For years we believed, with a belief that firmly took root in us, that we are ordinary, flat, with no depth. I am dealing with the search for identity and with trying to re-define it; to invent it anew as a creative, active, independent process, which leads to the negation of prior assumptions. This is more than just a counter reaction. Some people might consider our coming out with an exhibition of Mizrahi women as closing us in a “ghetto”, but the opposite is true. Mizrahi identity is something very broad, rich, multi-faced, constantly taking on new forms. And so is being a woman.
Ahuva: You present a very elegant way of going abroad. As a child I always envied the children who came back from vacations abroad. I’ve been abroad only once. It seems to me that even if I’ll have some money available one day, going abroad is not an option for me, it’s like a dream.
Sigal: It’s interesting that through art you take a voyage to a place you can’t actually visit, like Persia.
Rahel: The question is, would you actually want to go there.
Shula: Very much!
Orna: Me too, it’s a big dream of mine.

Parvin: My mother, Rina Shmuelian, who’s participating in this exhibition, came from Persia around the age of forty. In Persia she worked in fabric weaving. She started painting here in Israel, actually reviving her memories from Persia in her paintings. She has an enormous number of paintings, all of them expressing memories and longing for the place she came from and can not go back to. One of them, for instance, relates to a custom they had, around the selling of beef: someone would walk around with a cow, and sell its parts in advance, before its slaughter, thus avoiding storage problems. Another painting depicts an experience she had before giving birth to my eldest brother: while visiting Ziarat with my father, she went into the stream and saw a goldfish in its waters. Someone told her it meant that she was about to have a son. It was a kind of a vision that was very moving for my mother.
In my childhood we had a yard full of chickens. It’s a very vivid memory for me, because it was my first encounter with sexuality. When studying at Bezalel I once depicted a fight between roosters, on a very big scale, with strong colors and feathers flying in the air. The criticism on me was harsh. It was difficult for me. When I studied at Bezalel I felt like quite of an outsider, I kept getting the message “you can do better”. I think that if I were Arab, they would have addressed my Arab cultural identity, but in my case, there was a total disregard for my identity as a Mizrahi Jew.

Orna: In Israeli society the Mizrahi is identified as such, but at the same time, it is indignantly claimed that “everyone is the same”. But it’s not true, in their eyes it makes a difference who is Mizrahi and who is not. I don’t want to generalize, but I heard from people remarks that astonished me. Someone once looked at me and asked me- what is your origin? As if he couldn’t understand how one could be both intelligent and Mizrahi. I have to fit into some preconceived category. And it did not come from someone I held in low regard.
What connects me to this exhibition does not have to do with discrimination as a Mizrahi artist. I grew up in Amidar in Bat Yam, a neighborhood vastly populated by emigrants from Arab countries, and I wasn’t so aware of the Mizrahi issue. I began my studies in the Midrasha art school at the age of twenty-six, and while dealing with art I was searching for my own materials and that is how I reached my childhood. I know that what I carried with me, then, was a totally different load: human warmth, tastes, smells, intense emotions, customs of mourning, engagements, wedding. I felt that I wanted to make art that would be different from what I saw at the time, and of course the Midrasha was the fortress of conceptual art. I had a terrible urge to do something else and I had a crisis. I didn’t get up and leave, I decided to go through this and do what I feel like, while enjoying it, without thinking “what would they say”. Until that point I painted, but at that time I didn’t find myself in painting. I had an urge to work with a different kind of material, and chose lycra. I stretched it, pierced it with a hot needle, with a cigarette. When I finished the works, I understood I was following a tradition of embroidery, of applique, but in another way. What I saw in my childhood went through some kind of transformation and became something totally different. For me it’s a discovery. I know I chose a very unclear direction, as if I was working in the dark, without even knowing what I was doing, and then I opened my eyes, turned on the light and saw that a lot of things I wasn’t aware of, came up.

Rahel: Ever since I was a child I wanted to paint. After high school I wanted to develop in that direction but I couldn’t afford it so I went to nursing school. My children were born and painting was neglected, and when my children grew up I enabled myself to give myself to it. I went to study in a college in Be’er Sheva, where I was exposed to western art. One of the students naively painted the house, the donkey, Rebecca and Isaac, the bible stories. The criticism he got was fatal. I accepted and didn’t accept that criticism at the same time, I was in a conflict, could not decide which side I was on, until I came connected to what I’ve got. Neta, my daughter, has a big part in my opening and giving legitimacy to my Mizrahi identity. I was in a state of denial and my daughter, who had more tools, liberated me. I had many arguments with Neta, who is one of the founders of the Democratic Mizrahi Rainbow (Keshet), who is a feminist and very socially and politically involved. While questioning my mother, my sisters and myself, she started to dig and strip off layers and that allowed me to be more aware of what’s going on around me. It’s a question of awareness. I heard from my mother about the painful, immense discrimination that is still evident to this day. I didn’t erase my Heit and Ayn, there’s a place where you draw the line. I still ask Neta – why are you so occupied, so young, with politics? It demands so much dedication. And she answers – mother, if you had had the tools and the strength to see what I see, you would have saved me this confrontation.

Esperance: I am a Mizrahi woman. Throughout the years I didn’t give it a thought, but today my children deal with it intensively. My eldest was sent to occupational school by his counselor. I objected, I said “no way”. Then the principal intervened and said I was right. With my second son, the counselor imposed the decision on me again, and this time I couldn’t do anything against it. I even went to see the mayor.
I came in touch with painting in a painful moment in my life. I immigrated from Iraq at the age of sixteen. I got married, was a housewife and a cosmetician. When my husband passed away I was lost, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was always attracted to paintings – whenever I saw one, I would stand and stare, but I didn’t know I had something inside me that I could take out. I went to a community club and there they made me paint. The teacher told me- paint. I told her I never painted, what can I paint. She told me it doesn’t matter, “just scribble something”. I was in deep sorrow, so I agreed. Then she gave me some poster paints and a sheet of paper, like they give a child, and I started to paint. Ever since, painting has become a very important part of my life.

Ahuva: I think there was something very rebellious about my father. In my family they usually don’t vote. I remember when there was the decision comparing Zionism to racism, I was about ten years old, and the teacher raised the issue in class, and I said to myself: “but they’re right”. I understood what racism was, and how can a ten year old think such things? In a certain way, I think I got it from home.
I started working with computer art five years ago. It suited my needs: first of all it released me from the need to address gallery owners; whenever I wanted to present a new work I just added it immediately to my website. There are other advantages, of course. I have no idea how many people see my work. On one hand I feel totally anonymous, but on the other, I enjoy complete freedom. I feel politically committed as a person. The last political thing I did was demonstrating for the release of Mordehai Va’anunu. I think that art that isn’t subversive in the political sense has no right to be; it’s not to say that whoever will see my work will say “wow, how subversive”, but personally, this is where my motivation comes from.

Sigal: I studied film and this is the first exhibition I’m taking part in, which makes me very happy. I was very ambitious in film school, and if anyone would have told me at the time, that I was about to have a ten year break from film making, it would have killed me. The fact that I didn’t create for so many years has to do with what we’re talking about. Creating relates to the question “where can I speak from”, where am I, facing the system of knowledge. Even though I am passionate about knowledge, it took me years to regain reading. Who am I in front of the book, in front of Knowledge. Sometimes when I write I feel as if I’m sailing between my islands of ignorance, I have no cannon, no one can tell me what to watch. Still, every time I have to write, I struggle. I’m so angry, I feel so excluded. The notion that art is a power game like any other; the whole question of status bothers me. When does something weak become attractive. I think these questions are related to this show and I’m glad this is the context in which I start showing, anew.
My memory from my childhood in Israel has a lot in common with what Ahuva was talking about, even though at the time I didn’t articulate it politically as “Zionism is racism”. Still I think I experienced it immensely as a child. What saved me came, paradoxically enough, from my father’s career in the army. I found myself doing first and second grade in San Jose, California. Suddenly I was living in a multicultural society and that was like breathing again. Going back to Israel was very difficult for me: back to something very narrow, power- oriented, hierarchical, the leaders in the class were always the lighter- skinned. Very oppressive. For me, the assassination of Rabin was a landmark. Politically I go way beyond the kind of left he represented, but when he was assassinated I understood that this whole narrative of secular, content and self indulgent Zionism means nothing to me. Rabin as a myth does not address me. When they speak about alienation to it I know what they’re talking about. And I grew up in northern Tel Aviv. For years, growing up, I didn’t know who were the president and the Prime Minister of Israel. It came out of alienation to the state and to what it represented. I am also occupied with some kind of Jewish discourse I find missing here. I’m trying to talk about my lack of belonging. On the other hand this lack of belonging is a gift, it enables me to realize things that don’t work in the Israeli identity, things others tend to deny. It’s part of my political, cultural and social identity. And artistically I draw immense inspiration from the search of an alternative language and from knowing it exists.

Zmira: Like Foucault’s statement that madness shouldn’t be defined as the negation of reason, as the lack of reason, but it has a history of itself, thus an art struggling with its being so-called marginal, has a culture and history of it’s own, not necessarily connected to the history and essence of the dominant culture. My statement is not to talk about what I am not, but about what I am. On one hand I work with hermeneutic philosophical texts. On the other I come with materials that are texts of longing to what can’t be anymore. I’m a western and an eastern woman at the same time. I am also a Mizrahi woman but not only. My Mizrahi identity comes from the fact that I was a Mizrahi child. Until the age of six I spoke Iraqi Arab, and walked around in festive pajamas, full of flowers. We had a happy atmosphere in our neighborhood in Or Yehuda. There was always a feeling, even when there wasn’t, that there was. It was my mother. Even when my mother worked two shifts, one cleaning and the other selling fruit and vegetables, there wasn’t a feeling of poverty. There was cultural wealth. There was a period when I didn’t want my mother to speak Arabic in the street and I didn’t listen to Um Kulthum, but I came back to it, I listen to Um Kulthum, and anywhere I hear anyone speaking Iraqi, I relate to them.

Chen: A Mizrahi artist is one of the definitions of my identity. I am an artist dealing with materials coming from the Mizrahi world. I have both sides, I can do very minimalist things that draw more from a western culture but I think the basis, the materials are very eastern, and they get some kind of a twist by the way I work with them. Participating in a show like this is like taking a stand.
When I came to Bezalel I was already very strong, I’ve been making art and participating in exhibitions, nobody undermined my place there. I felt very safe. Had I come to Bezalel earlier, for my B.F.A., I would have really gotten lost.

Gender and Orient – Henriette Dahan KalevUniversalism and particularism have formed a commonly accepted political dichotomy in the West as far back as Classical Greece, a dichotomy that supported the division of life into two spheres: the public and the private. This division is essentially a value judgment that prefers the public sphere, primarily by suppressing and hiding the private one behind it – or shall we say below it? As the Jewish woman, praised by the Psalmist as a “glorious daughter of the King” was considered honorable insofar as she kept within the house, women were pushed out of the public arena by its rulers – the men – and not only in traditional Judaism.
However, another look at the dichotomy shows the impossibility of men functioning in public life without the support and foundation that women provide for them in private. The earth on which public life grows, flourishes, and is perceived as universal is the very ground soil of the particular: the sphere of the private. Public life cannot prosper without the indispensable support of the private realm, even though the relationship between the two is neither symmetrical nor parallel, but rather symbiotic and inseparable. It is relationship of two poles that are dependent on each other for their very existence; nevertheless, the universal, external, public, and male, is perceived as being more valuable and more important than that which is private and particular.
In like manner, another cultural distinction has been made between the Orient and the Occident. Here, too, the relationship is both symbiotic and asymmetrical. The West cannot define itself without the Orient, despite the fact that its ethnocentricity stems from its perception of the Orient as marginal and secondary to the eurocentric cultural center.
The national and ideological values on which Israeli society was built were laid down along the lines of patriarchal and eurocentric universalism, which pushed to distant sidelines anyone who was not part of the Israeli nation, who was not a part of the eurocentric culture, i.e. the Mizrahim, and anyone who was not a part of the patriarchal culture i.e., women – from all sectors: Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Palestinian, ultra-Orthodox, and others. This repression transformed large segments of the population into those who were not seen and not heard, until the advent of the Feminist Revolution.
The Feminist Revolution opened a window of hope for equality to all women, but only a small number of women have seen hints of its realization. We have only very recently been privileged to witness a very meaningful new step in progress for women in Israel. Ms. Hussniya Jbarra, an Israeli Palestinian from Taibeh has just begun her term as the first Arab woman Member of Knesset since the establishment of the State of Israel. Palestinian women citizens of Israel – the most oppressed women in all of Israeli society – have succeeded in placing a representative of their own in the Israeli legislature. Thus Israeli democracy celebrated another seemingly meaningful victory, as the lowest sector succeeded in making it into the Knesset. It appeared that the period in which entire sectors of Israeli society had been deprived of political representation was over. It seemed logical to assume that if the weakest segment of the population had managed to send a representative to the Knesset, then surely the stronger sectors of society were also well represented.
Those who have a thorough understanding of Israeli society know very well that this signifies the beginning of an era, promising a future sure to bring about formidable changes. However, the very fact that Ms. Jbarra has been elected only now, after decades of obstruction and disregard of Palestinian women, just shows how much work is yet to be done in promoting the status of Palestinian women in Israel.
It is precisely this setting that makes the lack of representation of another considerable segment of the population so glaring. On the surface it seems that this group is stronger and better placed economically, socially and politically in Israeli society than the Palestinian women citizens of Israel: we are referring to the sector of Mizrahi women. The political scene of 1999 saw a woman of Kurdish origin appointed as a government minister, seemingly marking a milestone for broader political representation for Mizrahi women in Israel. But people living in Israel today – both men and women – who are familiar with this minister’s agenda and rhetoric also know that Mizrahi women are not one of her prime concerns, and this is no coincidence. However, it is not fair to consider a lone female politician, albeit Mizrahi, as the sole bearer of the responsibility for generations of Mizrahi women in Israel. Their absence from the political scene results from deeper and more complex factors than the activities of a single Mizrahi woman minister.
Mizrahi women, as Israelis and part of the Jewish sector, and on the other hand, as constituents of the Mizrahi sector, are hidden, absorbed within these broader categories. They disappear even within the community of women – when women do succeed in making themselves heard in Israel, the unique Mizrahi woman’s voice has not received the recognition it deserves. Mizrahi women have yet to form their own politico-social space, and their overloaded agenda still lacks legitimization. The Mizrahi woman’s unique life experience is different from the life experience of other women – from the experience of Palestinian women, or from the experience of men, including that of Mizrahi men. The special life-story of the Mizrahi women – the new immigrants of the 1950s, their daughters, and now, their granddaughters – remains to be told. It is as if these women do not exist, and are certainly not important as a distinct group. They are absorbed within various groups – among Ultra-Orthodox or traditional women, women from development towns or city neighborhoods, women who are highly educated, secular women, and are totally lost there.
This is certainly not the case when we come to the stereotypes, the myths, the grotesque, and the folklore images of the Mizrahi woman. Here the Mizrahi woman definitely does exist. Her image fills Israeli cultural life, which plods along in its efforts to create such an image. Mizrahi women did not invent those cultural stereotypes; they were constructed and exploited, by the external Israeli gaze. Just a few well-known examples are the daughter of Salah Shabbati of the film and musical of the same name; Gila Almagor’s “Queen of the Road”; Tziona, created by comic Hanna Laslo; the freha; and more recently, Crazy Pnina from the prize-winning film “Sh’hour,” her sister Rahel, and her mother.
These voices and stereotypes are the contemptuous, barren, and sterile essence that has solidified into the myth of the Mizrahi woman: the flat and one-dimensional woman, poor, common, and ignorant. It is a myth that carries within it a painful injustice to my mother and myself, an unjust stereotype that is almost impossible to shatter, since it animates so much of Israeli cultural and economic life. This injustice turns a blind eye to the rich life experience of women such as my mother and yours, our aunts and sisters, a rich and varied life experience, each so very different from the other. This is a life experience that Zionism summed up as primitive and Arab and foreign, as something to be eradicated, to be cut out of the fabric of Israeli life in favor of an extended process of re-socialization that would “Ashkenazify” them. Such a process requires the brutal erasure of the feminine-Arabic-Jewish experience as irrelevant in this context. Sometimes it considered this experience as the factor that doomed to failure any process of assimilation and any blending into Israeli society. This re-socialization process of the new immigrants was oblivious to the women themselves, and did not try to understand the meaning of their lives, nor did it think about the implications of this cultural effacement on their lives.
Against this background, and in the wake of the import of feminism into Israel, new trends in Mizrahi feminism developed, with the Mizrahi woman’s experience at its core. The awakening of Mizrahi feminism in the mid-1990s took place as it distinguished and separated itself from Ashkenazi feminism, which until then had identified itself as “Israeli” feminism. This Mizrahi feminist movement was spearheaded by a group of Mizrahi women who were conscious of their place as women both within Israeli society as well as their place as Mizrahi women in a eurocentric society. They tried to take their unique experiences “out of the closet”, experiences that were not part of either women’s narratives (neither Ashkenazi nor Palestinian), nor of men’s (whether Mizrahi or Ashkenazi). These women – despite being just a handful – did manage to glorify the varieties of their experiences as well as the uniqueness of their own lives and the lives of their mothers and their daughters. They pointed out the absence of narrative and showed just how derisive is the myth that lies at the base of how Mizrahi women are perceived in Israeli society. This pioneering breakthrough in Israeli feminism was the beginning of the long journey that still faces Israeli women striving to create their own space within the story of Israeli society.
The current fashion of multi-culturalism makes us rethink the possibility of Mizrahi women creating that space, of freeing Mizrahi women from being invisible and mute. It requires much more than a passing fad to end political delegitimization, allowing this unique, meaningful, and important sector of Israeli society to be truly perceived.
This exhibit is an attempt to give an inkling of the Mizrahi woman’s life experience, her being, uniqueness, and depth. Not of all Mizrahi women, only of some.